THE WASHINGTON PEST

Year by Year, Casualties Climb in Afghanistan

2006-01-01T16:53:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

America and the world were united in the concept of running down bin Laden and capturing him. But then, we changed our minds (Bush always was against going after bin Laden) and joined sides in an Afghani civil war. The allowed the creator of Bush's Trifecta Win to easily escape. Now, after an easy victory over barely armed peasants, we are now bogged down in an increasingly vicious war with these peasants who now idolize bin Laden as the Desert Fox of Muslim warfare.

From the London Times:

BRITISH troops set to deploy to southern Afghanistan this spring could sustain losses on a scale not seen since the Falklands war, military intelligence officers have warned.
They say insurgent forces in the south are preparing for a large offensive by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, backed by sophisticated weapons and training from Iran.

The warnings follow an increase in fighting in southern Afghanistan over the past year. Several thousand people, including about 100 US soldiers, have been killed.

The insurgents regard the withdrawal of 2,000 US troops as a key victory and are expected to press home their advantage against the British-led Nato force.

This has got to be the biggest fiasco in military history. A very lightly armed man with no navy, no army, no airforce, successfully attacks the world's biggest empire, stabbing it right in the center of the heart, destroys part of the central command as well as a good slice of the finacial district of this empire, then bogs them down in a futile war they can't win in a place made famous for the last 6,000+ years as a nearly impossible place to hold, militarily: Afghanistan.

Like the Euphrates Valley cul-de-sac, another famous graveyard of empires, this place is very easy to enter and very hard to leave. Ask Alexander the Great. This is why reading history like recent news stories from the 1980s would have paid off, no? Indeed, the author of the tactics of this great military disaster, Rumsfeld, has no excuse in all this, he was around, running the military, during the eighties!

Indeed, the GOP and the neocon neonazis running the Pentagon applauded bin Laden's tactics in the eighties to bog down the Soviet State in Afghanistan in an unpopular and futile war! Bingo!

So what is Rummy's excuse? He can't claim ignorance or out of the loop. Ditto Bush and his dad. And the neocons.

Actually, none of them wanted to go to Afghanistan, they wanted to run off to the Euphrates cul-de-sac and get trapped there. The truth about 9/11 forced them to go after bin Laden and they did this with singular lack of energy, brio or enthusiasm. They brought in a pitiful few troops, dropped bombs on peasants all over the place and when faced with a real battle with some battle hardened but barely armed insurgents, belly flopped badly, unable to take any real hand to hand combat. At least, not with real fighters.

Chemical bombing barely armed civilians in Fallujah, ah! That was sweet. Even they did inflict some real casualties on us. But we bested them...only to lose all of Iraq, of course.

I remember the Tora Bora battle which we lost 100%. The Pentagon crowed that it was "the Perfect Victory" and I quipped, "For bin Laden!" And it wasn't a joke. Bin Laden was quite proud of his generalship. Heck, his strategy and tactics are on the same level as Hannibal! And look how famous he is! 2200 year ago!

Bin Laden hasn't brought any elephants over the Rockies to invade Kansas but he doesn't have to since the bellowing elephant herd of GOPers are doing a perfectly splendid job, destroying America's power.

Gads.

Meanwhile, the war against Al Jazeera filming our many defeats and stupidities rages on. From the NYT:

U.S. forces in Afghanistan have arrested the Kabul correspondent of the Arab television station Al Jazeera along with his driver and cameraman, the station said on Sunday.

Well, bin Laden is slippery and devious but we sure can corner those pesky cameramen! Our rage at them is part of why we are losing. The Muslims have witnesses watching our depraved misadventures and every time we attack their watchers, al Jazeera tells everyone about it and the Muslims hate us even more. The idea that we be nice to the news media and not plot to murder them doesn't occur to Bush but then, remember the anthrax killer who went after only Bush's enemies, especially the media!

You know, Bush would become murderous if the media attacks him much more.

Anyway, the al Jazeera crew filmed stuff that annoyed us. We claimed it was a security breech as if Bin Laden is watching cable in his cave and says, "Hey, look, that huge American air base is in Kalahandra! Wow! Thanks for showing me!" Yeah, right.

Like, the guerrilla warriors are all couch potatoes. Sort of like you-know-who! And where are all those American volunteers who wanted bin Laden, dead or alive? Eh?

Home, Chaunteroy.
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Market Analysts Want American Jobs Sent Overseas to Drop Interest Rates

2006-01-01T13:06:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Wall Street pundits celebrate loss of American jobs. They say, getting cheap loans is most important and to do this, we need to export jobs, thus reducing inflation. This vicious cycle is what is killing America.

From Yahoo:

After a volatile 2005 and meager returns to show for it, investors are hoping 2006 will bring better fortunes. And if there's good news next week, the new year could get off to a good start.

Last January, stocks tumbled after an impressive December rally. Word that the Federal Reserve would continue hiking interest rates, combined with mediocre jobs figures, worried investors considerably. The Standard & Poor's 500 dropped 2 percent in the first two trading days of 2005.

Yet this year could be far different. First of all, there was no real December rally, so it's safe to say stocks aren't overbought. Second, the Fed has signaled that it's closer to ending its regime of rate hikes. That could be reinforced Tuesday as the Fed releases the minutes of its Dec. 13 meeting.

Good news is, stocks were flat last year so this year has to be better? How's that possible? Assuming that years alternate in good and bad isn't a smart way to think. Markets can go and do go sour for multiple years at a time!

Friday's jobs data from the Labor Department will be the key to determining whether January 2006 is anything like January 2005. Economists estimate the economy will have created 200,000 jobs in December, down slightly from 215,000 in November. A lower-than-expected number, if not sharply lower, could actually boost stocks, since fewer new jobs would mean fewer wages and less of a chance for inflation to take hold.

Read that carefully. What it means is, if we export high paying jobs to other countries with lower cost of living/cheaper wages/ worse working conditions, we can end inflation here since no one can strike for better wages or demand higher pay! If anyone does strike, the factory closes and moves to China!

So the entire force of energy inflation will be beaten out of the American worker's hide! Too many workers unemployed means the economy goes south for the winter, too, so the calibration Greenspan and his spawn, Bernarke, have to make is "how many jobs dare we send to China and India before it hurts us directly?"

You see, if it hurts you and me, this is OK. Hurts them and their rich buddies, nope. Has to be dealt with, pronto!

Why a democracy has rigged up such a traitorous system baffles me. But then, American workers, trained in a lifetime of propaganda, can't figure out the obvious: they have been betrayed. The new immigration laws Congress is trying to pass penalizes anyone who gives legal or medical help to illegal aliens by putting them in prison for five years, a harsh penalty.

But there is no prison for businesses like Walmart, for hiring these people. For they are another important inflation sink. They compress all the price hikes downwards, both by undercutting the bidding for jobs by legal Americans and by flooding the market with excess labor.
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Bush Denies He Demanded Wiretap Whistle Blower Be Captured

2006-01-01T10:33:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bush claims he didn't demand Justice Dept find the whistle blower who revealed illegal wiretapping. But note that he didn't call for an investigation a year ago when the NYT told him about the whistle blower! One wonders why! Meanwhile, the White House says more astonishingly stupid and insane things.

From Australia:

THE White House said overnight it had no role in the Justice Department's decision to investigate the leaking of classified information indicating that President George W. Bush authorised a secret government wiretap program.

Lying gets easier and easier if one does it all the time. Bush has trouble controlling his body tics and blicking eyes when he lies but since he lies all the time execpt when he blurts out his "Bushisms", everyone who doesn't want to think about things thinks this is normal behavior.

It is not.

Anyway, as the White House explains their obvious lies, they say really bizarre things like this:

Mr Duffy stressed that "the leaking of classified information is a serious issue." And he defended the use of wiretaps, warning that "Al-Qaeda's playbook is not printed on page one, and when America's is, it has serious ramifications."

Why is revealing the information that Bush and his cronies are illegally spying on Americans revealing information that will help al Qaeda? Does any terrorist not believe the government is trying to spy on them? That the government never ever uses phone tagging or other means?

Hahaha. If I figured this out way back in the sixties when I was a mere teenager, you can bet bin Laden and his merry band figured this out some time way back when they lived in that super police state, Saudi Arabia, where all communications big and small are spied upon!

This is so beyond ludicrous, it is to laugh to death (falling down dead noises at my desk). Good effing grief. The whistle blower, if he or she is found, should be enshrined in our history as a tremendous person who is actively saving Democracy, saving the Constitution, saving the American Flag which is now in tatters thanks to Bush and his gang wrecking everything it stands for.

The leakers in the White House who pushed the Valarie Plame contacts into danger because Bush wanted to shut up everyone in the diplomatic and CIA circles who were objecting to the neo-cons cooking the evidence used to justify a totally illegal war, they need to be put in prison.

For they broke the law in order to facilitate breaking some very grave laws, ones that carry the death penalty: starting wars of aggression for territorial gain.

