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Re: Blipits

Posted: May 10th, 2010, 2:20 pm
by Jason
BP / Gulf Oil Spill - MODIS Satellite Image - May 9, 2010

We estimate this well is leaking at a rate of 1.1 million gallons (26,500 barrels) per day. At this rate, the spill has now exceeded 21 million gallons. Most news accounts of this spill are repeating a much lower estimate of 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) per day, an unexplained number that NOAA and the Coast Guard were using for a few days until they admitted a week ago that they couldn't accurately estimate the flow rate. We think it's better not to use any number at all than to lock in on an unrealistically low estimate that nobody currently supports. Read why we think that here.

http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/bp-gul ... image.html

100-ton dome set aside as oil from Gulf spill nears shore
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... last_N.htm

Next step to stop oil: Throw garbage at it
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/09/gulf.o ... tml?hpt=T1

Oil spill may endanger human health, officials say
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... AD9FI4D3G1

Confidential NYSE Presentation Boasts High-Frequency Trading “A Race to the Extremes”
http://publicintelligence.net/confident ... -extremes/

The National Debt is Huge, but Unfunded Liabilities Are America’s Real Red-Ink Challenge
http://biggovernment.com/dmitchell/2010 ... ernment%29
Music Industry Reels After Nashville Floods

NASHVILL, TN (KTVI-FOX2now.com) - It could take one billion dollars to clean up Nashville after massive floods but some of the items and memories lost are priceless. If we remember anything from 1993 here in St. Louis, its that a flood is the kind of natural disaster that touches every segment of a community it hits. When flooding hit Nashville it hit the music.
http://www.fox2now.com/news/ktvi-nashvi ... 1159.story

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 10th, 2010, 6:46 pm
by Jason
Air Travel Disrupted Over Europe Again: A Major Global Disaster in the Making – Part I
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/air-tr ... %93-part-i

Live feed -
http://eldgos.mila.is/eyjafjallajokull- ... olfsfelli/
Challenger Investigation Got $175 Million. Columbia $152 Million. Lewinsky $30 Million. 9/11 $15 Million. Financial Crisis Gets Only $8 Million

The government spent $175 million investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
It spent $152 million on the the Columbia disaster investigation.

It spent $30 million investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The government only authorized $15 million for the 9/11 Commission.

And how much has the government authorized for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? You know, the commission charged with getting to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis?

Just $8 million.

You can tell alot about the questions which the government is truly interested in finding answers to by the amount of money it authorizes for the various investigations.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/challe ... 911-15-mil

BP Slick THE SOURCE 05.07.10.mov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG8JHSAVYT0

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 11th, 2010, 10:06 am
by Jason
One of the Biggest Health Frauds EVER Perpetrated on the American People...
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... imals.aspx

Captured: A Look Back at the Vietnam War on the 35th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/20 ... -saigon-2/

The USA and Drug Trafficking Violence in Mexico
http://www.mexidata.info/id2655.html

U.S. Marine Corps Information Operations April 2010
http://info.publicintelligence.net/USMCinfoops.pdf

Kagan helped shield Saudis from 9/11 lawsuits
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0511/kagan- ... -lawsuits/

$1 Trillion Was Not Enough
http://www.infowars.com/1-trillion-was-not-enough/

Volcanic cloud hits Spain, Canaries, Morocco
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0511/volcan ... s-morocco/

Economist Tim Madden: The PIIGS Brief: understanding how oligarchs rig, then loot our economies
http://www.examiner.com/x-18425-LA-Coun ... -economies

Master of the Cover-up... Michael Chertoff
http://www.knowthelies.com/?q=node/5749

Marine Holds His Ground
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/05/11 ... is-ground/

Federal Reserve Opens Line Of Credit To Europe
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

U.S. taxpayers could be bailing out European banks as debt crisis worsens
http://caivn.org/article/2010/05/04/us- ... is-worsens

Here We Go Again (Again): 100% Unverifiable E-Voting Systems Set for Use in PA, KY, Elsewhere...
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7831

Law officers in Missouri prepare for 'No Refusal' DWI checkpoints
http://www.ky3.com/news/local/92916864.html

Has Faisal Shahzad Started a War?
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010 ... ted-a-war/

New Film ‘Machete’ evokes race war
http://www.federaljack.com/?p=15501

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbnVo-fxhgw

Mad Cow Disease - What the Government Isn't Telling You!
http://www.drday.com/madcow.htm

EPA Approves BP’s Use of Questionable Chemicals to Break Up Oil
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item ... -oil#14973

BP: From Oil Spilling to Financial Reform Killing
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/05 ... rm-killing

Short Sellers in Congress: Another Lesson in Financial Hypocrisy
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/short-sell ... hypocrisy/

Kagan Can Be a Justice, Though She’s Never Been a Judge?
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/kagan-can- ... n-a-judge/

2010 Overview - Stats at a Glance
http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/index.php

Utah Statewide Information & Analysis Center Hotel Credit Card Scam
http://info.publicintelligence.net/Utah ... elscam.pdf

Senate votes to audit the Fed, 96-0
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0511/senate ... t-fed-960/

BP could pay entire cost of cleanup with 3.8 days of profits
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0511/bp-pay ... s-profits/

America’s Continued Thirst for War
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/10/129 ... ensored%29

Killing The Food Supply: The Dangers of Genetically Modified Food
http://www.infowars.com/killing-the-foo ... fied-food/

High Frequency Terrorism: How the Big Banks and the Federal Reserve Maintain Their Death Grip on the United States
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=19095

Germany, France May Hurt AAA Ratings in ‘Ponzi Game at The Highest Level’
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

China: April Inflation Accelerates, Property Prices Jump 12.8 Percent, Lending Surges
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

World Health Organization Moving Ahead on Billions in Internet and Other Taxes
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/10 ... ernet-tax/

L.A. Teacher Calls for Mexican Revolt in the U.S. (communism in action)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGqPo5of ... r_embedded

Governments in Southeast Asia Detain Thousands in Abusive Drug Detention Centers
Number of Centers Has Increased Exponentially in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, Despite Lack of Effectiveness
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/health ... n-20100507

Archbishop of Vienna accuses one of Pope’s closest aides of abuse cover-up
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 121062.ece

FTR #705 Update on 9/11 and Related Matters
http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ ... cord%27%29

WRAPUP 5-U.S. Gulf oil spill spreads west toward Texas
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0816351020100509

BP’s next plan: Cap oil gusher with ‘top hat’
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0510/bps-pl ... r-top-hat/

US oil spill: fishermen raise alarm over chemical dispersants - Alarm over the use of dispersants to combat the huge US oil leak is being raised by Gulf fisherman and scientists alike, warning that even if the spill is held at bay, the chemicals used to do so may do untold damage.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/770533 ... sants.html

JPMorgan Joins "Perfect 10" Club With Flawless Trading Quarter, Morgan Stanley Loses Money On Just 4 Days
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/jpmorg ... ust-4-days

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 12th, 2010, 10:38 am
by Jason
BP / Gulf Oil Spill - MODIS Satellite Image - May 10, 2010

Yesterday's MODIS/Terra satellite image has some of the usual complications - clouds, haze, and turbidity again may be obscuring portions of the slick. Observable slick and sheen covers 4,683 square miles (12,129 km2). Thicker, fresh-looking oil is apparent in the vicinity of the leaking well, and still appears to be entrained in a counterclockwise gyre (a circular current):
http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/bp-gul ... kyTruth%29

Law Enforcement Ritual & Occult Crime Report
http://info.publicintelligence.net/OccultCrime.pdf

Stripped-down Version of Federal Reserve Audit Passes, Only Covers Bailout
http://publicintelligence.net/stripped- ... s-bailout/

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW: Ex-CIA Official Reveals New Details About Torture, Plame Leak
http://www.truthout.org/interview-with- ... iakou59396

Blackwater (XE) is funding a Crowd-Sourced American Youth Gestapo
http://deadlinelive.info/2010/05/12/bla ... h-gestapo/

US troops executing prisoners in Afghanistan, journalist says
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0512/hersh- ... nue-obama/

Drifting satellite threatens US cable programming
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financia ... KNRPO0.htm

Iran could fire nuclear missile within two years, says think tank
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -tank.html

Disturbing Questions Remain about GM Flax Contamination
http://www.organicconsumers.org/article ... _20791.cfm

Mystery Disease Linked to Missing Israeli Scientist
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=19086

SAVING THE REPUBLIC?
PART 1
http://www.newswithviews.com/Nelson/kelleigh106.htm

White House aims to use Deepwater disaster to win votes for US climate bill
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... r-disaster

Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/ ... z0njZURZLE

Beware Unpredictable Consequences of Striking Iran: Former Bush Admin Official
http://defensetech.org/2010/05/11/bewar ... z0njiSitWw

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 13th, 2010, 10:05 am
by Jason
BP Deepwater Horizon Situation Status Maps
http://info.publicintelligence.net/BPmay11.pdf

BP finally releases oil spill video, but lies about delay
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0513/underw ... oil-spill/

Amateur Video Of Gulf Oil Slick - Worse Than BP Admits
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=did-S6XbpMM

BP knew of problems hours before blast
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/12/news/co ... htm?hpt=T2

'Don't Blame Me' Is Refrain At Gulf Oil Spill Hearing
http://www.kqed.org/news/story.jsp?id=29529

Afghan war costs now surpass Iraq’s: $6.7 billion for February alone
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0513/afghan ... @#$-iraqs/

Afghan war now outpaces Iraq costs
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/ne ... st.art.htm

Spanish prosecutors want 13 CIA agents arrested
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk ... 13_ci.html

Arrest of 13 CIA Agents Sought in Spain
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/hbc-90007028

Chemical Concussions and Secret LSD: Pentagon Details Cold War Mind-Control Tests
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05 ... z0npFooDV4

Bloomberg Wants 'Big Brother Britain' For NYC
http://wcbstv.com/cbs2crew/mayor.bloomb ... 86910.html

The New Middle East Peril
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpag ... peril.html

Russia may build nuclear plant in Syria
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340 ... 16,00.html

62 OBVIOUS TRAITORS - To be removed from public office
http://bigeye.com/62senator-traitors.htm

Protesters attempt to storm Irish parliament
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... ament.html

Lewis Black: Beck uses more swastikas than the History Channel
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0513/lewis- ... tourettes/

The Ogallala Aquifer Is Drying Up Which Means The Great Plains Could Soon Turn Into The Great American Desert
http://thefinalhour.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... which.html

Argentina a Step Closer to Same-Sex Marriage
http://towardfreedom.com/home/index.php ... 3&Itemid=0

Haiti: Government Destroys Refugee Camps
http://towardfreedom.com/home/index.php ... 4&Itemid=0

Former 9/11 Commissioner admits missile hit the Pentagon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUmr9dFb ... r_embedded

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 13th, 2010, 2:30 pm
by Jason
BP's next try to stem oil gusher: Smaller tube

WASHINGTON (AP) -- BP officials said Thursday they would thread a small tube into a jagged pipe on the seafloor to suck oil to the surface before it can spew into the Gulf and add to a disaster apparently set in motion by a long list of equipment failures.

Engineers will have to make sure the 6-inch-wide tube is inserted deep enough into the 21-inch-wide pipe so gas and seawater don't mix, which can form crystals that could clog the tube. They'll also have to thread the tube into the pipe without hitting debris around the riser.

The smaller tube will be surrounded by a stopper to keep oil from leaking into the sea. The tube will then siphon the crude to a tanker at the surface.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/BPs-next- ... et=&ccode=

Sounds like mission impossible!!!
As evidence of negligence in the BP oil spill continues to accumulate, legal experts are suggesting that criminal charges may be next on the horizon.

"There is no question there'll be an enforcement action," a former head of the Justice Department's environmental crimes section told the McClatchy Newspapers. "And, it's very likely that there will be at least some criminal charges brought."

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann cited a list of problems with BP's failed blowout preventer on Wednesday and also noted that a whistleblower has told the Huffington Post that while working on oil rigs in Alaska, "he observed cheating on blowout preventer tests at least 100 times, including on many wells owned by BP."

Olbermann then turned to columnist David Corn, who pointed out that "the regulations that cover these rigs were written back in 1978. ... Back in those days ... they didn't have this type of deepwater offshore drilling. ... So you've got decades of oil companies moving further and further out, drilling deeper and deeper down, and no one in the government saying, 'Hey! ... It may not be applicable when we get too far out and too far down.'"

"And the oil companies," Corn added, "and Halliburton and the manufacturers were not thinking, too, about how to make their rigs and their products safe for such use. ... I think it was Congressman Markey who said, 'They were conducting just one big science experiment -- and guess what. It went bad.'"
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0513/corn-b ... xperiment/

(Reuters) - A powerful bomb exploded outside Athens' main prison on Thursday, causing extensive damage, but no injuries, police said.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE64C4YE20100513

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 14th, 2010, 10:05 am
by Jason
California Disguised Weapons Handbook
http://info.publicintelligence.net/CAdi ... eapons.pdf

Side note: Interesting choice of bible on pg 17

Thai troops fire at rioting protesters in capital
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100514/ap_ ... d_politics

Trilateral Commission Wants War With Iran
http://www.infowars.com/trilateral-comm ... with-iran/

Oil spill could go on for years, experts say
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0514/76111/

Gulf oil gusher ‘ten times worse’ than previously estimated, experts say
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0513/gulf-o ... estimates/

Gulf oil spill kills fish
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd8J6aITAU0

Dead Dolphins found on Gulf Shore as spill moves to threaten National Wildlife Refuge
http://www.examiner.com/x-36925-Clay-Co ... ife-Refuge

MEDIA FAIL: CNN Pushes Homegrown Terrorists, Blames Internet
http://www.federaljack.com/?p=15557

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Afghanistan
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/13/the ... ensored%29

GM’S SHELL GAME
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/13/gm% ... ensored%29

Census Worker Charged With Rape, Burglary
http://biggovernment.com/bmccarty/2010/ ... ernment%29

EU Bids For Unprecedented Power Over National Budgets
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

California Now One Of The Top 10 Government Default Risks In The World
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

US posts 19th straight monthly budget deficit; April deficit nearly four times higher than in 2009
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

US faces same problems as Greece, says Bank of England
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ed ... f-england/

AP IMPACT: After 40 years, $1 trillion, US War on Drugs has failed to meet any of its goals
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 5606.story
Feds: Attorney Taped Pa. Judges Discussing Plot
SCRANTON, Pa. (AP) ― Two former county judges discussed receiving kickbacks and plotted perjury with the owner of a private juvenile detention facility, who recorded the conversations, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors on Tuesday filed a brief including transcripts of conversations they say were between attorney Robert Powell and former Luzerne County judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella.

The judges have been accused of taking $2.8 million in kickbacks from Powell and the builder of the detention center to send youth offenders to certain for-profit detention facilities. The scandal prompted the state Supreme Court to vacate thousands of juvenile convictions.

Prosecutors say the transcripts show the judges discussing the payments and scheming to commit perjury.
http://cbs3.com/wireapnewspa/Prosecutor ... 90459.html

Laura Bush: Gay Marriage, Abortion Should be Legal
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20 ... index.html
The Environmental Protection Agency, in conjunction with other federal agencies, is expected to provide an update on its findings for the use of chemical dispersants later Friday that could affect the continued use of the chemicals, Cmd. Allen said. Around 476,000 gallons of dispersant have so far been deployed to break up the slick, and more than 217,000 gallons are available, the joint command in charge of spill recovery said Friday.

Earlier this week, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the environmental effects of using the dispersants were still under investigation, adding that the agency retained the right to halt use of the chemicals if the harm outweighs the environmental benefits.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... ts_news_us

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 17th, 2010, 10:51 am
by Jason
The Sun seems to be slowly emerging from its extended solar minimum with five solar eruptions over a four-day period (May. 5 - 9, 2010). SOHO captured the action with its C2 coronagraph in which the sun is blocked out (by the circular occulting disk in the center of the image) to reveal the faint structures in the corona. The white circle represents the size of the Sun. These eruptions were not Earth-directed, and there is little evidence that effects from any of these blasts were felt here at Earth.
http://soho.nascom.nasa.gov/pickofthewe ... 14may2010/

How US Weapons Grade Uranium was Diverted to Israel - Declassified GAO Report Exposes Fatally Flawed Israel Investigations
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e25457.htm
Worry that Gulf oil spreading into major current

As engineers worked to get a better handle on the spill, a researcher told The Associated Press that computer models show the oil may have already seeped into a powerful water stream known as the loop current, which could propel it into the Atlantic Ocean. A boat is being sent later this week to collect samples and learn more.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Worry-tha ... et=&ccode=
The main leak is located along the riser pipe about 460' from the blowout preventer; the pipe is laying on the seafloor. The second, smaller leak is just above the blowout preventer, and apparently accounts for about 15-20% of the total flow from the well. According to statements made by BP to the press on May 3:

The riser is kinked at a 90-degree angle about 5 feet above the blowout preventer, and oil is bleeding from an irregular crack, BP spokesman Bill Salvin said.

A second leak is 460 feet away on a section of the riser that lies on the gulf floor.

A third leak, about 800' down the riser pipe, was sucessfully capped on May 5 but that operation did not change the rate of flow, which was simply diverted to the other two leak points.

Multiple scientists have reviewed this video; their estimates of the flow range from 840,000 gallons (20,000 barrels) per day to as much as 2.9 million gallons (70,000 barrels) per day. Add another 15-20% to those estimates for the secondary leak, and it's clear that SkyTruth's early alarm back on April 27 -- that the spill is actually much worse than the official BP and government estimates -- was valid, and conservative. By May 1 we had exceeded the official estimate of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster (about 11 million gallons); and by our count, at a rate of at least 1.1 million gallons (26,500 barrels) per day, we're closing in on 28.9 million gallons (689,000 barrels) spilled so far (it's Day 26 since the blowout began).

Where is all that oil? We don't think we're seeing that much at the surface in our satellite images. But scientists just announced they've discovered large underwater plumes of oil. Not all of the oil leaking from the well may be making it to the surface; dispersants, applied directly into the stream of leaking oil, and sprayed on the oil slick at the surface, are driving some of the oil underwater; and natural mechanical action of wind and waves can also cause oil to eventually sink. That may spare the beaches to some extent, but it raises questions about where all that oil is going, where will it ultimately end up, and what are the potential environmental and economic consequences.
http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/bp-gul ... kyTruth%29
Disaster unfolds slowly in the Gulf of Mexico

In the three weeks since the April 20th explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, and the start of the subsequent massive (and ongoing) oil leak, many attempts have been made to contain and control the scale of the environmental disaster. Oil dispersants are being sprayed, containment booms erected, protective barriers built, controlled burns undertaken, and devices are being lowered to the sea floor to try and cap the leaks, with little success to date. While tracking the volume of the continued flow of oil is difficult, an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil (possibly much more) continues to pour into the gulf every day. While visible damage to shorelines has been minimal to date as the oil has spread slowly, the scene remains, in the words of President Obama, a "potentially unprecedented environmental disaster." (40 photos total)
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/0 ... n_the.html
Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf

Scientists are finding enormous oil plumes in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, including one as large as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick in spots. The discovery is fresh evidence that the leak from the broken undersea well could be substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given.

“There’s a shocking amount of oil in the deep water, relative to what you see in the surface water,” said Samantha Joye, a researcher at the University of Georgia who is involved in one of the first scientific missions to gather details about what is happening in the gulf. “There’s a tremendous amount of oil in multiple layers, three or four or five layers deep in the water column.”

The plumes are depleting the oxygen dissolved in the gulf, worrying scientists, who fear that the oxygen level could eventually fall so low as to kill off much of the sea life near the plumes.