The NYT, by the way, is again in a broil over all this. Kellner, the editor in chief and the owner, Punch, won't tell the Ombudsman what the hell is going on. They don't want to explain why they cooperated with Bush and why this isn't news but then, this has happened to me, before the election, when they refused to report the story about how Haley Barbour came to their offices, complaining about ME! They still won't talk about that. Or all the other times they conspired to cover up real news.

The secret playbook of the media/Republican party is far more important for us to read than any terrorist playbook simply because the terrorists are police matters but the media/Republican collusion is a political matter and all politics are, by definition, public!
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Bush Spends More and More Time Alone....Drinking?

2006-01-01T09:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bush needs to pretend he isn't a 100% drunk. So either the media lies about him or ignores obvious drunken behavior or excuses symptoms as "falling down accidentally" or "Bushisms" but now it is so out of control, he can't appear in public at night except on rare occassions. Still, no one in the media mainstream dares say he is a drunken sot.

From Yahoo:

Peace and prosperity. It's a well-worn New Year's resolution, but that's what President Bush is wishing for 2006.

"The president's New Year's resolution is to continue to work tirelessly for peace abroad and prosperity at home," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Saturday.

Bush and his wife, Laura, and her mother, Jenna Welch, will be dining at the Bush ranch here, but it's unclear whether they'll stay up long enough to ring in 2006.

This conflicts with Bush's previous statement, from the Bushisms Library:

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

.

Bush shows every sign of being a lush. This started with the famous midwinter binge he took when he "choked on a pretzel and fell down" while watching football...alone. Now, I know men and men don't watch football alone, especially the Super Bowl, if there are any buddies around to share the fun and the White House is a catered kid's club from hell with all the goodies, servants, wives don't need anything since they are served, hand and foot, so the guys can yuck it up and there are armies of guys especially lobbyists and special interests who would adore yucking it up in the White House during the Rosebowl or Super Bowl!

So why does Bush go turtle during these times?

Here he is again, New Year's Eve, a big party date, alone, going to bed early. Or rather, passing out early. We have noted before that Bush now avoids any exposure before noon, forget even late afternoon these days. The few times he has appeared at night, he looks and sounds pretty smashed. There are videos of him slobbering, sputtering, hanging onto podiums, blinking stupidly, his jaw hanging crooked. Dropping his dog, knocking it out on the tarmac in front of children, staggering and falling in front of the military. On election night, his face struck by something, his eyes glassy. Gads.

The American media is like the wife of an alcoholic. The four sheets to the wind hubby staggering about, bottles strewn all over the house, the wife laughing nervously as she makes excuses for him. 90% of the "Bushisms" are the results of a drunk babbling moronically. Having a nation run by such a man is deadly. Like a drunk driver, a drunk leader can be worse. Judgement goes out the window.

Bush is a mirror image of Saddam during the time Saddam hid in his "spider hole". Saddam came out looking pretty plastered but now, after sitting in jail a while, he is stone sober and looks completely different. His acuity has gone up and his ability to fence with the prosecutor and jailers has grown greatly the more sober he is. Meanwhile, our drunken sot goes around the world, irritating our allies and amusing our enemies.

The fake story about Bush suddenly deciding he wasn't going to drink or drug himself anymore is a keystone in his entire fake Skull and Bones demonic "I am a born again Christian" campaign. To lull the Christians into believing in him and simultaneously scrubbing his multi-arrest, multi-crime spree in the past, he isolated it from his plans for ruling America by playing the "I am reformed" card. I, personally, believe he was never sober. His besotten daughters didn't turn out that way because they never saw daddy drink, that you can bet. Kids see everything and they watched him lie about drinking and then slobbering down one drink after another.

When the few (non professional reporters) investigators (like myself) who were going after Bush's past in 2000 discovered he had been arrested multiple times, Bush "won over the press and people" by admitting it (only the ones that were uncovered, not the hidden ones) and he admonished us to not talk about his alcoholism because his darling children will be corrupted by all this.

Then we learned that his daughters which were never in the news were actually a pair of underage, illegal, with fake ID, heavy drinkers already!

When the truth came out about Jenna and Babs, the entire press corpse (deliberate sic) should have gone bonkers. Instead, they attacked the messenger of this news, a gossip rag. Grandpa Bush famously snarled that the press better not poke their noses into the Bush's private affairs or bad things would happen to them.

Then, less than two months later, 9/11 happened, the CIA anthrax hitman was turned loose and the first person to die of anthrax was the unfortunate photoeditor of the newsservice that ran the Jeanna drunk photos. Next, came Democratic leaders and other media who might be tempted to pull the covers off of the Bush family drinking and drugging.

The fact that the entire family has many run-ins with the law, most recently, a nephew was arrested for fighting with the cops after he got drunk in Texas, this drinking and law breaking can be amusing if one is running a comedy show but is dangerous for the world's biggest empire. The fact that our media isn't hammering on this daily infuriates me. Every press conference gaggle with the press secretary should feature questions about the Bush family's drinking/drug problems. It is the top issue because the effects reverberate throughout our lives. Drunks are famous for being fiscally irresponsible, physically reckless, belligerent and ill tempered and easily conned by fake friendships. All bad for running a country.

Bush can't process information very well anymore as anyone reading his babblings can see, people who talk weird usually aren't thinking straight. It is pretty simple. You don't go to a schizophrenic to learn about what is going on in the real world! Nor do you go to a drunk for sober analysis.

New Years is a drinking celebration. When a family of lushes celebrate it alone, you can bet, the drinking is very heavy, too heavy, too violent, too disgusting to do in public.
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Blair Intimidates Newsmedia But Not Bloggers Who Run Uzbekistan Tortur

2005-12-31T07:53:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The media mythology always has been that they need to "scoop" each other and this is why the news always comes out, they are in such a rush to publish or put it on TV. This fairytale is hogwash, of course. Again and again, we bloggers online have to shove hard as hell to force the media to cough up the news. Here is yet another example of this: the torture story out of Uzbekistan.

From Yahoo:

A former British ambassador has published government documents he says prove that Britain knowingly received intelligence extracted under torture from prisoners in Uzbekistan.

Craig Murray, who was removed as ambassador to Uzbekistan after going public about his concerns, defied a Foreign Office ban to publish the internal memos on his Web site Friday. The documents include memos to Foreign Office chiefs in which Murray expressed his concern over the use of "torture material."

In one memo, Murray said he was told by Foreign Office legal adviser Sir Michael Wood that it was not illegal to use information acquired by torture, except in legal proceedings. Intelligence officer Matthew Kydd had also told him the intelligence services sometimes found such material "very useful indeed, with a direct bearing on the war on terror," he said.

It used to be, when the mainstream media finally was shoved and dragged by us bloggers into covering obviously important stories, they would moan and groan about how we need blogger ethics and how unreliable we all were and how we didn't understand what real news is (missing white women and celebrity divorces, of course!) and etcetera.

Not only was this story news, it is important news. The memo where Sir Michael "Boil them in oil" Wood blandly states that yes, it is illegal to torture but hey, it could be useful. "Ve haff vays off making you talk," is very popular in despotic regimes, right? Remember all those WWII movies where the Allies tortured people we captured? No?

Um, geeze. I do believe that doing this makes one the bad guy except today, in movies, the good guy tortures, murders, runs amok and doesn't follow any civilized finesse, does he?

Like the Downing Street memos, we bloggers single handedly (actually, a thousand bloggers pushing very hard!) forced the media to pay attention. This forces politicians to pay attention and say something or even force a prosecutor to go after criminal actions done by our rulers.

This is why they hate bloggers on the left. Right wing bloggers work for the rulers. This is why any yapping on their part instantly comes into the media. And they are petted and praised and even the, "Oh my, aren't you SOOOO much more effective than those unethical, annoying liberal bloggers!" stories show up time to time, most recently in Time magazine where they tell us sneeringly that we are so uneffective, why don't we imitate the right wingloons!

Well, they ain't pushing stories the media owners and their co-conspiritors, the men in power, are pushing!

And push we do, magnificently, thanks entirely to our many readers who faithfully read so many liberal bloggers and who are the real fuel that keeps all of this going, this budding experiment in real democracy, real news in real time by real people!

I love other leftist bloggers and there are now so many, it is impossible to keep up but I wish I could read all of them every day but then, I wouldn't have time to write, myself. But do remember, it is all of us together that matters and if 10,000 blogs carry these important stories this means 1,000,000 people will read and 100,000,000 will learn the real news as we force the mainstream media to tell the truth.

Onwards and upwards! Go, team!
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Tropical Storm Zeta Forms Right On Cusp Of New Year

2005-12-30T22:18:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Zeta is born. Record hurricane season continues unabated even as record warmth along with brush fires in the Midwest and giant waves from the huge weather system in the Pacific pounds the West Coast, the changes caused by global warming are now catastrophically obvious.

From Yahoo:

Tropical Storm Zeta formed Friday in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, another installment in a record-breaking hurricane season that officially ended last month.

Zeta, the 27th storm of the season, formed Friday about 1,000 miles south-southwest of the Azores islands, according to an advisory posted on the National Hurricane Center's Web site. It posed no immediate threat to land.

The center said it would send out a full advisory later Friday. Tropical storms have winds of at least 39 mph.

It was not immediately known if Dec. 30 was the latest date for the formation of a tropical storm in the Atlantic. But earlier this month, Hurricane Epsilon became only the fifth hurricane to form in December in 154 years of record-keeping. Hurricanes form when their winds exceed 74 mph.

Will the earth have hurricanes year round now? This is a serious querry. Building stuff in Florida and the Gulf at a frantic rate, all this can be undone forever by raging hurricanes. Unlike New England, Florida is flat as flat can be. On top of that, the ocean rising will swamp much of Florida, too.

New Orleans is doomed. You can't spend all our wealth on building in that obviously inadequet zone, not if we can spend our treasury on more important things, not that this matters while we are wasting over $200 billion+ on the stupid war in Iraq!

But this has to be considered! The drought/flood cycle is a disaster for all of us. I see signs of it up here in the Northeast, we usually have the evenest rain pattern in America. Same number of inches of moisture a month, up until the last 20 years! Now, that too, is destabilized.

KSBW Channel:

The latest storm along the Central Coast stirred up big, pounding waves along the Central Coast Wednesday.
The wind-whipped waves didn't cause any major flooding but did fall close to beach businesses on the Capitola Esplanade. Sandbags were kept close at hand but weren't needed, and some people came down to the coast just to watch the high surf.
"The water was coming up to the windows. That was something to be concerned about. I'm going to get the storm shutters today. I think it's time," said Zelda's Restaurant owner Ed Leipelt.

I have surfed in California and looking at the pictures of the waves brought back memories! The earlier waves were perfect surfing but it seems today, they are rougher and less even, no classic, glass-clear curl. Storm waves can really pound you into the sand!

At one of my old haunts, Manhattan/Venice beach, they had to berm the sand to prevent flooding and are handing out sandbags and there are the usual mudslides but then, we should talk! We had them up here, too, in Vermont, this week due to rain! Rain in northern Vermont after Xmas?

Ye gads.

Because I farm or have worked outdoors much of my life, I am hyper aware of the weather and look at today's map! This isn't a winter map! It is a Spring map. The storms are all moving south to north! There is snow, but it isn't sweeping down from the north, it is always part of a huge rain system that finally reached cold air. This is why all our snow storms this year have been half rain or more than half rain which makes my mountain very, very slippery. Already, many trees have been damaged from the ice when the storms transit from rain to snow. These are the most dangerous of storms.

Several years ago, much of Great Lakes Canada had so much ice on the lines, the huge power pylons collapsed. Electrical linesmen from my community had to move up into Canada for three months to rewire the place! Just this week on TV, we watched the damage from icestorms in the south cause trees to collapse on houses.

This isn't normal. I assure you, it isn't.

Meanwhile, back to watching Bush's massive planetary/economic/legal trainwreck. Gotterdammeridiot time.
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White House Anxious To Find Out Who Revealed Illegal Wiretapping and Spying

2005-12-30T20:33:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Gonzales, when not defending torture and while goofing around Karl Rove, leaker of all leakers of classified information, is now suddenly anxious to intimidate all government employees to keep them from leaking information vital to our democracy. Spying on Americans without warrant is 100% illegal since day one in the USA. Got that, Gonzales?

From Yahoo:

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President Bush's secret domestic spying program.

The inquiry focuses on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, officials said.

The Times revealed the existence of the program two weeks ago in a front-page story that acknowledged the news had been withheld from publication for a year, partly at the request of the administration and partly because the newspaper wanted more time to confirm various aspects of the program.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Justice undertook the action on its own, and the president was informed of it on Friday.

This has got to be the goofiest investigation yet. After all, Bush has known about the leak for an entire year! A year! Besides, and I wish the media would get this right but they won't, leaking information about illegal actions in our government is a good thing protected by "whistle-blower" laws! If one knows the President is breaking the law and hides it, they are then co-conspiritors! This means, criminals.

Of course, Bush is no stranger to handcuffs. He was often caught by the cops only to be let loose again by daddy's buddies in the system. But he has a long record of being a criminal mind who believes laws are to be flaunted.

Therefore, arrest Bush again! And this time, don't let him out on bail!

Speaking about illegal stuff, the torture allegations are growing apace. The web is all abuzz over the letters/cables published by whistle-blower from England, former amassador to Uzbekistan, home of cooking victims of the state in cauldrons, he took this "classified" information and made it public on the web and dared Blair to arrest him. Since the mainstream media didn't want to tangle with the dictator of Downing Street, he had the charming idea of letting us bloggers disseminate the information which is here: Craig Murry's webpage.

It is important reading. For one problem with many of Bush's prosecutions (persecutions) is it is illegal both in the Geneva Conventions and the good old scrap of paper called the Constitution, to use information gathered from torture in trials. Already, some lawyers are filling protests in court over this. Obviously, our war on terror is trembling on the edge of collapse and is falling faster than the WTC.

The forgotten war in Afghanistan roars on, two more soldiers blown up there today. In Iraq, the attacks on the oil refineries has nearly shut down the country which seeths with fundamentalist rage.

Meanwhile, the Valerie Plame affair continues to churn onwards with Fitzgerald hauling sundry neo-cons and con-men before his Grand Jury. And Watergate bigwig, John Dean, pipes up to remind us why Nixon was forced out of office. From Writnews:

On Friday, December 16, the New York Times published a major scoop by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau: They reported that Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans without warrants, ignoring the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

It was a long story loaded with astonishing information of lawbreaking at the White House. It reported that sometime in 2002, Bush issued an executive order authorizing NSA to track and intercept international telephone and/or email exchanges coming into, or out of, the U.S. - when one party was believed to have direct or indirect ties with al Qaeda.

Initially, Bush and the White House stonewalled, neither confirming nor denying the president had ignored the law. Bush refused to discuss it in his interview with Jim Lehrer.

Then, on Saturday, December 17, in his radio broadcast, Bush admitted that the New York Times was correct - and thus conceded he had committed an impeachable offense.

There can be no serious question that warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the law, is impeachable. After all, Nixon was charged in Article II of his bill of impeachment with illegal wiretapping for what he, too, claimed were national security reasons.

Yup. Bush admitted to committing a crime and is unrepentant and has unleashed his baying hounds in the media to scream that this is OK. Arrest him. Put him in the pokey. Send him to Uzbekistan. Send him to Bagdad where he can stand trial with Saddam. Heck, send him to Mars. He did say he wanted to go there.
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Read the Invasion Plans for Canada--Part of Many War Plans

2005-12-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Pentagon keeps on file an array of war plans for every contingency. Since we have clashed with both Mexico and Canada repeatedly in the past, it is no surprize to learn that we still make plans for future possible clashes. This is to be taken very seriously by our neighbors who have natural resources we might want to appropriate for the Vaterland.

From the Washington Post:

Invading Canada won't be like invading Iraq: When we invade Canada, nobody will be able to grumble that we didn't have a plan.

The United States government does have a plan to invade Canada. It's a 94-page document called "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan -- Red," with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. It's a bold plan, a bodacious plan, a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex our neighbor to the north. It goes like this:

The Canadians can retaliate simply by refusing to speak English (smiling). Let the people in Montreal take the brunt, they can deal with les Amerique.

It sounds like a joke but it's not. War Plan Red is real. It was drawn up and approved by the War Department in 1930, then updated in 1934 and 1935. It was declassified in 1974 and the word "SECRET" crossed out with a heavy pencil. Now it sits in a little gray box in the National Archives in College Park, available to anybody, even Canadian spies. They can photocopy it for 15 cents a page.

I have a very severe problem with secret war plans. Namely, the urge to set up a crisis so one can impliment the plans is a great temptation so rather than diplomatically dealing with the assassination of an Archduke, one just sets into motion a plan to invade the Netherlands and attack Paris, no?

No country should have secret invasion plans with allies. Period. Any ally who discovers such plans should raise a huge diplomatic row. Just like all the still secret plans for nuclear war, the populace which will bear the brunt of the violence has a right to see what sort of hideous plans the military is hatching. Especially with nuclear war!

Mexico has been invaded several times and we chopped off about half of Mexico's state territory over the years. Theoretical invasion plans aren't hyperbole with Mexico, it is a real possible threat. With Americans talking about simultaneously locking all Mexicans out of el Norte and bringing military power to bear on the border with Mexico, plus our refusal to sign the Kyoto Accords and thus, dooming Mexico to a future of increasingly desertfying conditions that will make life very tenuous there means tension between our nations will grow, not shrink.