Dr. Joye said the oxygen had already dropped 30 percent near some of the plumes in the month that the broken oil well had been flowing. “If you keep those kinds of rates up, you could draw the oxygen down to very low levels that are dangerous to animals in a couple of months,” she said Saturday. “That is alarming.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html

National Level Exercise 2010 (NLE 10) Begins Monday
http://publicintelligence.net/national- ... ns-monday/

FBI Bulletin: Prison Gangs Learn Arabic for Secret Codes
http://info.publicintelligence.net/FBIarabicprison.pdf

Greece May Pursue Legal Action Against U.S. Banks
http://publicintelligence.net/greece-ma ... u-s-banks/

Don’t shoot: NRA bans guns from its annual meeting
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0517/nra-ba ... l-meeting/

It’s All Unraveling Even As It All Comes Together
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/23272

Research links pesticides with ADHD in kids
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0517/resear ... adhd-kids/

FDA: Glaxo, Merck vaccines OK despite pig virus
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64D58I20100514

Ex-Director of the WHO's Global Influenza Programme, suggests developing a vaccine including a "cocktail" of flu strains ... together with an adjuvant
http://snardfarker.ning.com/group/flu/f ... hos-global

'Shocking' conditions at Tylenol plant
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/14/news/co ... m?hpt=Sbin

How Did the Red Cross Spend $106 Million Dollars in Haiti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trSfACmr ... r_embedded

New York midwives lose right to deliver babies at home
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... k-midwives

Revealed: The very unappetising truth about McDonald’s chicken meals
http://www.federaljack.com/?p=15608

Investigators: Obama uses Connecticut Soc. Sec. Number
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=152773

HIDTA task force on border mired in corruption charges
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebo ... on-charges
Where’s Jimmy? Just Google His Bar Code

Scientists tag animals to monitor their behavior and keep track of endangered species. Now some futurists are asking whether all of mankind should be tagged too. Looking for a loved one? Just Google his microchip.

The chips, called radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, emit a simple radio signal akin to a bar code, anywhere, anytime. Futurists say they can be easily implanted under the skin on a person’s arm.

Already, the government of Mexico has surgically implanted the chips, the size of a grain of rice, in the upper arms of staff at the attorney general’s office in Mexico City. The chips contain codes that, when read by scanners, allow access to a secure building, and prevent trespassing by drug lords.

In research published in the International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development, Taiwanese researchers postulate that the tags could help save lives in the aftermath of a major earthquake. "Office workers would have their identity badges embedded in their RFID tags, while visitors would be given temporary RFID tags when they enter the lobby," they suggest. Similarly, identity tags for hospital staff and patients could embed RFID technology.

“Our world is becoming instrumented,” IBM’s chairman and CEO, Samuel J. Palmisano said at an industry conference last week. “Today, there are nearly a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent. There are 30 billion radio RFID tags produced globally.”

Having one in every person could relieve anxiety for parents and help save lives, or work on a more mundane level by unlocking doors with the wave of a hand or starting a parked car -- that's how tech enthusiast Amal Graafstra (his hands are pictured above) uses his. But this secure, “instrumented” future is frightening for many civil liberties advocates. Even adding an RFID chip to a driver’s license or state ID card raises objections from concerned voices.

Tracking boxes and containers on a ship en route from Hong Kong is OK, civil libertarians say. So is monitoring cats and dogs with a chip surgically inserted under their skin. But they say tracking people is over-the-top -- even though the FDA has approved the devices as safe in humans and animals.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/ ... d-implant/

What has triggered the suicide cluster at Foxconn?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/malco ... t-foxconn/

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 17th, 2010, 2:41 pm
by Jason
GORDON DUFF: SLAVE AMERICA, HOLOCAUST BY DECEIT
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/05/17 ... by-deceit/

BP wouldn't lie to us, would they?
http://www.unknownnews.org/1005-17.html

BP Turns Down Offers to Better Measure Gulf Disaster
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item ... ster#15036

Gulf Oil Spill Update - Not Good
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=19201

Gulf oil spill: real disaster might be lurking beneath the surface
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0516/ ... he-surface

Despite Knowing It Had a Damaged Blowout Preventer, BP STILL Cut Corners By Removing the Single Most Important Safety Measure
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/

Whistleblower Sues to Stop Another BP Rig From Operating
http://www.propublica.org/article/whist ... -operating

Damaged Equipment, Feuding Between BP and Transocean in Lead up to Explosion
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item ... sion#15039
Oil spill: BP accused of using Gulf of Mexico as 'toxic testing-ground'

State officials are angry that federal regulators gave the company permission to try out new chemical techniques to break up and hold back the growing tide of oil.

Despite registering concerns about the potential implications for the environment, marine life and human health, Governor Bobby Jindal's administration was cut out of deliberations over the use of dispersants that break up the oil, as the Environmental Protection Agency granted BP permission to release large quantities underwater.

"We don't have any data or evidence behind the use of these chemicals in the water. We're now basically using one of the richest ecosysystems in the world as a laboratory," complained Alan Levine, the head of Louisiana's Department of Health and Hospitals.

Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive officer, told WAFB Channel 9 news station that the chemical has undergone "lots of testing" and is biodegradable. "We believe it's a very effective way of containing this spill until such time as we can eliminate the leak," he added.

But Robert Barham, the state's Secretary of the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, stated that it has not been used at such depths before - BP's leak stems from a pipe one mile below the surface - and that its potential impact and consequences are unknown. This includes how it travels through the water over time.

"We're very disappointed in their approach," he said of BP and the EPA. "The federal procedures call for a consensus between federal authorities, the responsible party and the states involved. When we met and expressed our concerns, apparently they decided to go without us."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/news ... round.html

An Updated List of Goldman Sachs Ties to the Obama Government Including Elena Kagan
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/46267

Files reveal Britain's secret biological weapons trials in second world war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/may/1 ... re-testing

FTR #706 Interview with John Loftus: The Obama Administration as the Last Victim of World War II
http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ ... cord%27%29
The Largest Abortion Supercenter In The United States Has Opened In Houston

On May 11th, Planned Parenthood officially opened their fourth abortion "supercenter". This new abortion supercenter is located in Houston, Texas and it is the largest abortion facility in the United States. It stands six stories tall, and it contains approximately 78,000 square feet of space. Considering the fact that they charge anywhere between $500 to $2,500 per abortion procedure, this new center stands to make a whole lot of money.
http://thisistheendoftheworldasweknowit ... in-houston

Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ma ... us-history

Clinton staff: “We are taking the law and bending it as far as we can to capture a whole new class of guns.” Kagan wrote the Clinton ban on gun imports.
http://volokh.com/2010/05/11/were-bendi ... n-imports/

BREAKING NEWS! Oath Keepers Proves That There WERE Troops Who Refused to Confiscate Guns During Katrina
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2010/05/17/ ... g-katrina/
Sun Erupts: Epic Blast Seen by NASA Solar Observatory

NASA's new Solar Dynamics Observatory may be getting all the press this week for its retina-searing first pictures of the sun. But two old sun-observing warhorses recently showed they're not quite ready for pasture yet.

The twin, golf cart-size spacecraft of NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission filmed, in ultraviolet light, the largest solar "prominence" in 15 years, according to the space agency. (See the video above, which compresses about 19 hours of solar activity on April 12 and 13).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... servatory/

Scramble! RAF warplanes are intercepting Russian nuclear bombers at least once a month
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0oDlapY83

Redshirts warn of civil war as Thai troops told to shoot on sight
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/ma ... hai-troops

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 9:55 am
by Jason
UN Troops In America
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/10-18- ... gi.73.html

United Nations Convoy sighted in Pennsylvania
http://www.infowars.com/unitied-nations ... nsylvania/
Male birth control: stopping sperm with ultrasound?

Among the 78 research projects to receive $100,000 grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this week as part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, is an effort by researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to develop a non-invasive, reversible form of birth control for men — using ultrasound.

The project is one of 10 to receive grants toward the goal of creating new technologies for contraception. Other projects geared toward men include a male contraceptive pill that researchers say would work by limiting the maturation of sperm, and research into the specific chemical compounds in the vagina that guide sperm to egg — which researchers hope to recreate in the lab and potentially use to "disrupt" sperm navigation en route to the egg. (Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco uncovered clues about how pH levels impact how sperm swim, and expressed hope that further research in this arena could yield possibilities for male contraception as well.)
http://wellness.blogs.time.com/2010/05/ ... z0oIPMQVJ9

Hidden Sources Of MSG In Foods
http://www.rense.com/general35/hidd.htm

Why did the Russians Ban an Appliance Found in 90% of American Homes?
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... zards.aspx

10 Truly Shocking Stats On STDs and College Students
http://www.nursingschools.net/blog/2010 ... -students/

New Race Tensions at Concord Mills Mall in North Carolina
http://uswgo.com/new-race-tensions-at-c ... rolina.htm
BP / Gulf Oil Spill - Slick Now Entrained In Loop Current?

Today's MODIS / Terra satellite image is the most cloud-free we've seen in many days, and what it reveals is disturbing: part of the still-massive Gulf oil slick has apparently been entrained in the strong Loop Current, and is rapidly being transported to the southeast toward Florida. The total area covered by slick and sheen, at 10,170 square miles (26,341 km2), is nearly double what it appeared to be on the May 14 radar satellite image, and is bigger than the state of Maryland:
http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/bp-gul ... kyTruth%29

BP emergency plan shows lack of readiness for oil spill
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... gulf_N.htm

Air tests from the Louisiana coast reveal human health threats from the oil disaster
http://www.southernstudies.org/2010/05/ ... aster.html

Gulf Wildlife 'Dead Zone' Keeps Growing
http://news.discovery.com/animals/gulf- ... spill.html

Scientists: Underwater plume of oil headed out to sea
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/201 ... pill_N.htm
Florida tar balls fuel fears of oil slick spread

A Coast Guard helicopter and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts planned to scour the Florida Keys on Tuesday for signs of additional pollution after rangers at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park found some twenty tar balls on the shore on Monday. The balls ranged from three to eight inches in diameter.

Tests were under way to determine whether the tar blobs on Key West, the southernmost tip of the popular Straits of Florida island chain, came from the BP-owned blown out Gulf well. If confirmed, it would be the southernmost and easternmost impact reported from the massive oil spill.

Experts have forecast the risk of the spilled oil being caught up in the powerful Loop Current curling around the Florida Peninsula, taking it into the Keys and possibly up the East Coast. This has stirred fears of an impact on Florida's multibillion-dollar tourism industry, as well as on the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_oil_rig_leak

Sony's energy saving TVs watch you while you sleep
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... atch-sleep

Ray Guns Near Crossroads to the Battlefield
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... crossroads

Christina Aguilera’s “Not Myself Tonight”: More Illuminati Music
http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=3825

US giving Qaeda '1,000 reasons' to attack: Yemen chief
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_giving_ ... 72010.html

Woody Allen says Obama should be granted dictatorial powers
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/292160
Iran Agrees to Ship Uranium to Turkey; West Unimpressed

Iran has surprised the West again and agreed to a plan, announced by Brazil, to ship its nuclear reactors’ low-grade uranium to its new ally Turkey, which in return will give Tehran fuel rods of medium-enriched uranium for a "medical research reactor."
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/137588

Hezbollah’s Growing Ballistic Missile Stockpile Turns From Terror Threat to Military Threat
http://defensetech.org/2010/05/18/hezbo ... z0oIYQbGyw

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 1:52 pm
by Jason
Oil spill to shut down 19 percent of Gulf fishing

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it is closing nearly 46,000 square miles, or about 19 percent of federal waters, beginning at 6 p.m. Tuesday.

That's up from the 7 percent of the Gulf that's been closed since shortly after an offshore oil rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers.

The expanded ban covers an area that starts near the Louisiana coast and moves southeast in a diagonal. From Mississippi to Pensacola, the ban starts about 30 miles offshore. It begins moving away from shore at the Florida-Alabama border. At its eastern end south of Apalachicola, about the midpoint of the Florida Panhandle, the ban starts about 160 miles offshore.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100518/ap_ ... al_fishing
Bold and Underline mine

Gives you an idea of the size of the oil spill.....since they don't want fishermen playing in the oily waters....and taking pictures!

Fishmeal prices (20-40% of farmed fish feed) -
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/? ... =fish-meal
The recent earthquake in Chile caused extensive damage to fish meal plants, doubling fish meal prices from mid 2008 to a current $2,000 per metric ton in the European Union. With the decline of the El Nino, fish catches would have increased, easing prices. Because processing capacity is limited, catches will be reduced in proportionally to available working plants.

The current oil contamination in the Gulf of Mexico may also exacerbate the situation with the greatest effect on aquaculture, where fish meal is used extensively in diets for mariculture and for farmed species.
http://www.wattagnet.com/15903.html
Fish Meal Price Rockets Because of Chilean Earthquake Damage to Plants

The earthquake in Chile earlier this year destroyed Chilean processing plants tightening world supply of fishmeal and causing world market prices to hit an all-time high. Chile is the world’s second biggest exporter of fishmeal, second only to Peru.

Nature, through the El Niño weather phenomenon, also hits fish catches in Peru, the world's biggest fishmeal exporter, and further tightens global supply of the raw material. The skyrocketing prices will likely affect fish and meat prices as the commodity is used as a feed raw material in aqua-feed and feed for pigs and poultry.

On the animal production side demand is surging because of the fast growth of global aquaculture production due to rapid expansion of this industry in China. Fishmeal prices rose to a record 1,937 US dollars a ton last week, up 85% in the past year, because of strong demand coupled with supply disruptions. Prices in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, were as low as 1,000 per ton after the economic crisis of 2008.

The industry is now watching catches in Peru, the world's top fishmeal exporter, due to concerns about the impact of El Niño. Normally the deep, cold water Humboldt current off Peru's Pacific coast creates nutrient-rich waters that are ideal for anchovies, but an El Niño brings warm waters, reducing fish stocks.

Because the fishmeal industry's main production centre is Latin America, far from Chinese and European consumption centres, fishmeal is one of the world's most internationally traded commodities. The International Fishmeal and Fish Oil Association, the trade body, estimates that each ton of fishmeal travels an average of 5,000 kilometres to reach its end-user in the aquaculture industry.
http://en.mercopress.com/2010/04/29/fis ... -to-plants

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 18th, 2010, 3:25 pm
by Jason
South Korea: North responsible for torpedo attack on warship

South Korea will formally blame North Korea on Thursday for launching a torpedo at one of its warships in March, causing an explosion that killed 46 sailors and heightened tensions in one of the world's most perilous regions, U.S. and East Asian officials said.

South Korea reached its conclusion that North Korea was responsible for the attack after investigators from Australia, Britain, Sweden and the United States pieced together portions of the ship at the port of Pyongtaek, 40 miles southwest of Seoul. The Cheonan sank on March 26, following an explosion that rocked the vessel as it sailed in the Yellow Sea off South Korea's west coast.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because South Korea has yet to disclose the findings of the investigation, said that subsequent analysis determined that the torpedo was identical to a North Korean torpedo that had previously been obtained by South Korea.

South Korea's conclusion underscores the continuing threat posed by North Korea and the intractable nature of the dispute between the two Koreas. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak must respond forcefully to the attack, analysts said, but not in a way that would risk further violence from North Korea, whose artillery could -- within minutes -- devastate greater Seoul, which has a population of 20.5 million.

South Korea's report will also present a challenge to China and other nations. China waited almost a month to express its condolences to South Korea for the loss of life, and, analysts and officials said, has seemed at pains to protect North Korea from criticism.

South Korea will request that the U.N. Security Council take up the issue and is looking to tighten sanctions on North Korea, the officials said. The United States has indicated it would support such an action, U.S. officials said. Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told his South Korean counterpart on Monday that Japan would do the same, the Japanese news media reported Tuesday.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... id=topnews

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 10:56 am
by Jason
BANGKOK – Downtown Bangkok became a flaming battleground Wednesday as an army assault forced anti-government protest leaders to surrender, enraging followers who shot grenades and set fire to landmark buildings, cloaking the skyline in black smoke.

Using live ammunition, troops dispersed thousands of Red Shirt protesters who had been camped in the capital's premier shopping and residential district for weeks. Five protesters and an Italian news photographer were killed in the ensuing gunbattles and about 60 wounded.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100519/ap_ ... d_politics

Bangkok burns as protest leaders surrender
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64C0L620100519

Bangkok Locked Down After Day of Chaos
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... News+US%29

Oops! MSNBC graphic suggests Taliban set fire to Bangkok
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0519/msnbc- ... -protests/
BP / Gulf Oil Spill - How Big Is It?

It's time to revisit this subject. NOAA and BP are still saying the spill rate is 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) per day, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Many in the media continue to uncritically accept this estimate.

Why is it important to get this number right? This is about more than just liability, or PR. You can bet that our future response capacity is going to be overhauled and retooled based on this spill. If we low-ball the spill amount and rate, we run the risk of designing an inadequate new spill-response system that is doomed to fail the next time something this big occurs.

A couple of thoughts:

1) Are we really being asked to believe that the spill-response capability of one of the world's biggest oil companies AND the United States Coast Guard has been totally overwhelmed by a spill of just 210,000 gallons per day? That's a big spill, but not nearly as big as could reasonably be anticipated. Plenty of wells in the Gulf produce more than that under controlled flow-rate conditions; plenty of tankers plying our waters hold millions of gallons of oil.

2) BP claims the siphon they've inserted into the end of the damaged riser pipe is diverting 84, 000 gallons (2,000 barrels) of oil per day from the main leak to a tanker at the surface. That is good news indeed. But it's worth remembering that for nearly a week BP stated the total spill rate was only 1,000 barrels per day.

3) Scientists analyzing video of that main leak, apparently shot on May 11 and released by BP on May 12, have estimated the flow rate from that leak to be anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day. This makes SkyTruth's 1.1 million gallon (26,500 barrel) per day estimate, based on our measurements of the oil slick as observed on satellite images and mapped by the Coast Guard, look fairly conservative. And it doesn't even include the additional 15-20% coming from the secondary leak. That means BP's siphoning effort is only capturing, at best, about 10% of the flow. This video of the main leak, shot on May 17 after the siphon was inserted and apparently working, shows the plume of oil continuing to spew into the Gulf; it hardly looks abated.

4) Speaking of which: video shot on May 15 and 16 has just been released showing the secondary leak, where the riser pipe is kinked and bent about 90 degrees a few feet above the blowout preventer stack. Unlike the short, blurry clip of the main leak, this video is several minutes long and quite sharp.

http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/bp-gul ... kyTruth%29
Bold and Underline mine

BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Environmental Devastation Photos
http://publicintelligence.net/bp-gulf-o ... on-photos/

Criminal Negligence: Despite Knowing It Had a Damaged Blowout Preventer, BP STILL Cut Corners By Removing the Single Most Important Safety Measure
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/ ... owout.html
In Gulf Spill, BP Using Dispersants Banned in U.K.

The two types of dispersants BP is spraying in the Gulf of Mexico are banned for use [1] on oil spills in the U.K. As EPA-approved products [2], BP has been using them in greater quantities than dispersants have ever been used [3] in the history of U.S. oil spills.

BP is using two products from a line of dispersants called Corexit [4], which EPA data [2] appear to show is more toxic and less effective [5] on South Louisiana crude than other available dispersants, according to Greenwire.

We learned about the U.K. ban from a mention on The New York Times’ website. (The reference was cut from later versions of the article, so we can’t link to the Times, but we found the piece [6] elsewhere.) The Times flagged a letter [7] that Rep. Edward Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment, sent to the EPA on Monday. The letter pointed out that both the Corexit products currently being used in the Gulf were removed from a list of approved treatments for oil spills in the U.K. more than a decade ago. (Here’s the letter [7].)

As we’ve reported, Corexit was also used after the Exxon Valdez disaster [8] and was later linked with human health problems including respiratory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders. One of the two Corexit products also contains a compound that, in high doses, is associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems [9].

Given that the dispersants are EPA-approved, the choice of which ones to use was left to BP, which had stockpiled large amounts of Corexit and is now ordering more.

BP has defended its choice to use Corexit. A BP spokesman called the product [5] “pretty effective,” and said it had been “rigorously tested.” It is not testing other dispersants, he said, [5] because it’s focusing on stopping the spill. Mani Ramesh, the chief technology officer for Nalco, which makes Corexit, disputed claims that the product is harmful to the environment [10], telling Reuters that Corexit’s active ingredient is “an emulsifier also found in ice cream.”

Dispersants like Corexit break up oil into droplets that linger longer in the water instead of collecting at the surface. The choice to use them is inherently an environmental tradeoff. Their use in the Gulf spill has limited the instances—and images—of oil-covered seabirds, but has kept the effects of the spill mostly underwater.

http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item ... n-UK#15057

.....out of sight out of mind....
Responders to the downed Deepwater Horizon rig have already spent days applying more than 253,000 gallons of oil dispersant -- Nalco's Corexit 9500 -- to break up the tens of thousands of gallons of oil that have reached the ocean's surface.