Mexico is possibly on the verge of voting into office a populist who is friendly with the growing alliance of leftist leaders in Spanish speaking countries and our reactionary imperialism greatly resents any manifestation of popularity in our subject proto-colonies. We invest a lot in maintaining unpopular, murderous dictators down south and thanks to Spain becoming much more liberal, so do former Spanish colonies. This is why the American right wing supported Franco (and their favorite, Hitler). When Spain liberalizes, so follows all the former colonies for this is a cultural thing, a Zeitgeist matter.

The Canadians shouldn't trust the USA to be honorable and respect borders. We already made it clear, once we get international organizations to certify a country is helpless, we invade with impunity and cruel, wanton disregard for civilians. And like Iraq, Canada represents energy and water, the stuff of life itself. Two things we are destroying or eating up massively here, building our hyper bubble.

From the NYT:

Nearly 10 million gallons a day draining away in the driest state in the nation - and the fastest growing one, propelled by the demographic rocket of Las Vegas - is just one of the many strange byproducts of Nevada's tangled love affair with gold.

An extensive review of government documents and court records, and scores of interviews with scientists and present and former mine industry workers and regulators, show that an absence of federal guidelines, of the sort that are commonplace for coal or oil, allowed gold wide latitude to operate here in the rural fastness of the desert, perhaps more than any other American industry.

As my previous climatic stories show, Texas Burns and Long Range Weather and Wishful Thinking About Mother Nature, we are in a destructive pattern with a bad ending. Namely, the snows that feed the mighty rivers in the West are failing and the glaciers are disappearing so there is no year-round feed of moisture and the rivers that do exist are used up totally, the Colorado, for example, is now a sluggard trickle when it reaches Mexico, depriving Mexico of those waters, leaving them high and dry and is a source of diplomatic complaints.

Canada has lots of nice, fresh water! Since a Canadian gold mining company is destroying Nevada's water, it is logical that Americans will retaliate violently in the opposite direction! These land/resource wars are a main trigger of violent invasions since the dawn of humanity.

Now to see the secret invasion plans Japan and the USA have cooked up this last five years! You can bet, the Chinese have copies of this in a safe in Beijing.
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Treasury Sec. Snow Blizzard: We Are Out of Money, Spent Over 8 Trillion!

2005-12-30T00:13:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Treasury Sec. Snow warns us he is going to eliminate Social Security unless Congress raises the debt ceiling another trillion dollars to over $9 trillion. The GOP is spending over $500 billion a year more than we take in as taxes!

From Yahoo:

U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow warned lawmakers on Thursday that a legally set limit on the government's ability to borrow will be hit in mid-February and urged Congress to raise it quickly.

Failure to do so potentially risks throwing the country into its first default in history, Snow warned in what has become virtually an annual rite as U.S. borrowing needs spiral.

"The administration now projects that the statutory debt limit, currently $8.184 trillion, will be reached in mid-February 2006," Snow said in a letter to 21 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate released by Treasury after financial markets had closed.

They waited until dark, eh? Can't have the sheep panic and run off the cliff, can they? And they commit the crime just before New Years, betting most investors will not pay attention until after Monday!

Hahaha. Fleece time!

Snow said that Treasury, if the debt limit was not raised by then, would have to take "extraordinary actions" to keep paying its bills for everything from Social Security to national defense spending.

OK, everyone, listen very carefully: they plan to steal all the Social Security money so the baby boomers can't retire! Got that? Shall I repeat?

The plan is to work us all to death. It wasn't accidental that they ignored the screams of the dying in New Orleans. That was the IMF/NWO/WTO plan for America. That is our future. All those elderly who died? That is you and me, babe!

From the Washington Post:

As noted by recent cover stories in Newsweek and Business Week, the first of the roughly 77 million baby boomers turn 60 in 2006. J. Walker Smith of the polling firm of Yankelovich Partners told Newsweek that many boomers "think they're going to die before they get old" -- a reference to one survey in which boomers defined old age as starting around 80. Business Week asserted that fifty- and sixtysomethings consider their "middle age a new start on life" to indulge hobbies, begin new careers or remarry. These portraits of vigorous baby boomers clash with another reality: Their huge federal retirement benefits may seriously damage the economy and American politics.

Our continued unwillingness to address this disconnect counts as one of 2005's big stories. We should ask ourselves: Why? After all, the need is well known. Consider the Congressional Budget Office's just released projections. By 2030, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid may cost 15 percent of national income -- almost double their level in 2000 and equal to 75 percent of today's federal budget. Left alone, these programs would require massive tax increases, cause immense deficits or crowd out other important government programs. We also know of at least partial solutions: curb costs by slowly raising eligibility ages and cutting benefits for wealthier recipients.

See? This is from a neo-nazi clown who doesn't do a stitch of real work. He bloviates and then lays about, sucking on his hookah and then reemerges to scold us about working.

These monsters are circling us like the sharks they are. They can't wait to say, triumphantly, "Well, we just had to stop the Social Security payments because there are too many of you!" and then force us to go back to work, cut medical care and in general, drive us all to an earlier grave while they live in gated communities, well fed, good doctors, full insurance, our ruling class will be oh so happy.

Well, if the average American is happy about this, it would be rather interesting to watch the much feister Chinese take over the planet since we won't deserve to run it anymore, will we?

Also, I track the data about finances and all year long, the neo nazis and Greenspan lied to everyone about financing. "The deficit is lower," they lied. They didn't say it was because of two things: all the big stuff was set "off budget" and Social Security payments were flowing in and the government was conficating them as swiftly as they came and sent them all to China and Japan!

Arigato.

So now we learn it wasn't really $325 billion in the red but over $500 billion in the red. As I expected. Each year under Bush and the GOP has been around $500 billion in the red and thanks to the recent huge tax cuts and corporate hand-outs, the deficit next year is going to be over $680 billion. Well, just remember, we hit $12 trillion, we die.

Yes, death. Like for real, not pretend. I would guess about 24 million American citizens will be forced into a death march. Families who have the income to prevent this will struggle to keep family members alive but quite a few people will starve/freeze/work to death. And all to pay for a stupid war in Iraq and to keep corporate America happy as they relocate overseas.

Or we can listen to the Chinese and Korean peasants. They seem to have a plan.
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Saddam's Lawyer Offers Help--Hand Over Iraq To Saddam and He Will Let Us Run Away

2005-12-29T14:15:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Padilla trial is coming apart at the seams, the trials of all those "terrorists" are going belly up thanks to tainted evidence gotten illegally and now we see Saddam suggesting Bush work with him instead of against him! Next: armed Sunni frees Saddam and carry him off in triumph. Grrrf.

From Yahoo::

The chief lawyer for Saddam at his trial for crimes against humanity in Baghdad told Bush that Iraqis who supported their former leader were waiting for a bold decision from the world's most powerful statesman to free him.

"I call on you ( President Bush) to release Mr. President (Saddam) immediately to allow the Iraqis to decide his fate. Only then will you get out of your predicament in Iraq and truly become an advocate of justice," Khalil Dulaimi wrote in a letter obtained by Reuters.

Such a decision would prove to be the panacea that would end Washington's woes over Iraq, Dulaimi asserted.

"Your relations with Iraq will then be historic and you will win the favor of the Arabs and Muslims and the entire world," Dulaimi said, adding that it was the only way to spare Iraq from undergoing a bloody civil war.

Seems Bush wants civil wars since he toils day and night to create this here at home! A number of American soldiers were blown up this holiday week and I suppose their families are not having a Merry Christmas nor a Happy Holiday. Bush is boning up on Imperial Warriors tripe, reading about how heroic and wonderful fighting in Vietnam was for Kerry and Gore. Well.

Life is full of irony. Why do our media owners put us through these nightmares without at least screaming, "I can't take this anymore" and dashing their heads out on a rock? Oh, the rock would shatter. They can't spatter their own brains, the cavity is empty.

From Christian Science Monitor:

Hoping to overturn a federal appeals court ruling last week, the Bush administration Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to allow the immediate transfer of accused terrorist Jose Padilla from a military prison to civilian custody. The New York Times reports that in its brief to the high court, the Justice Department called the appeals court ruling that blocked the transfer an "unwarranted attack" on presidential discretion.

Naturally, when anyone applies the Constitution to any issue, it is "attacking" AWOL Bubble Boy's discretion! He wants the courts to give him the legal trappings of a full dictator. He has joked and cackled evilly over the idea that "it would be easier if I were a dictator." Before he even took over America, he claimed the President has final say about the legality of anything!

This, November, 2000! I said back then, he should be eliminated from the vote counting because he doesn't understand our government and how it works!

Talking about dictators, Bush pulled another executive decree this week, changing the emergency military line of command so his neo-cons control everything if bin Laden heeds Bush's pleas for more attacks. From the LA Times:

Heading a military service isn't quite the position of power it used to be. In a Bush administration revision of plans for Pentagon succession in a doomsday scenario, three of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's most loyal advisers moved ahead of the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon's intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld. The second spot would be the deputy secretary of defense, but that position currently is vacant. The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth.

The changes, announced last week, are the second in six months and reflect the administration's new emphasis on intelligence gathering versus combat in 21st century war fighting.

Technically, the line of succession is assigned to specific positions, rather than the current individuals holding those jobs.

Namely, the KGB will take over the military if any attacks happen! Or rather, the SS will take over the Wehrmacht and force Rummel to commit suicide. Eh.

The 9/11 Commission was stupid if not totally evil. They thought, if we emulate Nazi Germany/Soviet Russia, we would then twart all attacks. The real question, why the hell did the Pentagon snooze away the morning of the attacks is something Rumsfeld could explain only he won't.

He wasn't fired, either. Nor was a single neo-con, for that matter. It is amazing we got Brownie to resign from FEMA after killing fewer Americans than Rummy. Seems he lost the "let Americans die" competition?

Well, just remember, these clowns are planning for WWIII and this latest paper along with creating Norcom which is the agency which will take over the country is we win any elections, is just another brick in the neo-con wall. Next, they plan on building walls around America, too.

After Saddam pulls them out of Iraq.
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Chinese Rulers Fear Peasant Power, Vote End to Farm Taxes!

2005-12-29T12:21:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Chinese government just removed all farm taxes! First time in 2,600 long years, the yoke of paying for the ruling class has fallen on the shoulders of the mass of toiling peasants. Fearful of uprising, the government has decided to address the income disparity of farm vs industry. I pay a lot of taxes on my farmland....hmm.

From Xinhuanet:

China's 2,600-year-old agricultural tax will be rescinded as of Jan. 1, 2006, after China's top legislature voted on Thursday to adopt a motion on the regulations revoking the agricultural tax.

The motion with only 94 Chinese characters was voted favorably by 162 lawmakers and abstained by one.

Wan Baorui, former vice minister of agriculture and vice chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Affairs Committee of National People's Congress told Xinhua that the abolition of the agricultural tax demonstrates that industry has outgrown agriculture to some extent along with the country's economic development. And the country ushers into a new era of "industry subsidizing agriculture".

Official figures show that agriculture contributed to 13.1 percent of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004, and industry and tertiary trade contributed to 46.2 percent and 40.7 percent respectively.

Agricultural tax, China's most ancient tax category, started to be collected in 594 BC. From that time, agricultural tax has existed for 2,600 years in China with dominant rural economy.

If the countryside was quiet, this would have never happened. But the actions and riots of the peasants has proven quite effective. The communist party runs China and they teach revolutionary politics in school and here they are, the ruling elite, worried about peasants who are told that they are the real rulers.

Whenever workers here resist the rulers, they are chastized by the media and the government and much of academia, too. They are told over and over again, riots and insurrections are evil and good people kneel down and let the rulers kick dirt in their faces. Today, some more workers just voted to cut their own throats! Like the autoworker's unions, the airline industry people are cutting back, reducing pay, eliminating health care, they are all, across the board, in full retreat. All over America, workers are giving back hard won work privilages and even now, the GOP plots to cut access to overtime pay and other things of great importance to the labor movement, meanwhile, everyone is well behaved and quiet. No agitators are yelling, unlike the Chinese, they aren't throwing fireworks at cops or overturning cars and burning them, they aren't beating on the cops with sticks like the South Korean farmers and workers. Geeze.

Talk about a difference. We can see plainly that fighting back works. DUH. Since when has anyone wrest anything from any ruler in any other fashion? Our Founding Fathers are called that because they fought the King of England and won!

Taxs on peasants is so ancient, it is part of the art of writing, the peasant view of all this. Namely, the picture for "tax collector" is a devil with a tail and pair of horns (head is the square) grabbing a stalk of rice. So even way back, you can see, the peasants didn't view all this tax stuff as a wonderful time.

But patiently, they paid. When Ghengis Khan defeated the emperor of northern China, he wanted to kill all the peasants and turn it into grazing lands for Mongol livestock only one of the court prisoners he was using as a translator interceded and explained how taxes from these peasants would make the Great Khan filthy rich. So only (a horrible massacre) a quarter of the peasants were murdered.

The Japanese came in and tried to force Chinese peasants to raise rice for Japan so they could conscript all the males working Japanese farms into the immense imperial forces. Fighting to keep the peasants productive was as frustrating for the Japanese as stealing oil from Iraq is for us today. The Japanese tried to instill fear by massacring hundreds of thousands of Chinese but this didn't work.

Here is a photo of my farm today:

Note that the fields are fallow, though it is funny to see green grass instead of snow! For it is raining today, how bizarre is that! Anyway, I pay taxes year round! Yet my farm is fallow more than half the year. This is why profitable farmers use Federally subsidized water to farm year round in dry climates and why they are killing the smaller, northern farms off. The taxes we pay is a huge burden. I pay over $5000 a year on my small farmhold!

In France, for example, the government helps farmers out because otherwise, no one would farm since it is hard work and very variable, subject to the capricious whims of Mother Nature. The free traders are working day an night to end government aid to farmers and note the WTO rioters are nearly all farmers in the third world and should be farmers in the first world, too, for they are being dragooned into this folly just as certainly as the factory workers were snookered!

Time will tell. All I can say is, power to the people, may a thousand Chinese peasants bloom!
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The Bush Illegal Spying On Vegans and Quaker Grannies Continues

2005-12-28T20:22:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

All week long the MSM has been filled to the gills with lying creeps telling us that it is OK to spy on Americans so we can be protected from bin Laden, the Bush family buddy. Well, not one of the pundits doing this mention who was spied upon nor will Bush tell us, nope. Not even if Congress asks.

From Ted Rall:

Civil libertarians relaxed when, in September 2003, Republicans bowed to public outcry and cancelled Total Information Awareness. TIA was a covert "data mining" operation run out of the Pentagon by creepy Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter. Bush Administration marketing mavens had tried to dress up the sinister "dataveillance" spook squad--first by changing TIA to Terrorism Information Awareness, then to the Information Awareness Office--to no avail. "But," wondered the Electronic Frontier Foundation watchdog group a month after Congress cut its funding, "is TIA truly dead?"

At the time I bet "no." Once a regime has revealed a predilection for spying on its own people, the histories of East Germany and Richard Nixon teach us, they never quit voluntarily. The cyclical clicks that appeared on my phone line after 9/11 corroborated my belief that federal spy agencies were using the War on Terrorism as a pretext for harassing their real enemies: liberals and others who criticized their policies. As did the phony Verizon employee tearing out of my building's basement, leaving the phone switching box open, when I demanded to see his identification. He drove away in an unmarked van.

I have been spied upon in my past and am probably being spied upon today. Since few people read me, I dwell in this little corner of the net by myself and watch the ridiculous story unfold. Far from being amazed, this is all old stuff.

The framers of the Constitution wanted to protect the privacy of the mail, visiting people, speaking freely in public, all sorts of radical, revolutionary stuff. They were so big on this, they wrote it all down and made it very important and surrounded it with all sorts of fences to keep out despots.

They didn't reckon with the Ben Franklin media collapsing and becoming co-conspiritors nor the Supreme Court saying, "the Constitution is just a goddam piece of paper" or whatever Bush said, too. Anyway, the laws Bush has been breaking are all the foundation stones of our democracy! He should be arrested and tried for treason.

The cartoon I drew is from two badges the NSA cooked up right after 9/11. Both badges don't exist anymore but I emailed them to a blogger who is now gone. One of the emblems was a hissing black cat for DARPA. It stood in front of the WTC on fire, the eyeball pyramid loomed over it all.

The Total Information guys had the same pyramid of power, glaring over the planet earth, focused on Iraq! Both were suffused with black magic emblems and signs. They were open declarations of satanic ritual abuse. They were, to be blunt, scary.

Now, the media didn't talk about all this. Newsweek mentioned it in a "haha" story. Geeze, the clowns planning to spy on us love satanic ritual evil! Whoopee, America. Merry Christmas.

Bush is a satanic ritualist who worships Geronimo's skull and plots the end of democracy, 322, the magic number of the Skull and Bones and all that nonesense. We have to arrest him. Letting vile evil magic ritualists to run amok in America is causing huge problems. He thinks he can break the law with impunity. Everyone is being told that it is OK to sneak around America, spying on law abiding citizens who happen to be against the war.

The USA even spied on the Security Council countries before our illegal war against the unarmed Iraqi people! I remember when France protested this and Bush and the American media retaliated by attacking France and launching a hostile boycott of all things French. Like a mugger running over the dog of his victim in order to shut him up. This beastly behavior was allowed to pass since the French cannot arrest Bush, they can, like me, only insult him.

Well, arrest Bush. Armies of prosecutors should be besieging the White House. Armies of reporters demanding the truth should be banging on the front and back doors of the White House.

Damn. Paul Revere, where are you now?
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Bush's Staff Lies About His Reading Books

2005-12-28T12:41:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

They lie all the time and they particularily like to lie about trivial things. Everyone knows Bush can barely read 3x5 cards. He even admits to barely scanning headlines. Yet he has his servants issue rank lies about him reading books for fun and to learn something.