"It's sort of the devil you know versus the devil you don't," said Linda Greer, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "It's really shocking to me how little research has been done into these basic questions."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 04989.html
Last Thursday, BP began putting more than 100,000 gallons of chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico to disperse some of the hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of gallons of petroleum its undersea volcano of oil has gushed so far.

Chemically dispersing oil spills “solves the political problem of visible oil but not the environmental problem,” Robert Brulle, a 20-year Coast Guard veteran and an affiliate professor of public health at Drexel University, told me. These dispersants “do not actually reduce the total amount of oil entering the environment,” as a 2005 National Academy of Sciences report on the subject put it.

In short: out of sight, out of mind. But not out of the body of marine life.

Dispersants decrease the amount of oil that directly reaches the shores or the creatures that live on the shores or sea surface. But they increase the exposure to oil by creatures that live in the water or on the sea floor — like, say, shrimp or oysters.

I spoke to Carys Mitchelmore, one of the writers of the toxicity chapter for the NAS report. She explained that dispersants are “a molecule that looks like a snake. The head part likes water and the tail part likes oil.” The dispersant “pulls the oil into the water in the form of tiny droplets.”

And that means subsurface creatures — from oysters to coral to larval eggs — that might never have had significant exposure to the oil are now going to get a double whammy, getting hit by the oil and by the dispersants. Worse, the oil droplets are now in a form that looks like food (e.g., the same size as algae) to filter feeders like oysters, which otherwise may only have been exposed to the far lower levels of dissolved oil components found under a typical oil slick. The droplets can also clog up fish gills.

Mitchelmore noted that “oil contains a whole suite of toxic chemicals, including known carcinogens.” The dispersants can lead to far greater accumulation in living organisms of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — oil-derived toxic compounds that were found in mussels 19 months after one spill in which dispersants were used. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, a study found PAHs had an impact on the developing hearts of both Pacific herring and pink salmon embryos.

The NAS report noted that many traditional lab studies of PAH toxicity use fluorescent lights. But research conducted under conditions equivalent to natural sunlight “indicated toxicity due to PAH increases significantly (from 12 to 50,000 times).” Also, many toxicity studies only look at exposure to PAH over a short period of time, rather than, say, many months. The point is that in the real-world of a massive, chemically dispersed oil spill, toxicity may be thousands of times higher than lab studies suggest.

ProPublica has reported that BP has bought up more than a third of the global supply of dispersants. Nalco Holding Co. has provided its entire inventory of one dispersant, Corexit 9500, to BP and the Coast Guard. Nalco’s chief technology office, Mani Ramesh, has claimed that “Corexit’s active ingredient is an emulsifier also found in ice cream,” and that it is not harmful to marine life.

Mitchelmore, however, has extensively studied the impact of Corexit 9500, and found the chemical to be “pretty toxic to soft corals.” It was “acutely toxic” to corals at low levels, 30 parts per million. It “affected physiological parameters at levels as low as 10ppm and also low ppm (20ppm) 8 hour exposures lead to reduced growth compared to controls even 32 days after being placed in clean seawater.”

While there hasn’t been much new research since the NAS report, she pointed to a recent Israeli study that looked at six different types of dispersants and found them very toxic to corals. The study recommended that they not be used anywhere near them. And, of course, the PAH’s are a grave threat to the corals too.

Nonetheless, the dispersant-laced oil spill may soon be entrained in the Loop Current, which is part of the Gulf Stream, sweeping it toward the Florida Keys, home to America’s biggest coral reef.

Still, this doesn’t mean she’s against using dispersants. With this disaster, she explained, we have a very tough trade-off. On the one hand, there’s a crucial need to protect the shoreline and sensitive coastal habitats, which will face long-term devastation if oil overwhelms them. A key purpose of the dispersants is to stop the oil from reaching the shore.

On the other hand, dispersants are normally applied on a surface oil slick, but BP is applying them near the sea floor. “This is something new, “Mitchelmore said. “I don’t think this has been done before.” Nobody has any idea what will be the impact of massive exposure to these toxic chemicals on organisms that live on the bottom or feed off the bottom of the ocean.

The effects of this horrendous spill will be with us for many years. Thanks to the dispersants, we may not directly see many of the worst effects, but sensitive marine ecosystems will feel them.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/05/06/b ... xit-nalco/
May 15, 2010 BP Oil is using chemical dispersants in large volumes in the Gulf of Mexico but is this worse than the oil spill? Chemicals such as oil dispersants only allow the oil to sink to the bottom of the ocean they do not dissolve the oil.

In addition these chemical dispersants are still toxic to humans, wildlife and fish.
The spill response has been a failure and the oil dispersants decision was made without thought of the pollution these chemicals cause with the oil mixture and the intended use is actually hiding the oil spill problem not resolving the damage of the oil leak.

What are Chemical Dispersants

The chemical dispersants are made up of two compounds which are a solvent and a surfactant. The dispersants are sprayed on to an oil slick where the solvent carries a sufactant into the oil. However it is well known that dispersants have a very small effect on floating oil and can stop being effective as the area of the oil spill requires a greater amount of these chemical dispersants with little success in cleaning the oil out of the water. The oil becomes a glob and sinks to the bottom of the ocean where it still endangers sea beds of shrimp and other sea animals. In essence it creates a toxic mess and the results are less than desired.

The Type 1 dispersant is a hydrocarbon solvent sprayed onto the oil at the surface of the water in the Gulf. Another type 3 dispersant is made up of alcohol and glycol in a higher concentration and both types require mixing with the oil after application.

Applications of Dispersants

The method of applying dispersants can be executed by boats that spray the chemicals equipped with pumps. Aerial spraying from planes or helicopters is also used and shoreline application used to remove the oil on rocks, sea walls and structures.

The environmental impact of BP Oil’s dispersants will not remove the oil it will sink it to the bottom where out of sight is out of mind. In shallow waters near the shoreline higher concentration of the chemicals will stay for longer periods of time

Many ecologists do not agree with using great amounts of these chemicals due to the damage to the wild life, sea birds, fish, oysters, and the spawning cycle which affects the fishing industry in four states. This affects dophins, pelicans, herons, and other wildlife that inhabit the Gulf. The toxicity level of the Gulf now after the oil spill on April 20, 2010 will certainly be damaged for a lifetime.

BP oil received approval for this chemical attack on the oil spill from the US government agency the EPA -Environmental Protection Agency and it was the wrong decision. However desperate this mess has become, adding more chemicals to the toxic mess will increase the negative impact on the eco system of the Gulf of Mexico.

The 6,000 square miles of open waters in the Gulf are affected by the explosion and oil leak is still threatening the US economy of Louisiana, Alabama, Texas and Florida. The oil slick is a threat in itself and what is worse is the oil that is not visable and this is the tip of the iceberg. The total amount of oil spilling could reach 50 million gallons and the toxic plume and the government has not initiated an adequate sampling of how much oil is in the Gulf today.

Millions of organisms have already died as a result of the spill including plankton that fish eat, and this will surely result in the death of fish in the Gulf with a lifetime impact.

The authorities were not prepared, BP Oil and other oil companies are not prepared to deal with with residents say this is basically negligence and a duty of care was not a priority. BP should put more response request in tackling the oil on the surface and the US government must rethink oil drilling offshore to its coastline as the thirst for oil drives more drilling.

If the US government is using intelligent energy resources -off shore drilling must end. The 5,000 barrels was not correctly reported and it could be as much as 84,000 barrels a day. Any gain that offshore drilling by BP Oil has provided in the way of profits is now being spent on cleaning up the spill and the environmental impact which is unknown.

It appears the EPA is not protecting the environment -at all.
http://www.politicolnews.com/bp-oil-dispersants/

Now independent thinkers are considered diseased by psychiatry
http://www.infowars.com/now-independent ... sychiatry/

NYPD Whistleblower Says He Was Forcibly Admitted to Psych Ward
http://reason.com/blog/2010/05/19/nypd- ... ays-he-was

UC Berkeley Asking Incoming Students For DNA
http://www.ktvu.com/news/23592937/detail.html

Simulated anti-terror exercise planned in Natick
http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/nat ... rcise.html

FBI to Run Radiological Checkpoints Tomorrow for NLE 10
http://publicintelligence.net/fbi-to-ru ... or-nle-10/

ACLU files suit to stop Arizona immigration law
http://www.examiner.com/x-37739-NY-Poli ... ration-law

More Drones to Border? New FAA Ruling
http://www.capitolnewsconnection.org/node/14695

NAACP president: Texas curriculum will turn world ‘upside down’ for kids
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0519/naacp- ... dark-ages/

CFR Meeting... Zbigniew Brzezinski Fears 'The Global Awakening'
http://www.knowthelies.com/?q=node/5792

Trilateral Commission Complete Membership List May 2010
http://info.publicintelligence.net/Tril ... st2010.pdf

Rigi: US, Israel paid for assassination
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=12 ... =351020101

Bill for Afghan war could run into the trillions
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0518/bill-a ... trillions/

Rand Paul trounces his neo-con opponent in the Kentucky Senate primary
http://truthalliance.net/Archive/News/t ... imary.aspx

Blockade of Monsanto in the Netherlands
http://gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/12217

Doctor alleges plans underway to "Microchip" Newborns in U.S. and Europe
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/F ... 01290.html

Confiscating Your Property
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37068

Conspiracy of Banks Rigging States Came With Crash (Update1)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... VDE&pos=10

The Greek People are the Victims of a Carefully Engineered Financial Extortion Racket
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=19226

11 Signs That The U.S. Government Has Become An Overgrown Monstrosity That Almost Every American Is Dependent Upon For Economic Survival
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... c-survival

Israel's nuclear weapons capabilities: Secret Report Reveals Weapons-grade Uranium Diversions from the U.S. to Israel
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=19225

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 1:18 pm
by Jason
White House Covers Up Menacing Oil "Blob"

In an exclusive for Oilprice.com, the Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) has learned from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sources that U.S. Navy submarines deployed to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast have detected what amounts to a frozen oil blob from the oil geyser at the destroyed Deep Horizon off-shore oil rig south of Louisiana. The Navy submarines have trained video cameras on the moving blob, which remains frozen at depths of between 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Because the oil blob is heavier than water, it remains frozen at current depths.

FEMA and Corps of Engineers employees are upset that the White House and the Pentagon remain tight-lipped and in cover-up mode about the images of the massive and fast-moving frozen coagulated oil blob that is being imaged by Navy submarines that are tracking its movement. The sources point out that BP and the White House conspired to withhold videos from BP-contracted submersibles that showed the oil geyser that was spewing oil from the chasm underneath the datum of the Deep Horizon at rates far exceeding originally reported amounts. We have learned that it was largely WMR's scoop on the existence of the BP videos that forced the company and its White House patrons to finally agree to the release of the video footage.

The White House is officially stating that it does not know where the officially reported 10 miles long by 3 miles wide "plume" is actually located or in what direction it is heading. However, WMR's sources claim the White House is getting real-time reports from Navy submarines as to the blob's location. We have learned that the blob is transiting the Florida Straits between Florida and Cuba, propelled by the Gulf's Loop Current, and that parts of it that is encountering warmer waters are breaking off into smaller tar balls that are now washing ashore in the environmentally-sensitive Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas.

Corps of Engineers and FEMA officials are also livid about the cover-up of the extent of the oil damage being promulgated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its marine research vessel in the Gulf, RV Pelican. NOAA stands accused by the aforementioned agencies of acting as a virtual public relations arm for BP. NOAA is a component of the business-oriented Department of Commerce.

Similarly, the Coast Guard, which takes its orders from the cover-up operatives at the Homeland Security Department, is denying the tar balls washing up on the Florida Keys are from the oil mass. WMR has been told the Coast Guard is lying in order to protect the Obama administration, which has thoroughly failed in its response to the disaster. The White House's only concern is trying to limit political damage to its image in the electorally-important state of Florida while the Pentagon has spent between $25 and $30 billion on oil spill operations in the Gulf and the Atlantic to date.

WMR sources also report that the oil mass has resulted in dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico that have cut off oxygen and killed massive numbers of marine creatures and plant life. Seafood wholesalers from the Gulf Coast to New Jersey and New York have been told that the supply of shrimp, oysters, and other seafood from the Gulf is severely in short supply and that they can expect a possible total cut-off as the situation worsens. The shortage will also affect the supply of seafood, especially shrimp, to national seafood restaurant chains like Red Lobster and Long John Silver's.

There is also evidence that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean sank a drill to a depth of 35,000 feet at the Deep Horizon site some six months ago without the required permits from the federal government. WMR has learned from U.S. government sources that the drilling at 35,000 feet caused a major catastrophic event that required the firms' oil rig personnel to quickly pull up the drill and close the drill hole.

However, the Deep Horizon re-sank the drill some six months after the unspecified "catastrophe," resulting in another, more destructive chain of events following the explosion that destroyed the rig, killing eleven workers. When the Deep Horizon blew up, WMR has been told it also "blew down," cracking the the sub-seabed pipe that may have been re-drilled to a depth of between 25,000 to 30,000 feet, again, without a government permit.

Government sources also report that BP is intent on recovering as much oil as possible from the undersea geyser rather than simply plugging and capping the well, which would then place it off-limits to further drilling. The Corps of Engineers reports that BP is playing a game with Obama, convincing him of the feasibility of "shooting junk" into the subterranean pipe, which would stop up the pipe with a manufactured chemical compound called "MUD." However, WMR has been informed that BP actually intends to shoot cement into the pipe in an attempt to cap the well with the later intention of digging a trench for side drilling from the pipe to recover as much oil as possible. The technology that would be employed by BP is the same technology that was used by Kuwait to conduct slant drilling of Iraq's Rumallah oil field -- an event that helped trigger Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

Corps of Engineers and FEMA sources also give a failing grade to both Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who stands accused of being woefully incompetent in handling the disaster, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. Government sources say both secretaries should immediately step down or be fired.
http://oilprice.com/Environment/Oil-Spi ... -Blob.html

...and for an alternate perspective...
Oil "Seeps": Nature's Biggest Oil Spills

Environmentalists take advantage of poor understanding of the natural world when pushing their agenda. For example, when opposing mining, they focus on metals, dust, and broken rock injected into the air and surrounding countryside by a mine. They do this while simultaneously ignoring metals, dust and broken rock at the foot of a glacier, flowing down a glacial river carving its path across the landscape, or spewing out of the throat of an active volcano. If nature does it, it is a Good thing. If man does it, it is a Great Evil.

So is it with oil spills. The hot story over the last couple weeks has been the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico following the accident that sunk the British Petroleum (BP) drilling rig Deepwater Horizon. Our prayers should go out to the families and friends of the 11 men lost in the accident.

Interestingly enough, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico are not uncommon. Natural oil spills in the form of oil seeps release about double the volume dumped by the Exxon Valdez every year into the Gulf – over 22 million gallons per year. The sea life in and around the Gulf of Mexico use these hydrocarbons as fertilizer for the bacterial life at the bottom of the food chain and support some of the most productive marine ecosystems around this continent. (Hat tip to Dr. Jack Wheeler’s Half Full Report 5/07/10).

Here is a link to a 2000 NASA press release from their Earth Observatory discussing the Gulf. The second link connects to a 2006 photo from the Terra satellite of natural oil slicks south of the Mississippi delta. The third link goes to marine life around California coastal oil seeps. For more information, do a search with the keywords “Gulf of Mexico oil seeps” or “California oil seeps” for additional information. URL follows:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsro ... p?id=20863
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=36873
http://www.mms.gov/omm/pacific/enviro/seeps2.htm

Globs of oil that you find on the sandy beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, California and the Atlantic seaboard are not manmade. They are a natural occurrence, and are as much a part of the natural environment as sharks, jellyfish and stingrays.

The NASA article says that there are as many as 600 oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico – which probably explains why the rest of the world wants to drill there. Interestingly enough, there are also over 2,000 oil seeps in and offshore California, meaning California may be as rich as the Gulf of Mexico in terms of future ability to drill for and produce oil. It also means that the wildlife and fauna of California, like the Gulf of Mexico and other areas with known oil seeps (like the Alaskan Arctic) have learned how to deal with what nature throws at them over the course of millions of years of evolution.

So what do we do with this information? Excuse BP for the accident? Nope. Neither should we use this accident as an excuse to shut down all offshore oil exploration and production, destroy BP with a series of get rich quick lawsuits, and impose yet another round of federal regulations, legislation and speed bumps to energy independence.

If you break it, you ought to pay for it. And I expect BP will make those people hurt by this whole. The most important thing to do right now is to disperse the spill as widely as possible, so that the bacterial life that eats it can do their thing without getting overwhelmed by sheer volume of oils pumped into a small area over a short period of time.

One of the reasons the EPA was created was in response to a very large oil spill – a drilling rig blowout off Santa Barbara in 1969. They have been in business for 40 years, regulating this and that. One of their primary responsibilities is spill mitigation. With the Gulf accident, we may observe that they were not ready. They were not able to contain the spill in a timely manner. They did not have sufficient equipment, manpower, training, or resources in place at the ready in the Gulf of Mexico. From this standpoint, the EPA has been an unmitigated failure and disaster for nearly two generations. And if it isn’t working, perhaps we ought to pull the plug on it and put it out of our misery.

The bottom line in all this discussion is that oil spills – even big ones – are natural occurrences. Those hydrocarbons are used as food and fertilizer by the bacterial life that sits at the bottom of local food chains. While we shouldn’t be in the business of making large messes, neither should we fall all over ourselves decrying the ultimate catastrophe when none exists. And we certainly should not use this as yet another vehicle to grow a large, ineffective, intrusive and overbearing government agency centered in Washington DC.

Perhaps if the EPA and the Obama administration weren’t so busily trying to regulate natural parts of the atmosphere absolutely vital for plant growth (carbon dioxide), they might have time and energy available to do their assigned mission of spill mitigation and cleanup.
http://www.redcounty.com/oil-seeps-natu ... ills/39648

Personally....my greatest worry about the whole catastrophe is the use of dispersants as described in my post above!
New BP Insertion Tube Isn't Working

BP's new insertion tube inside the leaking oil pipe - unfortunately - isn't doing very much.

Specifically, the Miami Herald points out that - according to the Coast Guard - the spill is getting worse in spite of the insertion tube:

The massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill is growing despite British Petroleum's effort to siphon some of the spewing crude from its ruptured deepwater well, the U.S. Coast Guard official leading the cleanup warned Tuesday.

BP doubled its estimate of the amount of crude being captured by a mile-long recovery tube to 2,000 barrels per day - but what percentage of the spill that is remains uncertain. BP has said it thinks that 5,000 barrels of crude a day are leaking from the well, but a video made public Tuesday after the tube was placed inside the broken pipe showed clouds of crude oil still billowing into the sea.

Another video provided the first public view of a second leak much nearer the runaway well's failed blowout preventer spewing oil, too. A BP robot took that video on Saturday and Sunday.

The Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Thad Allen, said that despite the siphoning, the spilled oil is spreading and now stretches from western Louisiana to Florida's Key West. The extent of the spill was straining even the substantial resources deployed for one of the worst ecological disasters in recent history, he said.

Kevin Grandia explains:

Two new videos have surface showing footage of the BP oil leak at the source 5,000 feet down at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

These new video are important because they show footage (if the time stamp on the video of May 17th is correct) taken after the oil company responsible for stopping the leak - British Petroleum (BP) - had inserted a tube into the leaking pipe in an attempt to siphon off some of the oil and pump it up to an awaiting ship on the surface.

Looking at this video there remains serious question about the exact amount of oil that is actually flowing from the burst pipe as well as how much is being captured by the inserted siphon:

Another video has also been released showing the leak from the riser that is described on US Senator Bill Nelson's website as video footage of the plume "after the intervention" - you can clearly see in the video a large kink in the riser that is spewing oil. The first half of this video is marked May 15th - the day before the insertion tube was placed in the leaking pipe.

The video then switches (at about the 2 min. 30 sec. mark) to a close of shot of the leak time stamped the next day, May 16th after the insertion tube was put in place:

Indeed, BP either doesn't know or won't tell how much oil is leaking. As the Miami Herald notes:

Under sharp questioning from Nelson and other lawmakers, Lamar McKay, the head of BP America, said the company was focused on sealing off the spill but couldn't offer estimates of how much oil was flowing into the ocean.