From the Waco Tribune

Read nothing into President Bush's current choice in books, the White House says.

The president is reading "When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House," but presidential spokesman Trent Duffy said Bush is not thinking about his post-Oval Office days.

"He is an avid reader and the president knows full well that he's got a lot of time left in this second term and he's going accomplish big things," Duffy said here Tuesday where Bush is relaxing between Christmas and New Year's.

They think they are so cute with the "read nothing into this..." crap.

And the stuff about him reading, "Imperial Grunt." I would suppose he thinks this is about a fat little piggy eating at the emperor's trough, a Halliburton hog fable? If this idiot wanted to find out what a grunt goes through fighting, he should have volunteered during the war in Nam like so many Democrats did. But no. He even said, he didn't want to get muddy, the little baby.

Why he issues these lies baffles me. I doubt his mother believed him when he pretended to read, holding the book upside down. By the way he talks, I doubt he read even the comix.

American youth is reading less and less. Functional illiteracy or rather, reading minimalizm is sweeping our culture just like it did in ancient Rome after the empire reached its zenith. There must be some sort of connection here for I always wondered why reading petered out in ancient Rome but then, see here! Language is debased daily as our media and many authors openly lie, openly misuse words and concepts in a frantic attempt to con people into doing things that are dangerous or bad for them.

Since businesses want customers who can't read the big print much less the fine print, our business leaders always urge us to get more education, to be more and more literate yet at the same time, they absolutely hate to deal with a literate, aware customer so they conspire along with others to keep everyone dumbed down. This is true of any dictatorship, when they desperately try to get their youth interested in education only to try to get them uninterested in thinking for themselves. This is why all rulers keep a wary eye on the schools and campuses.

Bush, like several famous emperors who were born into the office and took over very young, knows he doesn't have to master any skills to be a ruler, just issue orders and wishes and bingo! Everything goes his way. So why extend the mind? After all, he just has to summon a courtier or servant and have them explain everything and then cease when he waves his hand. This is why this incurious, stupid man could claim he read "Issac's Storm" which is all about the disasterous Galveston hurricane 100 years ago but when the identical hurricane hit in reality, claim he had no idea it would be bad, would kill thousands, would flood New Orleans.

I read the book which is why I sounded repeated alarms about Katrina before it hit. Maybe Bush should try reading my blog. Har.
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Nuclear Power Waste Problem Gets More Financing

2005-12-28T10:58:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Once again, America turns to nuclear energy, seeking some way of having infinite energy. Just like in personal life, endless consumption of anything ends up destroying everything in its path. Even if there were no limits possible, we would have to have them in order to preserve our own lives, for no universe is infinite.

From the NYT:

last month, Congress voted $50 million for the Energy Department to explore a new kind of reprocessing, one that would reuse a much larger fraction of the waste.

The idea is extremely ambitious. It would require perfecting not only a new method of reprocessing, but also a new class of reactors to burn the salvaged material. Still, proponents said it would have two great advantages: It would mean that Yucca Mountain would be big enough to accommodate the waste that could not be recycled. And it would make Yucca easier to open, because the material still to be buried would generate less heat in the centuries to come.

"Reprocessing, or processing spent fuel before it's put in the repository, is a very good way to buy time," said Roger W. Gale, a former Energy Department official who is now an electricity consultant. "It's a fail-safe in case we continue to have problems with Yucca Mountain."

There are several things here. One is, if we try to have maximum nuclear energy, this means building a huge number of plants over and over again since they degrade in less than 50 years and once you build one, unbuilding it becomes horrifically expensive both in the wallet and in nature. The waste doesn't degrade safely for many thousands of years.

Any open-ended system that grinds out eon-spanning waste products isn't a good system on a singular planet. Namely, we have only one earth.

The heat is not a problem in the first few decades, when a repository could be left open for ventilation. The harder time is the next 1,500 years, when heat would be given off by longer-lived radioactive materials, mostly a category called actinides, and also the isotopes that are created as those actinides go through radioactive decay.

You just know we will dump everything in one spot, over and over. And this will build up and since this is an unstable system that grows hotter, not cooler, internally, if we add more and more we will make something that resides deep inside the nearest star to us: a star core.

These things are dangerous, you know. What if it works with the earth's mantle and heats up and causes a rupture in the earth's crust, it being much heavier than mere rocks and soil? Since we know our earth isn't stable, putting this stuff nearly anywhere is asking for trouble. There are so many variables to consider, it just isn't a good option. The main one is, people, being gluttons, will want maximum power no matter what the consequences, just like today. And the NIMBY mentality will be fully operational, too. So whereever this stuff gets stuck away and always, it will be on Indian reservations, you just know it will, will have to bear the entire load generated.

The salvaged materials include uranium 235, the isotope used in bombs, which splits easily, and uranium 238, which makes up more than 99 percent of uranium in nature but is harder to split.

One use of uranium 238 in a reactor is as a "fertile" material that can absorb stray neutrons and become plutonium 239, which can be used in reactors and bombs.

But existing reactors split the uranium using "thermal" neutrons. The new ones would use "fast" neutrons, which travel thousands of times as fast.

I don't think humans are psychologically or emotionally capable of handling something this dangerous. Our track record, frankly, stinks.

The sane thing to do is pretty much what the same thing dealing with our budget problems, our red ink, our trade deficit. Raise prices on the flood of goods pouring into this country. Use the tariff to fund a fast moving solar energy individual home array system for everyone. The solar panels will be manufactured here in America so there will be lots of jobs available, making and installing these systems.

We don't want huge solar arrays far away from homes for several reasons. One: as electricity is transmitted from place to place, it loses power. For example, you can't run a narrow gage wire a long distance. There will be little feed at the terminus. The wire running up my mountain to the house is a cable as big as the ones running down the streets. We loose energy all over the place with the present grid system. Also, disruptions can spread across half a continent when there is no localized energy.

Solar arrays on roofs won't blow up and render the surrounding county unihabitable. Nor is it a useful terrorist target. Being diffuse, it means attacks on one part of the system won't cascade the entire system into crashing. So this makes sense on many levels.

Except for the tendency to be an energy glutton.

There is no satiating this desire. Most of us are only two generations away from primative energy use. Us upperclass people who have had electricity since 1900 are, in my case, a whole THREE generations away from primative energy use! That isn't very many, is it? The present set-up is temporary. Figuring out how to fix it is urgent and it doesn't involve many deals with the devil. There are sane ways of doing things!
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Apres de Hurricanes, Texas Burns: Global Warming Hits Home Base

2005-12-28T09:02:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

In classic "Gods punish foolish humans" mode, Mother Nature is battering Texas right after our childish and disgraceful behavior at the final Kyoto Accords talks in Canada. The right wing American Southwest will get to enjoy the climate from hell they worked so hard to create. A bad choice. Even energy bubbles need water.

From Yahoo:

Rancher Dean Dillard was able to save his 72-year-old mother's home from grass fires by soaking the land around it. But many of his neighbors weren't as lucky.

Wildfires that raced through Texas and Oklahoma Tuesday devoured scores of homes, including at least 25 in rural Cross Plains. The fires, fueled by gusty winds and a drought, were blamed for at least one death and a handful of injuries.

"It looked like we had been bombed in a big war, the whole city was on fire everywhere," said Dillard.

As a cattle owner, I would like to tell the fools in Texas, it is damn hard to graze large bovines when the place is on fire, there is no rain and it is hellishly hot. What ails these dudes? Are they all fakes like Bush? Don't they have the elementary brain mass to cog out the idea that you need rain to raise cattle?

These idiots are responsible for Bush existing. They cheer as they kill the Kyoto Accords and they snarl at Earth First. Well, they are getting Earth's FIST. As the voters of Texas who voted for the present form of planetary arrangements run from catastrophe to catastrophe, one wonders when they will figure out what is going on. Here is some more data to assist them in this learning process.

Purdue, courtesy of our reader, Jcrit:

The most comprehensive climate model to date of the continental United States predicts more extreme temperatures throughout the country and more extreme precipitation along the Gulf Coast, in the Pacific Northwest and east of the Mississippi.

The drought/flood cycle which is bothersome up here will be very bothersome down there. Another hint to all those Texan ranchers and farmers: downpours are bad news. They wash away topsoil. They drown the darn cattle, especially the calves. And they spawn tornadoes. You don't want more of these. Seriously.

How can people farm and be so stupid at the same time? Just like loggers hating environmenalists. My forest which I make money off of, is dying thanks to stupid pollution problems as well as global warming. Hello, hello? Anyone home? Can't log dead forests that burned up, dudes.

From the NYT:

Seven Northeastern states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, have embarked on a regionwide plan to reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, which contributes to global warming. Two years in the making, the plan is the first collective effort in America to adopt mandatory controls for greenhouse gases. It is further evidence of the states' willingness to address an issue that Washington has largely ignored, as well as a timely antidote for the administration's dispiriting performance at the recent global warming conference in Montreal.