And see this. BP has refused to let independent scientists inspect the site so that they could estimate the rate of the oil leak.

BP's next plan is to try to seal the leak using heavy drilling fluids and then cement:

BP likely will try to shut down the well completely late this week using a technique called “top kill,” BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said at a news conference Monday.

The process involves pumping heavy drilling fluids through two 3-inch lines into the blowout preventer that sits on top of the Macondo wellhead a mile underwater. This would first restrict the flow of oil from the well, which then could be sealed permanently with cement.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/05/ ... rking.html
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration widened its no-fishing zone to cover 19 percent of the Gulf, or 45,728 square miles, and its head, Lubchenco, told a news conference that "a light tendril of oil" is spreading eastward and approaching the loop current, a powerful warm-water current that could drag the oil around Florida and into the Gulf Stream that flows up the Atlantic coast.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/18/1 ... z0oPNiuHya

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 3:47 pm
by Jason
Wikileaks up and running again...
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks

Florida fears deepen as oil enters the Loop Current
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0519/florid ... p-current/

Latest Gulf Oil Spill FAQ: How Much Oil Has Spilled, Why Hasn’t it been Plugged, and More…
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item ... nsib#14946

Thanks To 3 Senators, China Entrenched In Iraqi Oil For 20 Years
http://biggovernment.com/sschippert/201 ... ernment%29

Coast Guard Under 'BP's Rules' - Kelly Cobiella reports that a CBS News team was threatened with arrest by Coast Guard officials in the Gulf of Mexico who said they were acting under the authority of British Petroleum.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id= ... photovideo

Simulated terrorist attack in Long Beach will test first responders' skills
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2 ... beach.html
Rich and powerful: Obama and the global super-elite

The US President's bank balance has been buoyant since he took office. But he is still some way short of rivalling the very richest world leaders. Now the nation knows. That doggy in the White House window is worth $1,600 (£1,100). Pretty pricey for a pooch – but then he is part of a household that is worth many millions of dollars, according to the latest financial disclosures filed, as US law requires, by the First Couple, Barack and Michelle Obama.

The forms, posted for all to see on the internet, are a window into the not inconsiderable wealth
of America's top family, generated partly by royalties from the president's two memoirs, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope.

Last year, they earned him between $2m and $10m. His assets are between $2.3m and $7.7m – the forms show ranges of value rather than specific figures.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 76403.html

Congressmen urge Obama to take personal interest in Israel - Some 37 Jewish members of the Democratic caucuses meet with US president, urge him to increase his personal involvement in the administration's Israel-related policies
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340 ... 02,00.html
Hack attacks mounted on car control systems

The computer systems used to control modern cars are very vulnerable to attack, say experts. An investigation by security researchers found the systems to be "fragile" and easily subverted. The researchers showed how to kill a car engine remotely, turn off the brakes so the car would not stop and make instruments give false readings. Despite their success, the team said it would be hard for malicious attackers to reproduce their work.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10119492.stm

China organ trafficking trial exposes grisly trade
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 76808.html
KFC Doubles Down on Double Down

Remember KFC’s Double Down sandwich, the bacon and cheese between two pieces of fried chicken concoction introduced to the delight of comedians and horror of the medical establishment? Well, it has been a smashing success.

KFC says Americans are gobbling down so many Double Down sandwiches that the fast-food chain will offer the bunless, meaty sandwich longer than it had planned. Originally the sandwich — bacon and cheese surrounded by chicken filets — was to have been available through Sunday. But KFC said Wednesday that the sandwich will be available now for as long as customer demand remains high.

The Double Down came onto the market on April 12 and was supposed to have lasted about six weeks. But it tapped into Americans’ fascination with quirky food and became a viral-marketing sensation. People posted videos of themselves eating the sandwich on sites like YouTube, and celebrities like Stephen Colbert gobbled it up.

KFC said it has been one of its most successful sandwich launches ever. Later this month, KFC expects to sell its 10 millionth Double Down. They cost about $5.

Some have questioned the sandwiches’ nutritional value. The original version has 540 calories and 32 grams of fat, and 1,380 milligrams of salt. A grilled version cuts calories to 460 and fat to 23 grams, but sodium rises to 1,430 milligrams. By comparison, the Big Mac from McDonald’s has 540 calories, 29 grams of fat and 1,040 milligrams of sodium.
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/kfc_do ... y+|+OTB%29

Tribune Investigation Finds Mercury-Laced Skin Creams
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct ... 07.graphic
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/tribune_in ... nds_me.php
Chemtrails and Monsanto’s New Aluminum Resistance Gene – Coincidence?

Why did Monsanto Develop an Aluminum Resistance Gene?

Monsanto is currently marketing an aluminum resistance gene. Here’s the spin, folks:

Small-scale, resource-poor farmers in developing countries face daily stresses, including poor soils, drought, and lack of inputs. Ongoing trends such as climate change and population growth will likely exacerbate binding stresses. A new generation of genetically engineered (GE) crop research aims to alleviate these pressures through the improvement of subsistence crops—such as cassava, sorghum, and millet—that incorporate traits such as tolerance to drought, water, and aluminum in soils as well as plants with more efficient nitrogen and phosphorus use. (http://www.ifpri.org/publication/delive ... or-farmers)

Now, let’s take a look at journalist Michael Murphy’s research into chemtrails, geo-engineering, and the fact that extremely high levels of aluminum and barium are found in water, snow and soil, in areas shown to have heavy chemtrail patterns (three-part video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tisXSc4s ... r_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZM0buLZ ... r_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xiqmz8vw ... r_embedded

Coincidence that Monsanto will “come to the rescue” with aluminum resistance genes because normal plants die off in the presence of excess aluminum? Or opportunistic capitalism and planned corporate food monopoly courtesy of Monsanto and the Hegelian Dialectic based on insider information that a proposed “geo-engineering” scheme is already in place that is filling our atmosphere with chemtrails containing aluminum and barium?

This is no game folks. We are being hit from all sides with a planned, homicidal, genocidal agenda to make a very few families even richer than they already are, and reduce the world’s population to 500 million as set forth in the Georgia Guidestones. This is nothing short of biological warfare.
http://farmwars.info/?p=2927&utm_source ... rm+Wars%29

What in the World Are They Spraying? Part I
http://truthmediaproductions.blogspot.com/

G. Edward Griffin Talks Candidly About Chemtrails/SAG
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsWpSPBw ... r_embedded

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 7:47 pm
by Jason
Utah State Prison nearing full capacity

SALT LAKE CITY -- Utah's state prison system is nearing full capacity and that could result in some inmates being released as early as this summer before their sentences are up, the state corrections chief said Wednesday.

Department of Corrections Executive Director Tom Patterson told a legislative committee that only about 108 beds are left for prison inmates.

The prison system has about 6,800 beds statewide, which includes space at two prisons and at county jails contracted by the state to house inmates.

In the past two months, Patterson said, 74 inmates have come into the prison system, but he was expecting only about 10 new inmates each month.

Once the prison system is full, Patterson said, inmates will be housed for 45 days in gyms and open spaces, which pose a greater security threat for guards.

Once those 45 days are up, prisoners will start being released early.

"We have to find an ongoing solution. We can't stay at maximum capacity because, at some point, you will allow a violent offender out, and there is a risk to the community," Patterson said following the hearing.

He said about 300 beds are available at contracted county jails, but no money was available. Housing one prisoner typically costs about $26,000 a year.

About $50 million designated for new housing at the state prison has been cut, as well as $7.6 million for a new parole-violator center run by a private contractor that would have to be funded at similar levels every year.

The $50 million for new housing at the Gunnison prison would have resulted in 192 new beds and included planning money for another facility with 288 beds.

Patterson said losing funding for the parole-violator center has translated into a loss of 300 beds, which could have housed up to 900 inmates a year and helped inmates address problems that frequently results in their return to prison once they're released.
http://www.standard.net/topics/crime/20 ... l-capacity

Bet nearly every one of the other states is in a similar situation.....

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 19th, 2010, 8:20 pm
by Jason
Former US General Warns of Chemical Attacks Against Israel
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=136

Iran Prepared to Block Gulf Oil and Wreck Western Economies
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/news.aspx/137586

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 20th, 2010, 9:39 am
by Jason
Corexit is Killing the Gulf
http://www.infowars.com/corexit-is-killing-the-gulf/

Gulf oil spill leak now pegged at 95,000 barrels a day
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/19/9 ... z0oU0nLnz8

BP touts containment efforts; heavy oil reaches Louisiana wetlands
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/19/gulf.o ... tml?hpt=C1

Federal officials: tar balls rolling in current toward Florida Keys; just days away
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/feder ... e=rss_news

BP and Coast Guard Threaten to Arrest Journalists for Covering Oil Polluted Shoreline in Louisiana
http://www.infowars.com/bp-and-coast-gu ... louisiana/

While BP’s Oil Gushes, Company Keeps Information to a Trickle
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item ... ment#15069

Spill could devastate Keys fishing businesses
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/spill ... e=rss_news

WRAPUP 4-BP, under fire, says its oil leak control advances
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1927272520100520

U.S. to check BP spill size, heavy oil comes ashore
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6 ... 4170676:z0

Mexico Seizes 80 Tons of Drug Precursor Chemicals
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?Article ... ryId=14091

Jobless claims rise by largest amount in 3 months
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0520/jobles ... -3-months/

By Any Means Necessary and Detroit
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/19/by- ... ensored%29

Greek Central Bank Accused of Encouraging Naked Short Selling of Greek Bonds
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

Supplanting the United States Constitution: War, National Emergency and the "Continuity of Governement"
http://blacklistednews.com/?news_id=8795

Cyberwar Cassandras Get $400 Million in Conflict Cash
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05 ... z0oU1UHDLj

Panic Time at Fox News as Glenn Beck loses 50% of his Viewers
http://www.politicususa.com/en/glenn-beck-ratings-drop

Photos reveal inside look at East Austin tunnel home
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/Inside-l ... 00924.html

'Act of aggression' sank Korean ship
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010 ... ion=justin

NKorea warns of war if punished for ship sinking
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100520/ap_ ... ship_sinks

U.S. backs Seoul's charge that North Korea sank ship
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6 ... 4170676:z0

Brzezinski Decries “Global Political Awakening” During CFR Speech
http://www.prisonplanet.com/brzezinski- ... peech.html

RALEIGH, NC (WBTV) - The North Carolina Senate is at the halfway point of passing it's version of the state's next budget at just under $19 Billion. Senators Wednesday voted 32-17 in favor of a plan that closes a projected $788 million deficit.
http://www.wbtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12512993

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The number of people applying for unemployment benefits shot up 25,000 in the latest week, indicating continued weakness in the U.S. job market, government data showed.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/weekly ... _news_stmp

Initial Claims Confirm Economic Deterioration: +471k, Miss Expectations By 31k, Previous 446k
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/initia ... vious-446k

Ten U.S. cities in free fall
http://www.vancouversun.com/business/fp ... story.html

Philly Fed Index increases slightly in May, New orders index declines
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29

Today we got more startling news that 1 out of 7 homeowners is either in foreclosure or has stopped paying their mortgage. With over 51 million mortgages in the U.S. that means we have 7.2 million mortgages in this distress pipeline. By the way, this is a new all time record yet somehow you still have people claiming that not paying your mortgage is somehow a sign of a healthy market? It isn’t and this just means the shadow inventory figures are enormous. We have enough in the pipeline for years to come.
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/pasa ... e+SoCal%29

CPI Goes Negative for Month, Smallest 12-Month Increase Since January 1966, More Negative Months Coming
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29

CPI Declines 'Unexpectedly'
http://dailycapitalist.com/2010/05/19/c ... italist%29

Home Price Data Slipping
http://dailycapitalist.com/2010/05/19/h ... italist%29

May 20 (Bloomberg) -- Accretive Health Inc. and ReachLocal Inc. cut the size of their initial public offerings by as much as 44 percent as the IPO market’s May slump deepened.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... .GZ9FopM6o
On a less positive note, the number of so-called problem banks that the FDIC is concerned may not make it rose to 775 institutions form 702.

Total assets at the problem banks climbed to $431 billion from $403 billion, but total deposits at those same institutions fell.

"The number of institutions reporting quarterly financial results declined by 80 in the first quarter, from 8,012 to 7,932. Forty-one FDIC-insured institutions failed during the quarter, while 37 institutions were merged into other charters. Only three new charters were added during the quarter, and all three were charters formed to acquire failed banks," the FDIC said.

The FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund, the money the agency has on hand to cover limited depositor losses, rose by $145 million in the first quarter. It was the first rise in the fund since the first quarter of 2008.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/banks- ... 2010-05-20

FDIC Still As Bankrupt As Ever, DIF-to-Deposit Ratio At -0.38%
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/fdic-s ... -ratio-038

German Finance Minister Says Needs Rules For Orderly Insolvency Of EMU States
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/german ... emu-states

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
http://www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html
Whistle-Blowers Become Investment Option for Hedge Funds

Hedge funds have found a new market to invest in: whistle-blowers.

Informants who turn in tax cheats have to wait years to get their share of any reward from the I.R.S.’s recently expanded whistle-blower program. So hedge funds, private equity groups and other big investors are offering an alternative. They are essentially agreeing to buy a percentage of those future payouts in exchange for a smaller amount upfront to the whistle-blowers.

The surging size of the potential awards is driving all the interest. Three years ago, the I.R.S. began offering bigger rewards — 15 percent to 30 percent of whatever money the government recovered — in a move that has turbocharged the agency’s whistle-blower program.

Where it once handled only a trickle of tips, often involving relatively small amounts of unpaid taxes, I.R.S. offices now receive a torrent of big money claims. Accountants and company employees have taken to trooping in bearing computer records and boxes of documents to back up their claims of underpayment by big companies.

In what is believed to be the first of these structured tax payouts, an I.R.S. informant who reported that an overseas multinational corporation had underpaid its taxes by billions of dollars received $4 million last month from a private equity firm. In exchange, the firm will receive a portion of the award the informant expects to collect eventually.

The whistle-blower’s lawyer, Eric R. Havian, declined to name his client or provide specifics of the deal, such as how much more than $4 million the investor expects to get. But he said the informant needed money to cover living expenses because he had had trouble finding work since filing his claim.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/WhistleBl ... et=&ccode=
Moody’s has released data that shows CRE has fallen for a second straight month. Thus far, things are rolling along exactly as we anticipated in our CRE 2010 Overview (2.85 MB 2009-12-16 07:52:36), available for free download.

Reference the truth: CRE 2010 Overview (2.85 MB 2009-12-16 07:52:36),

1. rents are dropping rapidly;
2. CRE values are collapsing;
3. CAP rates are exploding;
4. the refinancing market is looking for much lower LTVs while the property values of recently purchased properties are dropping simultaneously,
5. and an often overlooked occurrence – REITs are selling off the more valuable assets to fund the gaps necessary to rollover overpriced debt, further reducing rent rolls and dramatically reducing the overall value of the existing portfolios.

These five ingredients combine to make a deadly elixir.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/commer ... ng-reality
Home Price Data Slipping

Again the main driver in the housing market has been tax credits. The federal government is trying to reinflate home prices and the tax credit has been their main tool. According to the latest data from CoreLogic, March home prices increased 1.7% YoY. They reported that 51 of the 100 core markets they studied increased versus a 42 market increase in February. There is a "but" to this: prices have been declining in the past three months--1.7% for January and February and another 0.3% in March. If you take out foreclosure/distressed sales from the data, from peak to trough, prices declined 21.5% through March.

According to MDA DataQuick data, the market in Southern California is slowing because, among other factors, the percentage of distressed sales is declining. The flippers are starting to run out of product:

What this means is that there is very little holding this market up. The tax credit has stolen future sales which will result in a serious drop in sales. More disturbing is that this is happening as mortgage rates are 4.83%, or historically very low.

There is a lot of data to suggest that the shadow inventory, homes that are in or close to default, will continue to depress home prices, especially without the tax credit. The MBA also reported today that mortgage delinquencies

increased to a seasonally adjusted rate of 10.06 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the first quarter of 2010, an increase of 59 basis points from the fourth quarter of 2009, and up 94 basis points from one year ago ...

The percentage of loans in the foreclosure process at the end of the first quarter was 4.63 percent, an increase of five basis points from the fourth quarter of 2009 and 78 basis points from one year ago. This represents another record high.

If Congress chooses to extend the credit, then, prices will continue to hold steady, and flippers will stay in business for a while longer. But at some point the effect of the credits will be like pushing on a string. There are a lot of other factors that will influence future home prices beside the credit. These would be: deflationary pressures from foreclosures, upward pressure on interest rates after the EU calms down, the stagnant job market which I anticipate to continue, and GDP stagnation which I see happening in H2.

Another factor that will weigh on the housing market is the financial stability of the FHA, Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie are broke, and the FHA is taking on too much risk as it takes up the slack. Without massive inflation to bail these institutions out, I would be wary of their future.

The tax credits show not only is Fed policy disruptive of the housing markets by preventing an orderly deflation/deleveraging of overvalued and over-financed assets, the chance that they will succeed inflating the market only means that they will create a bust-bust cycle: this time the economy will avoid the big boom part of the cycle and slip into stagnation weighed down with malinvestment and too much debt.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/home-p ... a-slipping

Here's a little eye opener if you've ever wondered why the US (and really the whole PTB) has bent over backwards to support China...
"We're Seeing the End of a Global Free Market," Says Ian Bremmer

The free market principles increasingly popular around the world over the last 40 years are suddenly less so. “We're seeing the end of a global free market,” says Ian Bremmer president of the political consulting firm, Eurasia Group. “In the west, it's indefensible to support the free markets publicly,” says the author of the The End of the Free Market.

The alternative, of course, is a Chinese style state controlled economy which may gain popularity among emerging markets. While most of the developed world muddles through China continues to grow at a torrid pace. “The world's second largest and fastest growing economy, China, is completely committed to a model that at base is fundamentally incompatible with free market capitalism.”

Which model shapes the future? It's not clear yet, says Bremmer.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/%2 ... et=&ccode=

Set up to be the example for the rest of the world to follow.....

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 21st, 2010, 11:55 am
by Jason
CONTROLLER GREUEL RELEASES AUDIT SHOWING CITY CAN’T FIND 45% OF ITEMS PURCHASED WITH TAXPAYER FUNDS

Hundreds of Other Items Purchased More Than a Year Ago, Sitting Unused

(Los Angeles) – City Controller Wendy Greuel released an audit today showing that various City departments could not locate hundreds of items purchased with taxpayer funds, and that hundreds of other items had been sitting unopened or unused for up to 7
years.

“With the City facing such a large budget deficit, it’s essential that any equipment that we are able to purchase is easily located if needed and utilized immediately. It’s critical that keep tight controls on the City’s scarce resources,” said City Controller Greuel.

“Unfortunately we found in this case that no one was minding the store.”
http://controller.lacity.org/stellent/g ... 009991.pdf

We Are Out of Money
American governance won’t begin to inch forward until the political class faces basic facts.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/07/w ... t-of-money

We Are So Totally Out of Money
http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/15/we-ar ... t-of-money

We Are Out of Money, L.A. Edition
http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/07/we-ar ... la-edition

We Are Out of Money, California Edition
http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/07/we-ar ... california

California: The Frog in the Sub-Prime Frying Pan
http://biggovernment.com/cstreet/2010/0 ... ernment%29

Fact vs. Fiction on Today’s Economy
http://www.caseyresearch.com/editorial/ ... 168ED0510B
OKLAHOMA CITY — Democratic Gov. Brad Henry and Republican leaders of the House and Senate announced an agreement Thursday on a $6.68 billion state budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1 that reduces spending by about 7.6 percent.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... QD9FQPAUO0

Las Vegas land prices: 80% off peak
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29
The number of Americans filing initial jobless claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly jumped 25,000 in the week ended May 15, leading economists to fear that changes in healthcare regulations have created uncertainty and discouraged small firms from hiring.