The governors' message would have been stronger still had it not been for the defection of Gov. Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts Republican. He pulled the rug out from under his own negotiators with an 11th-hour complaint that the plan would impose unacceptable utility costs on consumers.

Listen, the costs to consumers if the planet goes to literal hell is going to be immense so saving pennies now isn't a good idea. Indeed, the costs will rise and rise, anyway, so why not set up a system today that operates without polluting the holy hell out of the earth? Eh? The bubbles we have created won't last long if Mother Nature decides it is time to wipe us out and we are getting tornadoes in Massachusetts as well as New York, in the mountains, no less! As well as Mass. trees are dying just as horribly as my trees.

Everyone in Texas who isn't hiring Mexicans to work in the hot sun for them is complaining about all the Mexicans coming to el Norte to work in the hot sun for them. Well, look at this map. If most of Mexico is going to have 100+ degree days over 100 days a year, how habitable will that be?

I have seen droughts in Mexico. Livestock hung up on barbed wire fences, dried out so hard even the vultures aren't interested in the carcasses. Scorpins scuttling all over the place at night. Dust devils roaring around in the afternoon, strong as small tornadoes. Yup. Lovely.

And it will be much worse. Any desert dweller knows that 90% of the rain that falls runs away lickety split. The desert rejects the water. Any loose dirt is long gone thanks to the wind. Caliche which is nature's cement, rocks and sand remain. The Sahara wasn't much of a desert 35,000 years ago, it was lush.

Our ancestors called the Great Plains "The Great Desert." Well, this just might be an appropriate name in the future. And Kansas will have a lot more things wrong than teaching about evolution when this happens. They will be the crucible of evolutionary changes, the survival of the fittest, adapting to desert conditions.
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Dr. Freud--Psychiatry Runs in Eternal Circles, Chasing the Psychotic Tail

2005-12-27T22:56:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Psychotherapists gathered this week in La-La-Land, California. Like Freud in Vienna at the edge of the cliff leading into the madness of WWI and Naziism, psychotherapists of the Vienna School stand on the edge of America and wonder what is going on. No one seems able to get a grip on madness and I think this is because our species is totally insane all the way through thanks to our elaborate brains.

From the insane New York Times:

One of several prominent therapists who agreed to visit Disneyland at the invitation of this reporter, Dr. Seligman was here in mid-December for a conference on the state of psychotherapy, its current challenges and its future. And a wild ride it was.

Because it was clear at this landmark meeting that, although the participants agreed it was a time for bold action, psychotherapists were deeply divided over whether that action should be guided by the cool logic of science or a spirit of humanistic activism. The answer will determine not only what psychotherapy means, many experts said, but its place in the 21st century.

"In the 1960's and 1970's, we had these characters like Carl Rogers, Minuchin, Frankl; psychotherapy felt like a social movement, and you just wanted to be a part of it," said Dr. Jeffrey Zeig, a psychologist who heads the Milton H. Erickson Foundation, which every five years since 1980 has sponsored the conference in honor of Dr. Erickson, a pioneer in the use of hypnosis and brief therapy techniques.

"Now," Dr. Zeig continued, "well, therapists are becoming more like technicians, and we're trying to find the common denominator from the different schools and methods to see what works best, and where to go from here."

I am listening to Arnold Schoenberg, the musical counterpoint and contemporary of Dr. Freud. As one who grew up immersed in the Vienna Kultur thanks to the Deutsch/Occult side of the family, I find a great affinity with Freud's Weltanschauung.

He realized early on that drugs couldn't fix the psyche nor could hypnotism or autosuggestion or electric shocks. In desperation, living in a world of disintigrating political and economic connections as the West devoured the planet earth and soon turned to cannibalizing each other, he wished to find the magic Key to the human brain, that vast dark chamber forged when we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden in Africa and forced to forage for food savagely. The brain evolved to give us the ability to understand subtle clues and worse, to convincingly lie to others while intending to eat them for dinner.

Even Freud couldn't accept this.

Today, psychiatrists have been reduced by the dynamics of funding insurance and hospitals, into pill dispensers. They don't want to hear what is ailing the mind, they just want to give a pill that will make the symptoms less obvious and then throw you back into the cesspit.

But it is literally life and death that we humans understand our own minds. For we are killing not only ourselves, we are killing this planet. A serious mistake!

Dr. Freud, like myself, looked towards the ancients and their tales of how we came to be what we are. He, like myself, looked into the magical world of mythology and ancient practices, seeking clues to follow in the cavern of the mind. More, or maybe worse, he and I both come from a peculiar class of people: we remember the Outer Darkness, namely, what goes on when our minds take over and run things while the conscious self is asleep.

Most humans can't remember more than a tiny handful of dreams, a pitiful few dried up pedals, faded and inert, left over from the wild blossom of dreams. As a person who remembers all dreams all my life, I assure you, dreams are very vivid. They include non-visual elements that are probably much more important than the pictures: smells, stray thoughts and of course, feelings.

The emotions that ripple through a dream like a subterranean river go to the very core of the human brain, it is probably welling out of the most primative parts. This is where love and hate are forged. Where sadness resided next to escasy.

If one swims in the dark, Lethian Rivers of the Memory one might find, like a shell on the beach after a tidalwave, fragments of memories the mind wished to supress, memories that could, when dragged out into the daylight, enlighten oneself about why one does various destructive actions.

Alas, many humans are not only content to run around psychotic, wrecking not only everything around them but even the entire planet earth itself, they often glory in exactly that which is sickest in their own minds. For part of all this is the fact that our minds were created to be evil. Like in "betray friends, cannibalize strangers and kill your own family" insane. To control this prehistoric mega-madness, humans created culture and this culture usually works to inhibit or even eliminate the darker forces that want to go bezerk all the time, eating everything and everyone.

When Freud tried this, via dream analysis, he didn't fix anything broken, what he found was, the dream world is very dangerous and few can endure what they experience there, if they remember it. As a person who can, I assure you, it is not fun. One really can't share this stuff except as artwork and of course, all artists are like myself in this regard: they live more in the dreamworld than waking world.

To be, or not to be ... that is the question.
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles - and by opposing them end them?
To die... To sleep... no more...
And by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to..
Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished!

To die... To sleep...
To sleep? Perchance to dream!
Ay there's the rub! For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause...

In the labyrinth of the mind, we run into ourselves and no crueler critic is alive than one's own concience! Like the Angel at the Gates of Eden, this entity wields the Sword of Truth.

In Europe, I saw "Hamlet" in German. It was very interesting and cast a different light upon the play. DRITTER AKT. ERSTE SZENE:

König
Und lockt ihm keine Wendung des Gesprächs
Heraus, warum er die Verwirrung anlegt,
Die seiner Tage Ruh so wild zerreißt
Mit stürmischer, gefährlicher Verrücktheit?

Rosenkranz Er gibt es zu, er fühle sich verstört,
Allein wodurch, will er durchaus nicht sagen.

One of many German words for insane is "verruckt". Geistesgestört (disturbed spirit), geisteskrank (spiritually sick), irre (irregular), irrsinnig (erroneous thinking), krankhaft (very sick), sinnlos (senseless), unsinnig (insensible), verrückt (fatally crooked), wahnsinnig (abandoned thoughts). We now know that many mental diseases are part and parcel of many whole body problems and it isn't often something one can think one's way out of despite Freud's enthusiasm in the search for that Holy Grail of Mental Health.

Hamlet
Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage:

I am/I am not; that here is the question. Freud liked Hamlet for he was a man who was always trying to analyze his own mind as well as the minds and motives of others. He hallucinated and he debated not only with himself but with everyone while at the same time, to throw off his criminal Uncle's intentions, pretended to be insane which was a dilemna since the entire situation the poor Prince was in, was psychotic thanks to his Uncle's crimes.

This is like America today. We bloggers spend many happy hours tracking the psychosis of our insane ruler and his gang of criminal friends. Many Americans desperately want to believe that Bush isn't insane, he is normal and we are crazy for seeing what is going on since self delusion is a powerful tool the brain has evolved over millions of years of suffering. So blindly, they follow this obviously demented man and his friends, assured that safety lie in committing graver and graver crimes against humanity.

The inner cannibal feasts on flesh and laughs and still, devotedly, is followed by the flock hoping for safety in the dark cave of the night of the soul.

And so, Dr. Freud fled Vienna, chased out by fellow Viennese, Herr Adolf Hitler who then turned on his last, living relative, after supervising the suicide of his only niece, and this poor woman, a schizophrenic in a German asylum, was gassed to death and burned.

One of the earliest victims of Hitler's mad Holocaust.

Something to ponder as the clock nears midnight, as the New Year dawn is a glimmer in the East.
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Chinese Start Jet Fabrication Plant and Europe Launches GPS Test Satellite

2005-12-27T21:18:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

China breaks ground for their first, Chinese designed and run jet fabrication plant. Meanwhile, Europe continues to develop their own satellite system by launching a GPS system of their own design. Many of these moves irritate American power brokers but then, they are the ones who have broken the bank here at home which is why our space program is floundering and our factories are leaving these shores.