Advanced seasonally adjusted claims rose to 471,000, up almost 6 percent from the previous week’s claims of 446,000, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg LP were expecting claims to drop to a seasonally adjusted 440,000.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chi ... ?id=164961

National Unemployment Increases To 9.9%
http://dailycapitalist.com/2010/05/21/n ... es-to-9-9/

Central Falls Rhode Island - Bankrupt - Goes Into Receivership
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29

April State Unemployment Rates: California and Nevada at series highs
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29

FDIC: 'Problem' Banks at 775
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... gle+Reader

Ten Percent of US Banks In Trouble
http://dailycapitalist.com/2010/05/20/t ... italist%29

LBO Debt Tumbles Revealing ‘Leveraged Fantasy’: Credit Markets
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... GiQE&pos=4

Global Bust Round II; Australia Mining Contagion; Vindication for Steve Keen Coming; What about the Loonie and Australian Dollar?
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29

The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the XXI Century.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=19025

The Mother Of All Unwinds Accelerates: Treasury Curve Flattening With Unprecedented Speed
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/mother ... nted-speed

Three-Month Dollar Libor Rises to Highest Since July (Update2)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... zKPY&pos=2

Albert Edwards: Europe Is On The Edge Of A Deflationary Precipice That Will, Paradoxically, Usher In 20-30% Inflation
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/albert ... -inflation
The wave of social unrest is spreading. A new round of protests has hit Spain with a public sector strike set for June 8. In Slovenia, students are protesting new rules that limit their work hours and pay.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29

European Social Welfare State Model Running Out of Time and Money
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/european-s ... and-money/

Europe May Be Insolvent But It Sure Is Guzzling Electricity
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/europe ... lectricity
Interestingly, the WSJ carried an article on Brian Weinstein, who manages $3.1 billion BlackRock Inflation Protected Bond, the company's flagship TIPS fund, stating that he is short TIPS. Mr. Weinstein said "investors are mistaking inflation volatility for inflation -- inflation volatility means we have both inflation and deflation risk."

Right now, everyone is worried about a protracted deflationary wave. There are those who fear a major crash is coming in stocks. The fixed income manager I met today told me "it's all hedge funds right now". I agreed telling him "the extreme volatility is driven by the top hedge funds who are loading up again, preparing for the next move up".
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/endless-bear-market

One Week After Flash Crash, Investors Continue Pulling Cash From Equities As Money Market Holdings Plunge
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/one-we ... oldings-pl

U.S. deflation fears mount
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=3048919

The Road to Recession
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney05192010.html

Crisis and Leviathan: Observations amid the Current Episode
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=873

Public Intelligence Discovers Second Working BP Leak Feed, Servers Not Overloaded
http://publicintelligence.net/public-in ... verloaded/

Gulf oil spill: 'Like tracking a serial killer'
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/20/1 ... z0oaLlFtv4

Syrupy oil washes into La. marshes for first time
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/ ... 15439.html

New NASA Image of Gulf Oil Moving Towards Atlantic Ocean
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

NASA Images Show Oil Entering Loop Current
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

BP Acknowledges Oil Spill Is Larger Than Previous Estimates
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/21/oil

Gulf oil spill leak now pegged at 95,000 barrels a day
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/05/19/9 ... z0oaJlaof5

Congress Told Oil Gusher Jetting Up To 104,000 Barrels Per Day
http://trueslant.com/stephenwebster/201 ... s-per-day/

Coast Guard may burn polluted areas to clean up spilled oil
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0520/coast- ... illed-oil/

....whole new aspect to scorched earth....

Flash Bulletin: Corexit is Killing the Gulf
http://farmwars.info/?p=2944&utm_source ... rm+Wars%29

Sick Fishermen and Oily Smells on the Gulf Coast
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-solo ... 83256.html

Just Like 9/11? Oil Spill Responders Are Getting Sick ... But Are Being Told They Don't Need Any Safety Gear
http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-8802-0-0-0--.html

Plans to evacuate the Gulf are BEGINING TO FLY AROUND THE NET.
http://gazbom.blogspot.com/2010/05/benz ... z0oaOxSwcL
BP denies botching Gulf of Mexico clean-up

Democratic US congressman Ed Markey voiced the frustrations of many, saying: "We're beginning to understand that we cannot trust BP. People do not trust the experts any longer. BP has lost all credibility."
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0521/bp-den ... o-cleanup/

EPA Officials Weigh Sanctions Against BP’s U.S. Operations
http://www.propublica.org/feature/epa-o ... operations
There's a best-case scenario for what might ultimately happen to all the oil being spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, and it looks something like this:

Most of the oil doesn't reach shore, but it doesn't sink to the bottom of the ocean basin either. Rather, it gets dissolved in the microbe-rich first few hundred feet of water below the surface, where it it biodegrades within a period of weeks.

This is basically what BP and the government are trying to force by dousing the oil with chemical dispersants -- a risky maneuver. These toxic chemicals have never been used on this scale.

Of course, it could all go horribly wrong.

"This event is completely outside the box of prior experience," said Robert Carney, a professor of oceanography at Louisiana State University. "We really don't know what's going to happen."

What makes this spill so different is the depth and the chemicals. Because of high pressure and low temperatures, oil breaks down and disperses much differently if it's leaked at 5,000 feet than if it's leaked at 100. The heavy use of chemical dispersants, which BP is rumored to be flying in from stockpiles the world over, only adds to the uncertainty.

So far, BP's plan seems to be working. The slick has remained largely at sea -- though some oil has washed ashore on some Louisiana beaches and, possibly, the Florida Keys.

But what it's doing at sea is mysterious. Some of the oil is floating on the surface or breaking into so-called "tar balls" that look like oil pancakes several inches thick in diameter.

Reports over the weekend suggested that some of the oil had formed into plumes under the water, some up to 10 miles long, although Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), on Monday called those reports "misleading, premature and, in some cases, inaccurate."

Carney thinks that what's happening with the plumes is that the combination of pressure and chemicals is causing the oil to break into small particles, like a fog.

This fog is not thick enough to rise to the surface, but not heavy enough to sink. So it is remaining suspended in the ocean, maybe 600 to 1,000 feet below the surface.

These so-called plumes, said Carney, would not be a thick glob of crude oil -- they're more like cloudy water. In some cases the oil might not be visible to the naked eye.

But it would rob the water of oxygen and be harmful to marine organisms that came into contact with it.

Fortunately, most marine life does not inhabit those depths. The creatures preferring to stay closer to the surface or in shallower waters where there's light and, consequentially, more food.

The real danger comes if the oil either moves closer to shore or sinks deeper.

In deep water, the lack of oxygen and cold temperatures means the oil will take years to break down -- perhaps even centuries, said Lisa Suatoni, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council's ocean program.

But that would be preferable to another possibility: Having the oil reach shore despite the mass amounts of dispersants used.

"Never, ever, ever let oil into salt marshes," Suatoni said, noting that it will soak into the soil and leech out again every time it rains. "It will be there for decades."

Suatoni was cautiously supportive of the plan to disperse the oil so far, although she notes that very little research has been done on what effects the dispersants themselves will have on the environment.

Even NOAA's Lubchenco acknowledges that dispersants aren't a silver bullet. "They are used to move us towards the lesser of two environmental outcomes," she said in a prepared statement.

Attempts to disperse the oil into the water column will invariably lead to wildlife deaths, as the dispersants are known toxins. But Suatoni said animal kills are generally preferable to the loss of habitat, which affects species for generations.

Either way, the different scenarios for what may happen to the oil underscore a basic fact of oil spills.

"Once the oil is out, it's out," said Suatoni. "There are no good outcomes, only different outcomes."
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Where-the ... et=&ccode=

Saturday Night Live 680 (Se 35 Ep 22) Alec Baldwin - BP, Transocean, and Halliburton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUyLBA8m ... r_embedded

Wisconsin bar burns Obama effigy with duct tape wrapped around its neck as crowd laughs and cheers.
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/20/wis ... ma-effigy/

Iran Must Not Be Allowed To Defend Itself!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_mAiJuG ... r_embedded

US Begins Massive Military Build Up Around Iran, Sending Up To 4 New Carrier Groups In Region
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/us-beg ... ups-region

Ahmadinejad's associate: If Israel attacks, we will destroy it within week
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340 ... 57,00.html

Russian official: Iranian nuclear plant to be launched by August
http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadi ... eI1e2lcgyw

IDF preparing for mass evacuations in case of Hezbollah missile strike
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... bled=false

Iranian teams train on S-300 interceptors at Russian bases
http://www.debka.com/article/8792/

The Pakistan Mess
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/20/the ... ensored%29

US vows punishment for North Korea over ship sinking
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia_p ... 134613.stm

‘All out war’ threatened over North Korea attack on warship Cheonan
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 131533.ece

North Korea: "Punish Us For War And We'll... Make War"
http://threatswatch.org/rapidrecon/2010 ... tsWatch%29

Here's a formula for success.....let's attach Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea all at the same time. The money flowing to MIC will enhance the economy. The demand for boots and troops will lower the unemployment rate. All the young men will be sucked off to war and won't cause riots in the homeland. Sounds like a winner to me.....only one tiny problem....it must all be paid for with labor.....production labor that is nearly non-existent now....but it would definitely be the final fulfillment of prophecy - spending strength fighting wars in foreign lands!

RAND’s Latest Assessment of China’s Air Forces Modernization
http://defensetech.org/2010/05/20/rands ... z0oaTX0nLl
Defense.org

Obama is Boxed In From the Gulf to Afghanistan
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=19263

Night Shoot With Mk-19 and 60mm Mortar
http://kitup.military.com/2010/05/night ... ortar.html

Eyewitness: Under fire in Thailand
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 77647.html

Clinton’s New START Misstatements
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/05/18/cli ... tatements/

Interview: Dudley Brown on UN “Small Arms Treaty”
http://www.ammoland.com/2010/04/16/dudl ... ms-treaty/

Socialist Clinton signs Treaty to ban small arms in America, Civil War 2 is close
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/socialis ... -is-close/

Carbon Tax Takeover Passes in MD County: "Businesses that purchase 1 million kilowatt hours a month would see their monthly electricity bills increase from $13,843 to $23,852"
http://www.informationliberation.com/index.php?id=30308

Police State Strengthens Its Hold
http://libertarianviewpoint.com/blog/?p=1997
Pirates plying the waves of Falcon Lake

McALLEN — Heavily armed Mexican freshwater pirates have been shaking down U.S. boaters on Falcon Lake, a reservoir and bass fishing haven that straddles the Rio Grande.

At least three such incidents have been reported since April 30, the latest on Sunday, according to a Texas Department of Public Safety warning issued Tuesday that linked the muggings to northern Mexico's increasing lawlessness.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/state/ ... lArticle=y

Obama's search history
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQXbjuhj ... r_embedded

How Mercury Kills The Brain: Vaccines & Autism
http://www.infowars.com/how-mercury-kil ... es-autism/

The ‘rot’ thickens: RFD identification for kids to ride the schools for a fee in Colorado
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/20/the ... ensored%29

US team creates first ’synthetic life’
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0520/team-c ... etic-life/

Abortion services to be advertised on UK television for first time
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/ma ... evision-uk

Large sinkhole opens up in Detroit's downtown
http://detnews.com/article/20100520/MET ... 452/-1/rss

Earth's Mantle in Overdrive Under Alaska - The mantle under Alaska is moving 20 to 30 times faster than the crust -- reversing the usual order of plate tectonics.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/earth-m ... laska.html

IT'S TIME TO BURN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue3F3isiCvQ

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 21st, 2010, 8:26 pm
by Jason
America Will Pass $13 Trillion In Total Debt Next Tuesday; $397 Billion In Debt Rolled Month To Date

Total US debt just hit $12,987,823,000,000, $13 billion from lucky $13 trillion. As next week the US Treasury is auctioning off another gross $140+ billion in Bonds, we will pass this totally irrelevant resistance level on May 25, when Timmy issues another $42 billion of 2 Year Notes. The next important support level of $14 trillion will be surpassed around the time the Democrats get destroyed in the mid-term elections, while the statutory debt limit of $14.3 trillion will likely have to be raised in January 2011 by a new republican majority, an action which will promptly reduce popular republican support following their ladnslide election victory, thus starting the pointless D->R->D->R etc cycle all over again. Also, at approximately that time headlines that US debt is now 100% of GDP will bring the US bond vigilantes out of hibernation and will send US interest rates soaring, assisted by Ben Bernanke's most recent announcement that the Fed will is once again"forced" to purchase another $1.5 trillion in treasuries and mortgages.

Stepping away from the Ouija board, we also notice that so far in April, the Treasury has rolled another unsustainable amount of Treasuries: $397 billion, of which $$359 billion is in Bills.

The clock to the US' hyperstagflationary period is now ticking louder than ever
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/americ ... month-date
32 States Now Officially Bankrupt: $37.8 Billion Borrowed From Treasury To Fund Unemployment; CA, MI, NY Worst

Courtesy of Economic Policy Journal we now know that the majority of American states are currently insolvent, and that the US Treasury has been conducting a shadow bailout of at least 32 US states. Over 60% of Americans receiving state unemployment benefits are getting these directly from the US government, as 32 states have now borrowed $37.8 billion from Uncle Sam to fund unemployment insurance. The states in most dire condition, are, not unexpectedly, the unholy trifecta of California ($6.9 billion borrowed), Michigan ($3.9 billion), and New York ($3.2 billion). With this form of shadow bailout occurring, one can only wonder how many other shadow programs are currently in operation to fund states under the table with federal money.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/32-sta ... ca-mi-ny-w
Record EUR Shorts Decline Just Barely, As GBP Spec Shorts Hit All Time Record

The CFTC's just released Commitment of Traders report indicates that Non-Commercial, speculative net positions in the Euro declined just marginally from -113,890 to -107,143 for the week ended May 18, Tuesday. With central banks throwing everything at shorts, up to and including the tungsten-plated kitchen sink, the response is surprisingly muted. However, with the major wave of SNB/ECB initiated forced short covering beginning on Thursday, and driving the EURUSD up by 300 pips from 1.21 in one day, we expect the short number to decline substantially. If it does not, "speculators" can tap themselves on the back for pulling off a feat bigger than even George Soros ever achieved- taking on all central banks and not wavering. If that is indeed the case, we salute them. On the other hand, Soros replicants are certainly on fire in the GBP: the cable saw a new record number of shorts in the past week, which increased by -4,557 to -76,745.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/record ... ime-record

Senate Passes Wall Street Permanent Bailout Bill, It’s a Job Killer!
http://noworldsystem.com/2010/05/21/sen ... lout-bill/

In wake of financial crises, IMF seeks a new role with broader authority
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... s_business

House votes to expand national DNA arrest database
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20005458-38.html

US: North Korea must stop provocative behaviour or face consequences
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/us-north ... sequences/

Obama celebrates biggest banking shake-up since the Great Depression
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/05/obama-ce ... epression/

Bank Failure #73: Pinehurst Bank, St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29
Bob Kleine, State Treasurer: "We haven't decided yet how we're going to solve the budget problem for 2010 yet."

A spokeswoman says Governor Granholm will meet with lawmakers next week to figure out how to fill an almost 250 million dollar gap.
http://www.wlns.com/Global/story.asp?S=12523033

Israel's Extreme Strike Vehicle: ZIBAR Mk2
http://www.defense-update.com/products/ ... +Update%29

Yes, They Really Do Want To Impose Global Taxes And A Global Currency On You
http://thisistheendoftheworldasweknowit ... ncy-on-you

Hidden Government Papers on the Measles Vaccine Exposed
http://vactruth.com/2010/05/20/governme ... s-exposed/

Govt plans vaccination bank
http://vactruth.com/2010/05/20/govt-pla ... tion-bank/

Two-thirds of Orlando real estate transactions are REO Or Short Sales
http://www.bankreorealestate.com/reo-ne ... sales.html

Sun Erupts: Epic Blast Seen by NASA Solar Observatory
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... servatory/

Codex Serves Up A Hearty Helping of Melamine!
http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvot ... amine.aspx

Prescription Drug Use by U.S. Children on the Rise
http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvot ... -rise.aspx

The Wall Street ICEcapade
http://solari.com/blog/?p=7458

Taitz files new motion in the Taitz v Obama Quo Warranto, submits transcript from Kenya and Obama’s Multiple Social Security Numbers.
http://www.orlytaitzesq.com/?p=10751

New Anti-Obama Billboards Pop Up in Kansas City Area
http://www.freedomslighthouse.com/2010/ ... hthouse%29

UL CRAIG ROBERTS: EXPECT FALSE FLAG ATTACK TERROR ATTACK TO PRECEDE INVASION OF IRAN
http://peopleforfreedom.com/58820/ul-cr ... on-of-iran

“We Have A Spending And Size Of Government Problem, And We Need To Start Saying ‘No’”
http://sayanythingblog.com/entry/we-hav ... saying-no/

Morphing Into an Economic Problem
http://www.economicroadmap.com/2010/05/ ... ts+Fall%29

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 22nd, 2010, 2:10 pm
by Jason
BP / Gulf Oil Spill - Deeper Into Loop Current (??)

The MODIS / Terra image taken today shows a very faint, long belt of anomalous ocean color that appears to follow the Loop Current. We have very tentatively identified this as possible oil slick and sheen carried far to the south. Consider this a low-confidence analysis; it's possible that the Loop Current has a distinct ocean-color signature without any oil present:
http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/bp-gul ... kyTruth%29

The BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Update
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmen ... z0ogmYZQvL

Fishermen get severly ill from clean-up work in Gulf
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29
BP Says Oil Capture Rate Falls to 2,200 Barrels a Day

The flow today is made up of larger quantities of natural gas, 15 million cubic feet, a source familiar with the situation tells CNBC. The company is now able to better measure the composition of the flow, six days into the siphoning operation, using a mile-long tube inserted into the pipe leaking down on the ocean floor. The mixture of oil and gas coming from the leak fluctuates continuously, the source says.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/37276941

US vows punishment for North Korea over ship sinking
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/asia_p ... 134613.stm

Clinton threatens sanctions, North Korea threatens ‘all-out war’
http://publicintelligence.net/clinton-t ... l-out-war/

US/NATO Troops Patrolling Opium Poppy Fields in Afghanistan
http://publicintelligence.net/usnato-tr ... ghanistan/

The Militarization of Police
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upNSUZpT ... r_embedded#!

AMERICA’S SECRET POLICE NETWORK
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/22/ame ... ensored%29

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn ... index.html

Maryland Citizens Face Felony Charges for Recording Cops
http://www.infowars.com/maryland-citize ... ding-cops/

Woman Prisoner Sent to Solitary for Reporting Rape by Guard
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/05/wom ... rape-guard

UPDATE: Y.C. woman killed by police pointed gun at officers
http://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/fam ... woman.html
At West Point, Obama talks up national security strategy

WEST POINT, N.Y. -- President Obama on Saturday pledged to shape a new "international order" as part of a national security strategy that emphasizes his belief in global institutions and America's role in promoting democratic values around the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01586.html

Did the U.S. Army help spread Morgellons and other diseases?
http://www.voltairenet.org/article165450.html

Whittaker Chambers: The New Deal as Revolution
http://biggovernment.com/asnyder/2010/0 ... ernment%29

Wealth gap spurs revolts across Asia
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Wealth ... z0oX830a1H
Saudi King slams intelligence leak

The King of Saudi Arabia has strongly criticized the country's intelligence officials for disclosing a secret document, which shows Riyadh has links with terrorist activities carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq.

According to a report by Iraq's Buratha news agency on Friday, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz ordered a special committee to investigate the intelligence leak and inform him about those liable in the case.

Some 37 members of Saudi's intelligence service, accused of being behind the leakage of the confidential document, were also reported to have been arrested.

The condemnation by the Saudi monarch comes as the Iraqi news agency disclosed the amount of money transferred by Saudi government officials to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Saudi officials are also reported to send explosives and weapons to the terrorist groups.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=12 ... =351020205

Bush/Saudi Connection
http://www.hermes-press.com/BushSaud.htm

A little humor in newspaper headlines
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library ... ncegay.htm

Florida state of emergency
http://www.postonpolitics.com/wp-conten ... 10-106.pdf

10 States Most Likely To Default
http://wallstcheatsheet.com/breaking-ne ... t+Sheet%29
Sacramento - -- Courts in recent years have crushed attempts by California to cut spending by billions of dollars and have forced the state to spend hundreds of millions more than planned.

Designated cuts to health and human services that were rejected by federal courts alone have resulted in $4.5 billion in lost savings over the past three years, according to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration.

Prison health care costs have doubled to more than $1.9 billion since 2006, when a federal judge ordered a federal receiver to take control of prison health services.

"The judicial branch is now a full player in the budget because the decisions they are making have an impact on what the governor and Legislature can or cannot do," said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the Department of Finance. "The judiciary does not have to deal with the fiscal consequence of the rulings - they say you can't do a spending reduction, but we have to come up with another $100 million in cuts somewhere else."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... z0ogr2lESB
During the crisis these indicators showed the stress in the credit markets and it is probably worth revisiting them now.

This graph from Bloomberg, based on data from the British Bankers' Association, shows the three-month U.S. dollar London interbank offered rate, or Libor rose to 0.50% on Friday.

This is an important rates since trillions of financial products worldwide are tied to the Libor - including many adjustable mortgages in the U.S.

The rate has increased recently, but it is still very low.

The TED spread has also risen recently and is now at 34.47. This is a 5 year graph to show the recent increase is very small compared to the huge increases during the worst of the crisis.

Note: This is the difference between the interbank rate for three month loans and the three month Treasury. The peak was 463 on Oct 10th and a normal spread is below 50 bps.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29
College Grads about to Flood Labor Market; Class of 2009 Still Without Jobs in Deep Trouble

The 2009 college graduates still without a job are in deep trouble as a wave of 2010 grads is on the way. Please consider College Grads Flood U.S. Labor Market With Diminished Prospects

Ten months after graduating from Ohio State University with a civil-engineering degree and three internships, Matt Grant finally has a job -- as a banquet waiter at a Clarion Inn near Akron, Ohio.

“It’s discouraging right now,” said the 24-year-old, who sent out more than 100 applications for engineering positions. “It’s getting closer to the Class of 2010, their graduation date. I’m starting to worry more.”

Schools from Grant’s alma mater to Harvard University will soon begin sending a wave of more than 1.6 million men and women with bachelor’s degrees into a labor market with a 9.9 percent jobless rate, according to the Education and Labor departments. While the economy is improving, unemployment is near a 26-year high, rising last month from 9.7 percent in January-March as more Americans entered the workforce.

The scramble for jobs may depress earnings of new and recent college graduates for years to come and handicap their future career opportunities, according to Lisa Kahn, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University’s School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut. It also might hurt Democrats in the November Congressional elections, as the young voters who helped propel the party to power in 2008 grow disenchanted with their economic prospects.

“More so in the last year to 18 months than at any time, we have seen applicants from prior graduating classes looking for the kind of entry-level jobs we’re recruiting for,” said Dan Black, director of campus recruiting for Ernst & Young LLP, a professional-services firm headquartered in New York. “There are a lot more cohorts competing with each other: ‘09 with ‘10, probably ‘10 with ‘11.”

Unemployment among people under 25 years old was 19.6 percent in April, the highest level since the Labor Department began tracking the data in 1948.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29
(5/21/10) Big update today! Katla has had 4 earthquakes in the last 12 hours! 5 total quakes in the last 24 hours if you count the one that occurred in the very short distance between the west side of Katla and east side of Eyja. This is the most earthquakes I recall seeing at Katla since the March eruptions started at Eyjafjallajokull. These earthquakes are our built in warning system for an eruption and if this keeps up, we will see action soon.
http://scienceray.com/earth-sciences/mu ... z0ogtCnlh3

Katla Volcano Update 21 May 2010
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/natural-d ... valBlog%29

Link to earthquake action in that area
http://en.vedur.is/earthquakes-and-volc ... alsjokull/

Mother Earth On Crack
http://econotwist.wordpress.com/2010/02 ... -on-crack/

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 23rd, 2010, 12:38 pm
by Jason
California: More Than 6 Million Tons of Food Products are Dumped Annually; Food is The Largest Source of Waste
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2010/05/ ... Unknown%29

BP calls in Costner's $26m vacuum cleaners to mop up huge oil spill
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 79976.html
Some news from Europe ...

From Bloomberg: Regulator Seizes CajaSur, Lender Hurt by Bad Loans

The Bank of Spain removed the managers of CajaSur ... a savings bank with assets of about 19 billion euros and 486 branches ... and put the bank under a provisional administrator.

This is a fairly large bank. The 45 or so 'cajas' are local government owned banks that are focused domestically with about 70% of their portfolios exposed to the Spanish real estate market.

And in the U.K. it looks like the proposed austerity measures will lead to 100s of thousands of public job cuts, from the police to active duty front line soldiers. The ministers are promising a “bonfire of the quangos” (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation), but it sounds like this will go far beyond the NGOs ...

From the Times: 300,000 jobs in public sector face the axe

Detailed research by The Sunday Times shows that at least 300,000 workers, including civil servants and frontline staff, will lose their jobs over the next few years.

Some estimates suggest that the number of job losses could reach 700,000.

These will include tens of thousands of health service managers as well as many thousands of doctors and nurses ... Thousands of police officers and their civilian support staff ... 20,000 jobs will be lost at the Ministry of Defence ... including some frontline soldiers ...
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29

Looks like deflation to me....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_kO7poR ... r_embedded#!
25 Cents a Poop in Canada

Here is an interesting development in Canada, courtesy of government bureaucrats who have never ending ways to spend your money. At $400,000 each, Automatic public toilet debuts in Toronto.

For those who can give two bits, Toronto’s first automated pay toilet is now taking customers at 25 cents a poop — er, pop.

“They are modern, state of the art washrooms — they actually clean themselves after each use. Now try that at home,” Mayor David Miller said before cutting a blue ribbon to open the loo.

A large crowd of press, officials and curious onlookers were on hand for the grand opening of the automated john, the first of 20 planned across the city over the next 20 years.

The new bathroom automatically cleans itself and will also get visited by an attendant three times a day.

The Automated Public Toilets will take any coins up to and including toonies and will provide change. They will also work with tokens that the city plans to distribute to homeless people through its Streets to Homes program.

One quarter gets you 20 minutes max.

Warning lights will start flashing at 15 minutes. At 18 minutes the warning comes on again and when 20 minutes are up you better be done, as the door then opens.

It’s also equipped with emergency buttons linked to a dispatcher, a smoke alarm, an emergency escape hatch and sensors to prevent the cleaning system from starting if anyone is inside.

Patrick, who sent me the story writes ...

Tokens will be given to homeless people will use them to do drugs inside.

Prostitutes will use them as well.

All because one day a city council member had trouble finding a bathroom. Apparently it is too hard to walk into a McDonalds or Tim Hortons to take care of business.

I do not know about Toronto, but in Chicago or LA such sites would be plastered with graffiti in about two days flat.

Of course they can put in more alarms, video cameras, and have qualified personnel monitor the videos 24 hours a day to make sure that poop is all you do. Perhaps they need a security guard posted at the door of each one.

The return of the pay toilet. Who coulda thunk?

Now all Toronto needs are signs on every corner "This way to the nearest loo". After all, Toronto's a pretty big place. How would you find it?
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29
“Although the Federal Reserve has been aggressive about easing monetary policy to support economic activity, the recovery is not likely to be as robust as we would like,” Dudley said.

Economic growth is likely to be “more sluggish” than desired because households are deleveraging, banks remain under “significant stress,” and economic growth has been fueled by temporary sources such as fiscal stimulus programs, Dudley said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... z4NQ&pos=3

FDIC Problem banks...
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content ... ures-3.gif

30,000 protest budget cuts in New Jersey
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0522/30000- ... ts-jersey/
Mexican President Wants to Disarm Americans

Mexican President Felipe Calderón called upon the United States Congress to re-enact the assault weapons ban in a bid to disarm the American people as they are integrated into the North American Union system. Further, he placed blame for fueling drug cartels and gang violence squarely on the United States and their supply of firearms.

Calderón made these outrageous and anti-American remarks from the floor of the U.S. Congress during an official visit, and also renewed attacks on the immigration legislation passed by Arizona.

Alex Jones responds to these radical statements in a video address, questioning Calderón’s wherewithal to scold the United States or meddle with its internal affairs, particularly when Mexico has become such an unmanageable, nightmarish police state– where, by the way, there is a total gun ban for ordinary citizens.
http://www.infowars.com/mexican-preside ... americans/

Detainees Barred From Access to U.S. Courts
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world ... in.html?hp

Central Bank Intervention Is Now Self-Defeating
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/centra ... to+zero%29

Ray Stevens - Come to the USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOHOHKBEqE

Warning: This Common Food Causes Devastating Offspring Defects in New Research Study
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/artic ... il-24.aspx

Sen. Bob Bennett declines to 'pull a Crist'
http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/1/602947.html

Presenting What Could Be The Oddest Capital Flow Observation In History
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/presen ... on-history

Global Financial Crisis - Clarke and Dawes ask the million dollar questions
http://www.abc.net.au/news/video/2010/05/20/2905304.htm

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 24th, 2010, 1:32 pm
by Jason
CIA Report on Soviet War Shows Futility of Military Effort in Afghanistan
http://publicintelligence.net/cia-repor ... ghanistan/

(U//FOUO) CIA Report: Lessons of the Soviet War in Afghanistan
http://info.publicintelligence.net/CIAafghanlessons.pdf

BlackRock Inc.
http://publicintelligence.net/blackrock-inc/

BP's Operation "Top Kill" Gets DELAYED
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/BPs-Opera ... et=&ccode=

US threatens to ‘push BP out of the way’
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0524/threatens-push-bp-way/

US has approved 19 environmental drilling waivers since oil spill
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0524/morato ... l-waivers/

As spill grows, oil soaks delicate marshes, birds
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100523/D9FSQGNO1.html

Economists See Solid U.S. Growth
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... ts_news_us

LOL!!!! LOL!!!! LOL!!!!

States Borrow Billions as U-6 Unemployment Rate Hits 17.1%
http://sumfolio.com/states-borrow-billi ... -17-1-569/
Earlier the NAR released the existing home sales data for April; here are a couple more graphs ...Inventory increased 2.7% YoY in April, the first YoY increase since 2008.

This increase in the inventory is especially concerning because the reported inventory is already historically very high, and the 8.4 months of supply in April is well above normal.

Sales were up because of the tax credit (pulling sales forward), but that does very little for the economy. The key is the increase in the inventory and months-of-supply, and if these two measures increase later this year (after the distortions in May and June), then there will be additional downward pressure on house prices.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29
Here is a pair of interesting articles from the Arizona Republic regarding an increase in commercial foreclosures and a slowing number of evictions in apartment complexes.

Please consider Commercial foreclosures pick up speed

Mesa Financial Plaza, the 17-story office tower that lights up the night sky with a neon-blue silhouette, has been noticed for trustee sale.

The $40.6 million default is just one of many that are starting to drop in the Valley. The number of defaults for loans of more than $20 million is increasing rapidly for all product types, including office, industrial, retail and large apartment complexes.

Chris Toci, executive director of the capital markets group at Cushman & Wakefield of Arizona Inc., said Phoenix is at the front end of a major crash.

Cash-strapped landlords let evictions lag

One might that that evictions would be rising due to lack of payment but that's not the case in the Phoenix area as Cash-strapped landlords let evictions lag

Fewer tenants are being evicted from apartments across the Valley, but the decline is more about the dismal state of landlord finances than tenants paying their rent on time.

In the latest fallout from the recession and housing crisis, growing numbers of apartment-complex owners are in serious financial trouble or foreclosure.
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... nalysis%29

.23 cents on the dollar.....
On May 18, 2010, the FDIC closed a sale of notes backed by commercial real estate loans from twenty-two financial institutions, for which the FDIC was appointed receiver during the period from August 2008 to March 2009. The sale was conducted through a private offering to qualified purchasers.

The $233 million of notes are backed by performing and non-performing commercial real estate loans with a related aggregate unpaid balance of approximately $1.0 billion. The notes were originally issued in January 2010 to the FDIC as receiver for the twenty-two financial institutions in connection with the creation of an LLC to hold the aforementioned assets, and are guaranteed by the FDIC in its corporate capacity. The FDIC still retains its 60% equity interest issued by the LLC, and ColFin DB Funding, formed by entities affiliated with Colony Capital, still owns the 40% equity interest sold to it by the FDIC in January 2010.
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/press/2010/pr10120.html
May 24 (Bloomberg) -- Corporate bond sales are poised for their worst month in a decade, while relative yields are rising the most since Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse, as the response by lawmakers to Europe’s sovereign debt crisis fails to inspire investor confidence.

Companies have issued $47 billion of debt in May, down from $183 billion in April and the least since December 1999, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“This is a quintessential liquidity crisis,” said William Cunningham, head of credit strategies and fixed-income research at Boston-based State Street Corp.’s investment unit, which oversees almost $2 trillion. “It’s not inconceivable to imagine a situation where the markets behave so poorly, the liquidity behaves so badly, and risk-tolerance just evaporates that -- particularly in Europe -- consumers contract, businesses stop hiring and stop investing, and economic activity halts.”

More Americans unexpectedly filed applications for unemployment benefits last week as Labor Department figures showed initial jobless claims rose by 25,000 to 471,000, the highest level for a month and exceeding the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. An index of U.S. leading indicators fell 0.1 percent in April, a sign the economic expansion may slow in the second half of the year, Conference Board data showed on May 20.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... fYVE&pos=3
Although gasoline prices are dropping ahead of the Memorial Day weekend and the start of the summer driving season, there's no sign motorists are rushing back to the pump to top off their tanks.

Data released Monday by the Federal Highway Administration show the number of miles driven on U.S. roads rose in March compared with February, but still was below March 2009, in the depths of the recession.

There is no sign of anything more than a modest increase in demand for gasoline so far this year. Last week's MasterCard SpendingPulse report showed consumption of gasoline for the first two weeks of May running about 1.3 percent ahead of last year. For the year, consumption has risen about 1 percent.

Demand is 4 percent below 2007 levels, according to the MasterCard data, which tallies total gas sales paid by credit card, checks and cash.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Drivers-s ... et=&ccode=
Bold and Underline mine

CAFR: US agencies have billions, trillions in investments while crying budget deficits
http://www.examiner.com/x-18425-LA-Coun ... t-deficits

Revealed- How Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XJmgziU ... r_embedded

Austin, TX: America’s Largest Water Fluoridation Fight
http://dcbureau.org/20100521434/Bulldog ... fight.html

Britain Bans Doctor Who Linked Autism to Vaccine
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05 ... ss&emc=rss

With US support, SKorea cuts trade with North
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100524/ap_ ... ship_sinks

U.S., South Korea plan military exercises
Show of force intended to send message to North over warship sinking
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37309788/ns ... iapacific/
GORDON DUFF: ANSWERING OUR TROOPS, “WHY DID YOU SEND US TO WAR OVER A LIE?”

After 9/11 it started. We raced into Afghanistan looking for terrorist groups that never existed and a terrorist mastermind who had nothing to do with an attack on America. We knew we were lying to our troops then, we know it now and we simply can’t stop, we love lying so much. Osama bin Laden, isolated in Afghanistan with a few supporters fled into the hills and died in days. There was never a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, no Al Qaeda, a group honest experts claim never existed and still may not, and the real Osama bin Laden, the bin Laden that said Israel was responsible for 9/11, has been dead since December 2001.

Our troops and veterans have to either watch Fox news hide the facts from them or learn of the corruption tied to the 9/11 investigation, the Building 7 scandal, a scandal free of “conspiracy theory,” and the very real “dancing Israelis,” a Mossad film squad positioned to record the planes hitting the twin towers, notified well in advance, an Israel team arrested by New York police as terrorists and released and rushed back to Israel by friends in the Bush administration before the FBI could question them.

We can keep trying to lie to our soldiers about this and about Iraq, how we sent them to war, killed 5000 and wounded tens of thousands, PTSD for hundreds of thousands more and did it all based on intelligence reports that were treason, not just wrong, not just lies, but a plan to deceive our own government, an act of war against the United States by some of her own people, people who sent us to war because of their “mixed loyalties” to a foreign country, loyalties that negated their oaths to America.

Now the questions are flooding in, phone, email, coming in to those of us who are supposed to know. Does anyone want to tell a wounded soldier he was duped by a pack of thieves and cowards who made billions of dollars on his suffering? Do we want to keep up the Fox News cover stories about the evils of Islam and the rows of tanks and thousands of missiles threatening poor defenseless Israel?
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/05/24 ... ver-a-lie/

Justice Thomas: We are evading the eligibility issue (Obama's Birth Cert)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ0C5_cE ... r_embedded

Ex-congressman who allegedly groped staffers claims Cheney wanted to institute ‘coup’
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0524/excong ... tute-coup/

A Death Blow to Europe's Welfare State?
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... ow-to.html

Failed CajaSur Fallout Accelerates: 4 Spanish Savings Banks To Merge In "Cold Fusion", €135 Billion In Assets At Stake
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/failed ... to+zero%29

Italy Banning Cash Transactions Over €5,000 As Latest European Austerity Package Revealed
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/italy- ... to+zero%29

Zapatero proposes EU-style Latin American Union
http://www.euractiv.com/en/foreign-affa ... ews-494250

Mayor Daley Threatens to Shoot the Messenger—Namely, Me
http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/ar ... rnamely-me

Ninjas rescue student from muggers
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100520/od_ ... lia_ninjas

Ex-CounterTerrorism Czar: Next terrorist threat will be from those resisting technology
http://www.technofascismblog.com/2010/0 ... -1606.html

MRAPs Take Over for Humvees Off Base
http://defensetech.org/2010/05/24/mraps ... -off-base/

FDA considers endorsement of drug that some call a Viagra for women
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... components

Treasury Auction Schedule for the Week of May 24, 2010
http://treasuryauctionwatch.blogspot.co ... of_23.html

Incarcerated America
http://www.hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/incarceration/

BoE's Posen-can't rule out deflation threat
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLAG0 ... arketsNews

Growing Revolutionary Guard Spells Uncertainty For Oil Investors In Iran
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest- ... stors-iran

US receives copy of Iran's reply to nuclear swap deal
http://www.alternet.org/rss/breaking_ne ... aking_news

Billions needed to end US child hunger, obesity: officials
http://www.alternet.org/rss/breaking_ne ... aking_news

Possibly the best evidence of a bomb explosion before the first plane hit
http://www.infowars.com/possibly-the-be ... plane-hit/
Feds eyeing online forums to correct 'misinformation'

The next time you post an opinion in an online forum or a Facebook group message board, don't be surprised if you get a rebuttal from a federal employee.

The government is looking for ways to monitor online chatter about political issues and correct what it perceives as misinformation.

The move started recently with a pilot project on the East Coast seal hunt. A Toronto-based company called Social Media Group has been hired to help counter some information put forward by the anti-sealing movement.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has paid the firm $75,000 "to monitor social activity and help identify ... areas where misinformation is being presented and repeated as fact," Simone MacAndrew, a department spokesperson, said in an email.

The firm alerts the government to questionable online comments and then employees in Foreign Affairs or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who have recently been trained in online posting, point the authors to information the government considers more accurate.

It appears to be just the beginning.

The seal hunt pilot project was set up in part "to establish foundations and recommendations for future programs and campaigns to use social media as another way to listen to, inform and engage with Canadians," MacAndrew added.

For some, the move to online monitoring was to be expected.

"I think we're seeing the government recognize that millions of Canadians are actively participating online in social networks," said Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in Internet law.

"We've had Facebook groups in Canada that have grown to the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, and they've clearly had a direct impact on public policy."

Geist himself launched such a Facebook group in 2007. He managed to get more than 84,000 members to help denounce a proposed copyright law that critics said would have restricted the way in which people use, copy or share books, movies and music they purchase. The bill was eventually put up for public consultations and is expected to be reintroduced in Parliament in the coming days. It remains to be seen, however, whether the online group managed to convince the government to alter the bill.

The commercial seal hunt might be an ideal test case for government involvement in online debate. The issue has polarized Canadians.

Opponents call the hunt cruel and needless and say seals are sometimes skinned alive or killed as whitecoated newborns. Supporters point out that regulations governing the hunt forbid both tactics and the hunt is heavily monitored. They accuse opponents of spreading lies by having celebrities such as Paul McCartney pose with whitecoat seals, pleading for their protection.

Some groups are wary of government employees being paid to post comments.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/s ... hub=Canada

Munis About to Blow Up
http://www.safehaven.com/article/16909/ ... rticles%29
Municipal Bonds: The Next Financial Land Mine?

As Wall Street nervously watches the sovereign debt crisis unfold in Greece, another potential landmine is looming closer to home, one that could bring U.S. cities and towns to their knees, force the federal government to cough up another bailout package, and potentially send the unemployment rate much higher. The danger this time? Municipal debt.

State and local governments are frantically scrambling to meet budget shortfalls as high unemployment and shaky consumer confidence mean less income tax and smaller sales tax revenue for government coffers. At the same time, falling home prices and rising foreclosures will start to hit municipalities hard this year as all those property reassessments done over the past 18 months kick in.

A couple of municipalities, such as Los Angeles and Detroit, have even whispered the "B" word. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan argued in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that the city will likely have little choice but to declare bankruptcy between now and 2014. Also, several smaller markets, such as Harrisburg, Pa., and Jefferson County, Ala., have openly talked about filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy -- a reorganization available only to municipalities.

In general, municipalities try to avoid Chapter 9 filings. Although such filings make it easier for a city to break onerous labor contracts or make other politically tough cost cuts, they can have hidden costs, such as distracting politicians, alienating business and making it more difficult for a city to raise cash in the capital markets going forward. The city of Vallejo, Calif., for example, has been in Chapter 9 since spring 2008, and observers say the process has been costly and hurt the city's ability to attract new business. "It's been two years and the case is still going on and there's still significant disputes with the unions," says Eric Schaffer, a partner at Reed Smith LLP. "Ultimately you hope to bring everybody to the table and share the pain, but that can be a messy process."

Bankruptcy is a particularly unnerving prospect for bondholders. Municipal securities are a $2.8 trillion market, according to Municipal Market Advisors. An avalanche of investors sought refuge in the sector in recent years, lured by the stable, tax-free nature of muni bonds. More than $69 billion flowed into long-term municipal bond mutual funds in 2009, up from only $7.8 billion in 2008 and $10.9 billion in 2007, according to the Investment Company Institute. Another $15.2 billion has been added so far in 2010.
http://www.time.com/time/business/artic ... 62,00.html

As We Have Warned, the Fissures Are Widening in the Spanish Banking System
http://www.safehaven.com/article/16908/ ... rticles%29

FYI: July4Patriot finally got out after being locked up and messed with for 4 months....found not guilty on the weapons charge but still faces upcoming trial on child rape accusation.....Fed is hittin' the ARM (American Resistance Movement) hard!

Gunbattles intensifying, spreading in Jamaica
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100524/ap_ ... tandoff_13

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 25th, 2010, 11:19 am
by Jason
“Both Europe and the USA are out of bazooka ammo now. Nobody can bail out so much as another lemonade stand. From here on governments really start to crumble.” — James Howard Kunstler
Recovery in U.S. to Exceed Previous Estimates, Economists Say
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-0 ... s-say.html

U.S. Economy: Consumers Gain Confidence as Employment Improves
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... HMds&pos=2

The Road to Economic Recovery Following the Financial Crisis
http://www.stlouisfed.org/newsroom/spee ... _05_25.cfm

25 Questions To Ask Anyone Who Is Delusional Enough To Believe That This Economic Recovery Is Real
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch ... ry-is-real
Real Case-Shiller National House Prices

In nominal terms (blue), the National Index declined 1.3% in Q1, and is 2.1% off the recent bottom in Q1 2009.

Note: Case-Shiller reported the national index declined 3.2% in Q1 (Not Seasonally Adjusted, NSA) - however I'm using the SA data.

In real terms (red), the National Index declined 1.9% in Q1, and is now at the lowest level since Q4 2000.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29
Bold and Underline mine
May 24 (Bloomberg) -- Loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration, the U.S.-owned mortgage insurer, may be involved in more home-purchase transactions than borrowing financed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

FHA lending last quarter may have topped the combined volume of government-supported Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a home-lending market that’s still a “government-financed market,” David Stevens, the agency’s head, said today at a conference in New York, citing research by consultant Potomac Partners.

“This is a market purely on life support, sustained by the federal government,” he said at the Mortgage Bankers Association conference. “Having FHA do this much volume is a sign of a very sick system.”

The FHA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which regulators seized in 2008, have been financing more than 90 percent of U.S. home lending after a retreat by banks and the collapse of the market for mortgage bonds without government-backed guarantees.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-0 ... ate2-.html
Bold and Underline mine

Long-Term Unemployment: No Help for the 99ers
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/05/25-1

$5 Billion in new taxes proposed to balance state’s budget
http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.c ... /?ID=15292

THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE REVOLUTION OF 2017
http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot ... -2017.html

Euro Commercial Paper Rates Surge As Debt Roll Troubles Become Acute
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/euro-c ... come-acute

4 More Spanish Savings Banks Reported To Be "Merging" As Spanish Economy Unravels
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/4-more ... to+zero%29

NKorea severs all ties with rival SKorea
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... HNHQ&pos=8

S.Korea cuts trade, sea lanes with North
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/S_Korea_cu ... 42010.html

North Korea Warns of Military Action
http://publicintelligence.net/north-kor ... ry-action/
BP / Gulf Oil Spill - 39 Million Gallons And Growing

The MODIS / Terra satellite image of the Gulf taken yesterday (May 24, 2010) is a relatively cloud-free look at the ongoing oil spill in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Areas covered by oil slick and sheen are marked with a solid orange line. Areas where we think there may be slicks and sheen, but our analysis is of lower confidence, are shown by dashed orange lines. All together, slicks and sheen are possibly covering as much as 28,958 square miles (75,000 km2). That's an area as big as the state of South Carolina:

It's Day 35 of this fatal incident. Our estimated spill rate of 1.1 million gallons (26,500 barrels) per day, now on the conservative end of the scientific estimates, leads us to conclude that almost 39 million gallons of oil have spilled into the Gulf so far. BP and the federal government had said that they would announce a new official estimate of the daily spill rate on May 22, but we've heard nothing more about that. As far as we can tell, they are still claiming the spill rate is 210,000 gallons (5,000 barrels) per day. At that much lower rate, the total amount spilled would be 7.35 million gallons.

http://blog.skytruth.org/2010/05/bp-gul ... kyTruth%29

Deepwater Horizon survivors allege they were kept in seclusion after rig explosion, coerced into signing legal waivers
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100521/ ... ews_sc2191

IG Report: Methamphetamine Use by Interior Department Staff
http://cryptogon.com/

Gates reluctantly backs deal on gays in military ban
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0525/gates- ... itary-ban/

Sander Hicks to form 9/11 Truth Political Party
http://www.federaljack.com/?p=15691

US State Department Says “Conspiracy Theories Exist In The Realm Of Myth”
http://america20xy.com/blog6/2010/05/24 ... %E2%80%9D/

Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians" for 2009
http://www.judicialwatch.org/news/2009/ ... cians-2009

Biden Says Brussels Could Be 'Capital of the Free World'
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05 ... ree-world/

CAFR: UC budget fully funded with one-fifth of one percent of CA state “investments”
http://dailycensored.com/2010/05/24/caf ... ensored%29

L’Etat C’est Moi: The Rise Of Dependency In America
http://biggovernment.com/vderugy/2010/0 ... ernment%29

Government: Destroying Your Wealth a Trillion Dollars at a Time
http://biggovernment.com/tdelbeccaro/20 ... ernment%29

Private pay shrinks to historic lows as gov't payouts rise
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/i ... ctor_N.htm

New pyramid discovered in Peru linked to ancient copper industry
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 79529.html

Israel-South Africa nuclear ties
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middl ... 75870.html

I've posted this before....but I think its fundamental to understanding the depth and scope of the economic issues at hand...
THE Most Important Chart of the CENTURY

The latest U.S. Treasury Z1 Flow of Funds report was released on March 11, 2010, bringing the data current through the end of 2009. What follows is the most important chart of your lifetime. It relegates almost all modern economists and economic theory to the dustbin of history. Any economic theory, formula, or relationship that does not consider this non-linear relationship of DEBT and phase transition is destined to fail.

It explains the "jobless" recoveries of the past and how each recent economic cycle produces higher money figures, yet lower employment. It explains why we are seeing debt driven events that circle the globe. It explains the psychological uneasiness that underpins this point in history, the elephant in the room that nobody sees or can describe.

This is a very simple chart. It takes the change in GDP and divides it by the change in Debt. What it shows is how much productivity is gained by infusing $1 of debt into our debt backed money system.

Back in the early 1960s a dollar of new debt added almost a dollar to the nation’s output of goods and services. As more debt enters the system the productivity gained by new debt diminishes. This produced a path that was following a diminishing line targeting ZERO in the year 2015. This meant that we could expect that each new dollar of debt added in the year 2015 would add NOTHING to our productivity.

Then a funny thing happened along the way. Macroeconomic DEBT SATURATION occurred causing a phase transition with our debt relationship. This is because total income can no longer support total debt. In the third quarter of 2009 each dollar of debt added produced NEGATIVE 15 cents of productivity, and at the end of 2009, each dollar of new debt now SUBTRACTS 45 cents from GDP!


This is mathematical PROOF that debt saturation has occurred. Continuing to add debt into a saturated system, where all money is debt, leads only to future defaults and to higher unemployment.

This is the dilemma created by our top down debt backed money structure. Because all money is backed by a liability, and carries interest, it guarantees mathematically that there will be losers and that the system will eventually reach the natural limits, the ability of incomes to service debt.

The data for the diminishing productivity of debt chart comes from the U.S. Treasury’s latest Z1 data, the complete report is posted below:
http://economicedge.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... ntury.html
Bold and Underline mine

Here's some more in depth analysis on the piece above...
There were a lot of people who understood the premise of the chart and its implications and meaning in perspective to history. Then again it was obvious that it left others bewildered and looking for more answers. This article is an attempt to reach both upwards into the higher levels of thinking, and yet also an attempt to explain what’s happening on a more rudimentary level so that more people understand how this chart is made and what in the world it means.

Let me begin by stating that the use of the term “Chart of the Century” in the title was very purposeful. It’s meaning, though, could be read several ways. Some people interpreted that to mean that I meant “of the 21st Century,” while others thought of the past 100 years. I mean both. And I stand by the claim that this chart, when fully understood, debunks modern economic theory; it is the result of the very misguided Federal Reserve Act that was passed into law in the year 1913, almost exactly one century ago. The outcome of what happens will be the greatest influence on what occurs in the 21st century. I do not believe this to be hyperbole.

Those who have studied economics, monetary systems, and history know that the major events of history are almost always preceded by economic upheaval and usually by collapses in credit or in monetary systems themselves. To see this picture for yourself, simply look at what events preceded within one decade WWII, WWI, the Revolutionary War, the War of Independence, and then keep on going back in time looking in the decade prior to major events throughout history, all the way back to the fall of the Roman Empire. The events wind up in history books, but the underlying tensions, the root causes are often overlooked.

Is it simply coincidence that there was a credit bubble of massive proportions in the “Roaring Twenties” that led to an economic collapse and Great Depression in the 30’s? And that that collapse was followed in the next decade by WWII? Why is that pattern repeated time and again? If you can dive deeply enough into this chart, you will discover the WHY and the WHO.

The math doesn’t lie. The math of debt-backed money doesn’t work, and the Diminishing Returns chart reflects this. In my previous article I said that the chart was a very simple one, and it is. Understanding the calculation and grasping the concept is obviously more difficult, so I invited Chris Rupe, who actually performs the calculation and builds the basic chart following the formula developed by Legg-Mason, to take a shot at explaining the calculations for those wanting a more in-depth understanding.

Lost? Hang on, normally I write for the middle, here we are going to cover a wide path. I will add more of what I believe to be common sense explanations afterwards…

Chris Rupe - My Thoughts on the Diminishing Productivity of Debt

Recently, I shared this graph with Nathan Martin and he has since made it famous. It has been showing up on dozens of other blogs (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here for example) and there are continuing questions as to the source of the data as well as the methodology used to calculate it.

The data sources are the Federal Reserve Z.1 Report, specifically, the Total Credit Market Debt figure and the annualized quarterly Nominal GDP number from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. I was sort of the progenitor of resuscitating this graph according to the original Legg Mason format and methodology.

Total Credit Market Debt includes all public debt (federal, state, local) and private debt (mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, etc.). It does NOT include the unfunded public liabilities such as Social Security, Medicare, etc.

Since I have the dataset, and have been compiling and thinking about it for a year and a half, I feel compelled to give my opinion on what I think it means.

The chart is not hard to reproduce, although a bit tedious.

The specific methodology is simply a 4 quarter moving average of (GDP(t) – GDP(t-4))/(Debt(t)-Debt(t-4)), where ‘t’ is in reference to the quarter in question.

That in and of itself isn’t so tedious, however, quarterly data disappears once you go back a few years and all you have left is annual data. So, you have to do a linear interpolation between each of the annual datapoints in order to generate the quarterly data. Incidentally, if you want to get rid of the simple moving average, you of course get a noisier chart with a deeper plunge:

The plunge goes to -0.91. So, that’s really all there is to the method, although there are a number of other ways you can calculate and plot a chart to get the gist of what is occurring here.

For example, Karl Denninger has also done a version of this chart on his own with his “Ponzi Finance Indicator Chart”:

Karl’s chart has some advantages over the other presentation. For example, I believe Karl’s chart uses a year over year % change format for his data rather than a year minus year format. Thus, his chart is not as susceptible to the problem of dividing by very small (close to zero) numbers that the other chart is. Indeed, if you go back in time far enough (I have this data back to 1916) this problem occurs more than once.

Now, there has been some debate as to the significance of this chart. Some think it is not very significant since it is recognized that if either the numerator OR the denominator goes negative, then the chart goes negative. If both are negative, then the chart yields a positive number. Others think that correlation is not causation w/r/t the impact of debt on GDP. Obviously, some think it is very significant. Nathan Martin referred to it as the ‘Chart of the Century’.

I agree with the detractors insofar as this is not a perfect metric of our predicament. GDP, for example, is kind of a fuzzy number. Not just because of tabulation games the government plays along with the constant revisions, but because GDP doesn’t even have a universal definition. Different countries calculate GDP in different ways.

I flatly disagree that debt and GDP are not correlated. Indeed, I view this chart as a measure of the Marginal Velocity of Debt in the economy. I have referred to it as such before. In this view, Total Credit Market Debt is synonymous with the Total Money Supply. All money is debt, and this debt has value and has varying degrees of liquidity. To the extent that debt loses it’s value or becomes totally illiquid (Home Equity Loans anyone?) it ceases to be money. To the extent that debt is paid back or is defaulted on, money supply shrinks!

This is an unconventional view of money. There would be howls of protest against this view ranging from mainstream (keynesian/monetarist) economists to the austrian economists. Gary North might disclaim me.

However, I have never liked any of the monetary statistics as compiled and named, M0, M1, M2, MZM, etc. I find them too narrowly focused on the liability side of U.S. bank balance sheets. A lot of money is missing in that view. Much of it is obscured by multiplier effects due to the advent of off-balance sheet entities. Some is not counted. Cash held by foreign central banks for example.

The way I see it, all loans must be originated by U.S. banks whether or not they are held on or off balance sheet. This is a distinctly asset side of bank balance sheet view of money. And ALL of this money is accounted for in the Federal Reserve Z.1 as Total Credit Market Debt. So, I have sometimes referred to this statistic as ‘Mtotal’.

This velocity measure thus follows the familiar equation of exchange: Velocity = GDP/(Money Supply) and Marginal Velocity = Delta(GDP)/Delta(Money Supply). Not just correlated, but plain old related as can be seen.

My own view overall is that the chart indicates (however imperfectly) that something significant has occurred. Indeed, nothing like it in 65 years. Anyone can check the Z.1 history and see that Total Credit Market Debt has never had a year over year decline in the postwar era.

Until now.

I view it as confirmatory (in our unique circumstances) that we have ‘hit The Wall’ with the amount of debt that the economy can carry (debt saturation). Politicians and policy makers have been able to keep the game going by continually and incrementally debauching lending standards.

Think about it this way. A large reason why we have emerged from every postwar recession and renewed the credit cycle to grow to ever greater heights is because the policy response has been to allow, nay, promote the decay of lending standards.

* In the ’60s you had to have a 20% downpayment. PMI applied to tiny fraction of mortgage loans. Credit cards required either a security deposit or were secured by a savings account. The point is, they had some kind of collateral.

* In the ’70s, PMI grew, especially encouraged by policies like the CRA

* After the early ’80s recession, Usury laws began to go away so credit cards eliminated their collateral requirements now that they could charge very high interest rates. Also, the law was changed to take Social Security surpluses and use them to buy government debt. This effectively lowered the lending standards to the government since they now had a guaranteed buyer. Incidentally, this change plus the continued growth in credit set up a feedback loop to artificially lower rates on Treasury securities.

* After the ‘91 recession, reserve requirements on most bank accounts were eliminated and Adjustable Rate Mortgages began to really grow as a % of home loans. FICO scores were developed in lieu of having any actual collateral for loans. Credit cards were now given away freely to any college kid with no job. Banks begin to financially innovate ways to originate loans but package them into off-balance sheet trusts which are sold, not counting against their capital requirements.

* After the 2001 recession, the gloves come off and anyone can get a loan for anything, no downpayments, bad FICO score, no job. Sometimes the bank will even loan more than the asset is priced at.

In this way, the policy makers took down the artificial barriers (read safety net) of prudence in lending because no politician wants to deal with a nasty recession or perhaps fewer campaign contributions from Wall Street. So, we eventually reached the point where there were simply no safety nets left and all that remained was ‘The Wall’. You just can’t stuff anymore credit into the system.

We have crashed into the wall.

Marginal Velocity has collapsed.


For the rocket scientists in the audience who really want to understand the exact numbers and calculations, Chris started a thread on Ticker Forum where he walks people through the calculation and shows how the numbers become negative – Ticker Forum posts on Diminishing Returns Chart.

What Chris is describing in his bullet points above is “how to build a massive credit bubble.” Look at the second chart, the unsmoothed version, and see just how bad the math was at the end of 2009. While you’re up there looking over those charts, note how ever since the post WWII era that the productivity of debt has been diminishing the entire time, producing lower high after lower high. This reflects the anchor of carrying ever increasing amounts of debt.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 placed our nation, and then rapidly the world, into a debt-backed money box. Since that time the world’s productive efforts have been siphoned off in ever increasing amounts as the chains of debt-backed money began to bite harder and harder. The math of debt grew exponentially since that time. We transitioned from working with millions, to billions, and now trillions. No monetary system and economy has ever successfully made it to the next higher level. It’s literally impossible to because incomes have not grown at nearly the same rate. It requires income to service debt, and once you have pulled all your future earnings into today, it’s impossible to pull even more forward. That’s where we are today on the macroeconomic level. Income cannot service existing debt.

Yes, the numbers have been negative before and they have snapped back to produce a lower high. This chart will most likely make a turn back upwards, however, it is very likely to make yet another lower high. How long can the cycles continue? Not too much longer, once in the parabolic growth phase, the crush of the math happens quickly. It is non-linear and thus events that seem to come quicker are actually occurring quicker, that is an expression of the exponential function as is the chart below. Crazy and before unheard of swings in the market? A symptom. Riots in Greece? A symptom. No more mail service on Saturdays? A symptom. Massive underemployment? A symptom. The central bankers at the IMF “rescuing” countries with debt? A root cause.

The PRIVATELY owned and controlled central banks place everyone and every nation into a debt backed money box and an impossible math situation that drains the productive efforts from the societies placed into that box.
To understand how that FACT is related to the diminishing returns chart, let’s examine three different rooms – A, B, and C.

In each room there are exactly 10 people: 1) A construction firm owner, 2) a hardware store owner, 3) a carpenter, 4) a restaurant owner, 5) a chef, 6) a school teacher, 7) clerk for the Hardware store, 8) a waitress for the restaurant, 9) a barber, and 10) a poodle – hey, dogs are people too and mine drives an entire economy all on his own!

In Room A, we are going to create an environment where there is no debt – zero. Then we are going to introduce an eleventh person who enters the room and hires the construction firm to build a house for $15,000 (think 1950’s). Thus new money enters the room.

The Construction firm owner is thrilled, he immediately turns to the hardware store owner placing a large initial order for supplies, he hires the carpenter who now has money to get something to eat at the restaurant. He in turn tips the waitress, and so on, right on through their little economy. Since there is no debt, the amount of money only decreases on each transaction as taxes are taken from it. Otherwise the rest of the money circulates creating what is termed “velocity.”

In that very simple example, it is easy to see how increasing taxes decreases velocity. What if the first transaction was taxed at the rate of 100%? Then the velocity would be zero as no money would pass to the first set of hands. What if there were NO taxes? Then there would be no friction and the money would continue to circulate around the room.

In Room B, we create an environment where the ten people in the room all possess an amount of debt to service that equals say 20% of their income. The eleventh person enters the room and hires the construction firm owner under the same terms. He passes $15,000 to the construction firm owner who, being 20% of his income in debt must immediately send $3,000 to the bank to service his prior existing debt. Thus $3,000 exits the room, leaving $12,000. He makes a deposit to the hardware store owner who also must send 20% of what he just took in to the bank, plus he must pay taxes. You can see where this is going… Duh, it’s only common sense, right? Of the money injected, the PRODUCTIVITY of the money is diminished, and by the time it filters down, there may not be enough left for the poor poodle who is likely going to go hungry.

In Room C, we take it to the other extreme where everyone in the room owes 100% or more of their income in debt. The eleventh person enters the room and hires the construction firm owner who owes so much of his income to the bank that when handed the $15,000 he MUST use it to make a payment on his debt with the bank. The $15,000 thus immediately leaves the room, no money makes it to the carpenter or anyone else, and everyone in the room subsequently goes hungry. It doesn’t matter how much money you pour into this room, debt will always outpace incomes. There is thus no economy. Money/ debt is created and it simply circles right back around to the bank.

Obviously this is an extreme. But let’s say that the room reaches a point that’s in-between room B and room C, say 70% of income in the room is used to service debt. Then let’s say that the Construction firm owner takes out a big loan. If the size of his income fails to increase to service the increased debt load, then it places greater strain on the velocity of the new money that enters the room and it affects not only him, but everybody in the room. In fact, if he takes on too much unserviceable debt, he may have to lay workers off, especially if his income falls. Macroeconomic debt saturation occurs well before it reaches 100% debt to income. Once you cross that fine line then adding more debt into the system results in insolvency and also in lower employment.

This is why in the 1940s, the nation only 30 years past the Federal Reserve Act, was able to generate a recovery without the quantity of money exploding into an exponential growth phase. Here we are nearly a century past and we are living through an explosive exponential money growth phase.

Remember, the Central Bankers created a system in which all money is backed by a liability. We’ll get back to that (why, who).

Okay, so now you get the picture, the Marginal Productivity of Debt is really a tale about the marginal velocity of debt. Debt is money. Economists don’t talk about the velocity of debt, they talk about the velocity of money. They have charts and formulas that work pretty well in room A and even in room B. But where they fail miserably is approaching room C – the room where debt saturation has occurred.

This is because their way of thinking, whatever you call it – Keynesianism, neo-modern economics, deficit spending, stimulus, deficits don’t matter, must get credit flowing, solving a debt problem with debt, lunacy, insanity, whatever – is simply erroneous and does not work in a 100% debt-backed money system. Modern economist’s calculations for the velocity of money, for example, do not take into account the very mechanical action that is plain to see happening in the rooms above. They have failed to take out their basic calculators and add up all the debts to see what level of saturation has occurred throughout the entire room.

When we examine an individual’s creditworthiness, for say an automobile loan, in the olden days of lore the credit industry used to examine individual’s debt-to-income ratio to ensure that a typical level of say 33% or less of a person’s income was being spent on debt. Then it became 38%, then 40%, and now what? Well, these ratios are typically calculated using gross incomes, not net. But wait, over the decades local governments grew, state governments grew, the Federal Government became a behemoth. To feed these governments, taxes grew. But taxes have the exact same effect as debt on the economy. That’s because they are a debt!!

When your state decides to build a bridge or a school, it will either finance it directly with a tax levy, or it will finance it with bonds that come from the very same central banks that lend money to our Federal Government. They issue bonds from nothing creating new credit money that did not previously exist (no productive effort). The people in the state are thus being indebted by their state, and it is their productive ability that is required to service the state’s debts. Thus the same people who are in debt for their homes, their cars, their credit cards, are also in debt to their city, their county, their state and to their federal government. The total burden of all those debts and obligations now stands well over $300,000 per man woman and child, nearly 750,000 per worker in America and it is growing very rapidly with new burdens such as the latest “healthcare” bill.

This bond and debt money system was developed for the benefit of the Central Banks, not the people. They profit from interest and fees for the use of the people’s money system – that is the WHY. Congress did not constitutionally have the power to assign that right away, but it was done regardless and the Judicial system is co-opted by the same money influence removing the check and balance designed into the system. If our nation were to go back to spending non debt-backed money into existence instead, the American public would not be burdened with the carrying costs of all that debt. This is the WHO part of the equation, and why what is more important than WHAT backs your money is who controls it. This saturation would not happen if the United States issued her own sovereign money, created as an asset, not a liability
.


The Diminishing Productivity Chart is a very useful tool to gauge the level of saturation inside a country. All countries should develop and track this metric. We need good data to make that happen and I would like to point out that I believe the situation is actually much worse in the U.S. than even that chart shows due to the inaccuracies in the way our own GDP is calculated. In fact, if the effects of speculative derivatives and mark-to-fantasy accounting were removed from our financial industry, GDP would plummet back to the reality that it should reflect.

There are other very simple metrics that can and should be measured to track debt ratios but they are not. One method is to calculate an overall debt to income ratio for the mean working American. The $52 Trillion Z1 figure (what Chris referred to as MTotal) divided by our working population (140 million) equals $371,000 of total system credit per worker, not counting future liabilities. what does the median worker over the age of 25 earn? $32,000 is all. That leaves the amount of credit per worker to service at 1,160% of income... is all, not counting future liabilites. Can he even keep up with the interest? Of course not, it's ridiculous and that metric should have never been allowed to get so out of control.

If you don’t wish to reside, or for your children to reside, in room C or in a debt-backed money box, then please visit SwarmUSA.com, register and participate in the Swarms. It’s completely possible to step outside of the box in which we have been forced to live, and it’s possible to avoid the events which history says may be coming.
http://economicedge.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... rtant.html
Curve Flattening Continues: 2s10s Now Under 240 bps

The most ominous sign for US bank P&L continues to not relent: the 2s10s curve, which is the primary source of "revenue" for the hedge funds formerly known as US banks until a bunch of idiots came along and repealed Glass-Steagall, has just gone inside 240 bps. As before, we view this as the primary margin call threat, as billions, if not trillions, of wrong-way bets on curve steepening move further out of the money with every passing basis point. Once the first major repo counterparty blinks and demands a trand unwind, this trade will snap and we could see an even faster flattening, which would lead to some scary consequences for every other asset class.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/curve- ... er-240-bps
Former CIA Officials Admit To Faking Bin Laden Video

Stein’s sources told him that during planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a fake video of Saddam Hussein engaged in sexual acts with a teenage boy, then flooding Iraq with copies of the tape.

That idea, along with faking Iraqi news bulletins, never came to fruition according to the former CIA officials, because agreement on the projects could not be reached between the Iraq Group and CIA’s Office of Technical Services.

However, the two sources reveal that the agency did previously concoct at least one fake Bin Laden video:

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

The former officials told Stein that the project was taken over by the military after it ground to a halt:

The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.

“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.

This latest revelation bolsters evidence that the intelligence agencies, and perhaps more significantly, the military have been engaged in creating fake Bin Laden videos in the past.

As we have exhaustively documented, Intelcenter, the U.S. monitoring group that routinely releases Bin Laden video and audio, much of which have been proven to be either rehashed old footage or outright fakes, is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, a web security company that monitors intelligence from the middle east.

IDEFENSE is heavily populated by long serving ex military intelligence officials, such as senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who served 16 years in the US army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in psychological operations. Melnick has also worked directly for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Intelcenter notoriously released the “laughing hijackers” tape and claimed it was an Al-Qaeda video, despite the fact that the footage was obtained by a “security agency” at a 2000 Bin Laden speech.
http://www.infowars.com/former-cia-offi ... den-video/

CIA unit's wacky idea: Depict Saddam as gay
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk ... _to_d.html

Warning: Crash dead ahead. Sell. Get liquid. Now.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/crash- ... 2010-05-25
In Standoff With Environmental Officials, BP Stays With an Oil Spill Dispersant

The Environmental Protection Agency had set a Sunday night deadline for BP to stop using two dispersants from the Corexit line of products. The oil company has defended its use of Corexit and taken issue with the methods the agency used to estimate its toxicity.

At a news conference Monday, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said that she was “dissatisfied with BP’s response” and had ordered the oil giant to take “immediate steps to scale back the use of dispersants.”

Ms. Jackson called BP’s safety data on dispersants insufficient and said government scientists would conduct their own tests to decide which dispersant was best to use. She said the amount of chemicals applied to control the oil spilling from the Deepwater Horizon well — more than 700,000 gallons so far on the gulf’s surface and a mile underwater at the leaking well head — was “approaching a world record.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/scien ... perse.html

Renaissance 2.0: Lesson 2 - Revisiting Economics 101 - Debt
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGTBkNJ8 ... r_embedded

America Passes $13 Trillion In Debt
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/americ ... llion-debt

Why Is BP Controlling Louisiana’s Cops?
http://washingtonindependent.com/85648/ ... ianas-cops

Jamaica Declares State of Emergency After Obama Demands Arrest of “Robin Hood” Drug Lord
http://www.infowars.com/jamaica-declare ... drug-lord/

Obama to Send 1,200 Guard Troops to Mexico Border
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/26/us/26border.html

Home Prices Decline 3.1% in First Quarter, FHFA Says (Update1)
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-0 ... ate1-.html

Israel building concentration camp for Freedom Flotilla crew
http://deadlinelive.info/2010/05/25/isr ... illa-crew/

Taxpayer Funded Terrorism
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37151

As Greece Suffers More Strikes Liberals Should Watch Closely
http://biggovernment.com/bschaeffer/201 ... ernment%29

Oil reaches Louisiana shores
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/0 ... hores.html

....Is it just me....or are things really starting to heat up at multiple angles....natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanoes, severe/odd weather), man made disasters (disease, food disorder/malfunctions, oil spill), economic (Europe, states, China, Japan), military (North Korea, Iran, Mexico, Afghanistan, Iraq)??????

Re: Blipits

Posted: May 26th, 2010, 2:00 pm
by Jason
UK gov't discloses size of its nuclear stockpile
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100526/ap_ ... in_nuclear

Why Housing Has Another Leg Down
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/why-ho ... r-leg-down
The EURJPY has now pushed back below the 110 support even as stocks, which nobody except a few computers, trades any more, fight tooth and nail to give the impression there is buying interest. Hopefully, readers have been prudent enough to stay out of the market since when it broke down terminally, some time in April of 2009, and ridiculous equity moves such as today's will not matter. What should matter, is the ongoing flatenning in the 2s10s, which, as we have claimed previously, is a far more troubling phenomenon, and indicates that between the unending FX carry unwinds, and the Treasury steepener selloffs, liquidations are continuing. That these are not spilling over into the now completely irrelevant stock class is not at all important: stocks are now just for administrative window dressing, and to push the Obama propaganda just how good the economy is, which as everyone knows, is a massive lie.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/market ... ng-further

Is China Preparing To Divest Its $630 Billion In Eurozone Bond Holdings?
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/china- ... d-holdings

...I wish China the best of luck in finding somewhere safe to stick their money!
And for those with more than a one-day, or one milisecond investment horizon, Farrell sees a new crash as "imminent, worse than 2008"

More proof: Earlier economist Gary Shilling said price-to-earnings ratios are at a "nosebleed 22.5 level." The Dow was around 11,000. Money manager Jeremy Grantham recently said the market's overvalued 40%. That could mean a collapse to 6,600. Last week in Reuters' "Markets Could Be Derailed Again," George Soros echoed a "game over" warning with a "stark warning ... that the financial world is on the wrong track and that we may be hurtling towards an even bigger boom and bust than in the credit crisis."

Now Dow Theory's Richard Russell is warning the public of an imminent crash: "Sell ... get liquid ... by the end of this year they won't recognize the country."

A bigger meltdown than the credit crisis? Yes, Bush's team drove America into a ditch. But now Obama and his money men, Summers, Geithner, Bernanke, are digging the hole deeper. Soros says we have not learned "the lessons that markets are inherently unstable." As a result, "the success in bailing out the system on the previous occasion led to a super-bubble." Now "we are facing a yet larger bubble." Worse than 2008?

Yes, the game may be "in the refrigerator," the lights will go out, but as Soros hints, the electricity may get turned off too. Get it? This may not be a correction. Not even a bear. What's coming could be worse than the 2000 dot-com crash and the 2008 meltdown combined, a "Super-Bubble" says Soros. And the biggest reason, Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm tell Newsweek, is that "the president's half-measures won't fix our failed financial system" because he refuses to "bust up the too-big-to-fail banks."

It gets worse: what is about to come upon us is not just a new crash, it is the Great Depression II, it is the end of capitalism.

So please listen closely: All the TARP bailouts, stimulus debt and Fed loans won't work. Neither will a new conservative government. This is not a basketball game. We are not channeling Chick Hearn, calling this game before the final buzzer. While we prefer the illusion that "this time really is different," eight centuries of history suggest otherwise:

"The lesson of history, then, is that even as institutions and policy makers improve there will always be a temptation to stretch the limits. ... If there is one common theme to the vast range of crises ... it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether it be by the government, banks, corporations, or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom. ... Highly indebted governments, banks, or corporations can seem to be merrily rolling along for an extended period, when bang -- confidence collapses, lenders disappear and a crisis hits. ... Highly leveraged economies ... seldom survive forever ... history does point to warnings signs that policy makers can look to access risk -- if only they do not become too drunk with their credit bubble-fueled success and say, as their predecessors have for centuries, 'This time is different'."

No, "this time" it's never different. Get it? In the end, it doesn't matter what happens to the Dodd-Obama financial reforms. The endgame's never a Black Swan, it's a very White Swan well known to historians -- guaranteed, inevitable and inescapable. This time is never different.

The clock's flashing. Huge point spread. Think bear, think crash, think end of capitalism, think Great Depression II ... This is no buying opportunity, this game's in the refrigerator, call it.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/paul-f ... i-imminent

Latin America and the Caribbean: Illicit Drug Trafficking and U.S. Counterdrug Programs
http://info.publicintelligence.net/R41215.pdf

ExxonMobil Brief: Dispersants, Corexit in Oil Spill Response
http://info.publicintelligence.net/Disp ... istory.pdf

Top Construction Firm: WTC Destroyed By Controlled Demolition
http://www.infowars.com/top-constructio ... emolition/

James Carville Slams Obama on Oil Spill: ‘We’re About to Die Down Here!’
http://deadlinelive.info/2010/05/26/jam ... down-here/
BP-owned Alaska oil pipeline shut after spill

(Reuters) - The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, partly owned by BP, shut down on Tuesday after spilling several thousand barrels of crude oil into backup containers, drastically cutting supply down the main artery between refineries and Alaska's oilfields.

The accident comes at a difficult time for BP -- the largest single owner of the pipeline operator, holding 47 percent -- as it struggles to plug a gushing Gulf of Mexico oil well.

The shutdown followed a series of mishaps that resulted from a scheduled fire-command system test at Pump Station 9, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks, said Alyeska Pipeline Service Co, the operator of the 800-mile oil line.

The power outage triggered opening of relief valves, causing an unspecified volume of crude oil to overflow a storage tank into a secondary containment. There were no injuries, but the approximately 40 people at the work site were evacuated, Alyeska spokeswoman Michele Egan said.

North Slope oil producers have cut their flow into the pipeline's Prudhoe Bay intake station to 16 percent of their normal rates, Egan said. There is enough storage capacity to allow the line to be shut down for 48 hours as long as producers maintain the 16 percent flow rate, she said.

It is unclear how long the shutdown will last.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6 ... mesticNews
UPDATE 3-BP-owned Alaska oil pipeline shut after spill

* 800-mile pipeline from Alaska's oilfields closed

* Pipeline part-owned by BP

* Producers cutting output to 16 pct of normal (Adds background on importance of pipeline)
http://in.reuters.com/article/governmen ... 26?sp=true

Haitian Farmers to Burn Donated Monsanto Hybrid Seed
http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/food ... haiti-pro/

New 5.56 ammo used sparingly in combat
http://militarytimes.com/news/2010/05/m ... t_052410w/

Obama Continues to Bully Iran
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/05/obama ... ully-iran/

Afghans Believe US is Funding Taliban - "The US has an interest in prolonging the conflict"
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... leId=19340

Despite Soaring National Debt, Congress Goes on Spending Spree
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05 ... ing-spree/

Is North Korea on the Verge of Collapse?
http://oilprice.com/Geo-Politics/Asia/I ... lapse.html

The Greek Bailout's Two Secret Exit Clauses: Why Europe Is Now Cheering For Its Own Demise
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/greek- ... own-demise

Rothschilds Engineer Fire Sale Of UK Infrastructure To Offshore Corporations
http://www.prisonplanet.com/rothschilds ... tions.html

October Surprise: Rahm Emanuel Goes to Jail for Obama
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37191
Whistleblower gets 20 months in prison

The Obama administration’s crackdown on leaks to the press has snared a high-profile conviction of an FBI linguist, who was sentenced to 20 months in prison Monday after pleading guilty to giving classified information to a blogger.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/05 ... z0p4C4Q0eg

RFID chip implanted into man gets computer virus
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10159315.stm
PROVIDENCE — Thousands of Rhode Island income-tax refunds are being delayed longer than previously reported because of state cash-flow problems.

Overall, the state has delayed payment of about 53,000 individual income-tax refunds — totaling about $36.3 million — to make sure it has enough money to pay off state borrowings that come due in June, said Paul L. Dion, chief of the state Office of Revenue Analysis.
http://www.projo.com/news/content/tax_r ... 1d9b9.html

Ky. House passes $17.1 billion state budget that would avert partial government shutdown
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets ... =D9FUMK280

This week's announcement that Oregon's state budget has a $560 million hole in it is drawing shock and dismay from agency directors and school leaders Wednesday.
http://news.opb.org/article/7439-oregon ... dget-cuts/

Obama’s ‘Empathy for Sexual Sadists’ Judge
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37173

What Will They Think of Next? DARPA's "Malintent" Machines
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/

10 Shocking Facts About The Unprecedented Environmental Horror In The Gulf Of Mexico
http://howtohelpsavetheenvironment.com/ ... -of-mexico

This is video 'BP does not want you to see'
http://blogs.tampabay.com/talk/2010/05/ ... o-see.html

More Reports of Illness Emerge Among Gulf Cleanup Workers
http://www.propublica.org/ion/blog/item ... kers#15128

US sets up missiles near Russian border
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 81968.html

New Home Prices: Median Lowest since 2003
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29

MBA: Mortgage Purchase Applications at 13 Year Low
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/ ... ed+Risk%29
The housing market is sick. At least that is what is being said by David Stevens who is the FHA agency head. FHA insured loans have been an enormous problem and it is simply another wreck coming down the highway. The reason FHA loans are problematic is that they rely on an absurdly low down payment. Most can get by with 3.5% down payment and contrary to housing cheerleaders, most people purchase with as little as possible if they go with FHA insured loans. After all, if you had 20 percent down why would you want to take on a loan that had added monthly costs including PMI? But this is where the housing market is today. In fact, probably for the first time in history FHA insured loans were a bigger part of the market than dubious Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

For the first quarter of 2010, FHA insured loans backed $52.5 billion in home mortgages while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac combined backed $46 billion. This made up 95% of the entire mortgage market. So much for banks lending out their “own” money (which is our bailout money) and having faith in the American consumer:

Most recent data shows the “serious default” rate up to 9 percent. This is extraordinarily high. This is a market that averaged between 0.5 percent and 2 percent for nearly 50 years and we are still near peak levels of distress. Yet what do we do with this information? Instead of address the obvious problems, we step on the gas and decide to rely on these government backed agencies to do the dirty work of the banking industry. It is the perfect silo structure.
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/fha- ... e+SoCal%29

Treasury Auction Schedule for the Week of May 24, 2010
http://treasuryauctionwatch.blogspot.co ... of_23.html

FDA probes hundreds of problems with J&J medicines - 775 reported complications, hundreds more since recall
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2618470020100526

"What in the World are They Spraying?" - Official Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te_FOsKL ... r_embedded