From China.org:

Chinese airplane manufacturers hope to make a big splash in the global aviation industry with a new made-in-China regional jet that went into production over the weekend.

Production of the ARJ21 started simultaneously at factories in Shanghai, Xi'an, Chengdu and Shenyang on Saturday.

By 2005, the Shanghai facility will assemble the finished planes out of parts produced in factories across the country, according to officials.

China Aviation Industry Corp I, a state-owned manufacturer of both civilian and military planes, set up a subsidiary - AVICI Commercial Aircraft Co Ltd - to make the regional jet, which it says will cost 10 percent less than regional jets produced by foreign rivals.

Many bloggers tracking China look only at the crummy things happening there. It being a huge country with a quarter of the world's population, it is easy to find quite a few things amiss. But to focus on them is stupid since that isn't the direction China is going.

They are going forwards. Look at who is going backwards. Even our nostalgia is backwards. Our movies are old stuff. King Kong and Narnia are WWII stuff repackaged with big special effects. Our cars we design are throwbacks. Everyone is facing backwards, it seems, without seeing what is what.

The last remains of our aerospace industry will be completely removed from America by 2012 if not sooner.

There isn't much left besides that, is there? This is why Bush was trumpetting the cynical Chinese jet deal, one which was totally misinterpeted by the American press when it happened, I called the shots correctly. Well, now we see the unveiling of the next step. Even if we compete with China, we will be forced to reduce prices drastically, killing the profit margin.

From the BBC:

With the Chinese economy expected to have grown by a further 9.3% across 2005, most economists now predict that China will rise still further in 2006 to fourth place in the global GDP list, easily passing both the UK and France in the process.

"For sure by 2006 China will become number four and by 2010 it will be more than Germany," says Chen Xingdong, an economist at BNP Paribas in Beijing.

It is much worse. Our economy is a hollow shell. Lots of money being spent not on building things that will increase our capitalist powers but indulgences. Sort of like building cathederals. It is a business but it is a net loss.

Building massive numbers of private homes that are ill suited for any extended habitation is a really wasteful enterprise!

Houses, like palaces, eat money and resources. The ideal is for people to live in tiny cells like monks did and work all day. Then it is pure profit. Sounds like the Chinese, like here: From Boston:

''Profit is what we want," said Liu ''Johnny" Jian Wei, 39, the company spokesman in Angola, sitting next to the bank of computers and like the others, dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt. ''We can make a profit because we have an advantage over other foreign companies -- we work holidays, Saturdays, Sundays, most evenings, and we cost a lot less."

Scary.

From the BBC:

Economic adviser Andrei Illarionov said Russia was no longer politically free but run by state corporations acting in their own interests.

"I did not sign a contract with such a state," Mr Illarionov told reporters.

Far from American-style "democracy" (sic) spreading, everyone reads the oolang tea leaves and sees clearly, letting the citizens vote themselves endless red ink is a sure fire way to end up in history's garbage can, all the despotic rulers are looking to China for guidance. And despite our yeowls, China is a shining star to them, not the evil place we like to imagine.

For you see, the road to destruction is easy to spot. It is covered with red ink and red blood and our road is under 20 feet of the stuff. We lost our space program with NASA floundering due to lack of funds and our government is cutting money going to educate our youth in college. Meanwhile, the space programs elsewhere are flourishing. Russia singlehandedly now supplies and controls the International Space Station, China has sent more people into orbit than we have, and Europe is launching their own satellite systems, the lastest being the GPS system with a different design from ours and they will undercut our sales abroad by offering better service for less! Yikes!

From the BBC:

Giove-A will be lofted into orbit by a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The demonstrator, built in the UK by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, will test key components in the Galileo network, notably its atomic clocks.

It also has the job of securing the radio frequencies allocated to the project under international agreements.

This requires Giove-A to transmit a sat-nav signal of the correct structure from orbit within the next six months. The SSTL team hopes to do it within a matter of days.

The Galileo project is costing some 3.4bn euros (£2.3bn; $4bn) in public and private finance. It is the biggest space project ever undertaken in Europe, and will eventually comprise a constellation of 30 satellites.

Note that Russia is launching this, too. We dropped the ball and the other team has dribbled away with it while our team stands inert, arguing about if it is worth even throwing a ball at the basket anymore. We decided to stand at the opposite end of the court and fling the ball with all our puny might and hope it scores.

Right. And how many times has Bush mentioned the word "Mars"? How about as often as he has mentioned his buddy, the anthrax killer.
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Kennedy Wants No Wind Mills Off Shore Where He Lives

2005-12-27T12:01:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As Asia and Europe extends renewable energy facilities the USA fiddles while the earth burns. The bubble around the rich is huge. They want to be energy pigs while exporting the mess creating this energy to poor folk who can live in foul air, foul water and industrial noise.

From the New York Times

AS an environmentalist, I support wind power, including wind power on the high seas. I am also involved in siting wind farms in appropriate landscapes, of which there are many. But I do believe that some places should be off limits to any sort of industrial development. I wouldn't build a wind farm in Yosemite National Park. Nor would I build one on Nantucket Sound, which is exactly what the company Energy Management is trying to do with its Cape Wind project.

Of course, Kennedy wants to burn tons of energy living his fabulous, upperclass lifestyle. He wants pristine nature in all Her glory. If this means crushing the lives of others, it is just Jim Dandy.

So he turns on his lights and my trees die from acid rain and the drought/flood cycle inflicting my mountain these days. Kennedy can sail about merrily, his eyes not disgraced by the vision of anything man-made while coal burning plants belch more toxins into the air, killing not only my trees but my very own son, aggravating his asthma.

I feel rather strongly about this. Kennedy basically wants me, my trees, my son, all of us to just shut up and drop dead so he can enjoy sailing unimpeded. Great.

Throughout America, we bellow we must change only one thing we are unable to change is our desire to live in the Garden of Eden while dooming the greater mass of humanity to live in the Pits of Hell. This is why we transported our dirty industries to China. China gets pollution and we get to pretend the degradation of the planet isn't caused by us even though we are the consumers of all that pollution producing stuff from Asia.

From Xinhuanet:

Energy experts predicted that the implementation of the Law on Renewable Resources on January 1, 2006 will open up a huge market in China for renewable solar energy.

The new law is expected to boost the development of the country's solar power industry, said the experts.

The Law on Renewable Energy, which was approved by the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee in February this year, will encourages all units and persons to use solar energy-based generation systems. It is regarded as an important law for the safety of China's environment and for the development of its energy resources.

When my father first came to China after Nixon's visit there, one of the many things the Chinese wanted to learn from him was all about solar energy.

They rationally understand there is no future in oil. It is a one time bonanza which we must use wisely so we can create a planet-wide energy net that is renewable. America has historically gone the other way, pretending this world is a ball of oil and can be pumped recklessly forever and ever. The ecosystem is now in greater and greater danger and we want to live in our bubble and eat it, too.

From the Manchester Journal:

Discussion of the proposed windmills on Glebe Mountain has so far focused on aesthetic and environmental issues. I should like to add some comment on the practical and financial aspects of this project. As a scientist I always find it disturbing that the public is often called upon to make important decisions in the absence of relevant data.

Due to the unpredictable nature of wind, the market value of electricity produced by windmills is quite low, at something less than 2.5 cents per KiloWatt-Hour. Given the high cost of construction and maintenance of windmills such as those proposed one can reasonably expect the actual cost of the power generated to greatly exceed its true market value, probably costing in the vicinity of 9-10 cents per KiloWatt-Hour. Clearly wind power is not a practical endeavor and cannot be expected to yield economic benefits to the public as a whole.

Being giganticus energeticus, we T-rex around the entire energy issue. Since we want to live in a total bubble, this requires unheard of and totally impractical energy needs.

I, for example, use no airconditioning. I use little heat, building my house to be energy efficient and solar energy use is very high thanks to the simple act of designing a sane house, not some energy dependent bubble zone.

I lived in a tent on this mountain for ten years. No running water and only one solar panel for electricity. We lived just fine. Far from merely surviving, we thrived. I love my much stronger bubble, a tent is not good in terrible storms! But the energy use isn't that much higher, in the house.

We are at the Hubbert Oil Peak. This means, all systems are going full blast and all possible sources of fossil fuels are being exploited to the maximum and the discovery of new fields is shrinking rapidly, they are smaller and smaller and harder and harder to find!

So we have a very limited time frame, less than twenty years, I will be in my seventies with another thirty years to go since I intend to live to see 2050, and we will be in the iron grip of the Real Energy Crisis, the Dawn of the Really Dark Ages if we don't do the right thing now!

The windmills off the coast are a feeble attempt at dealing with all this. It is 100% useless unless it is coupled with forcible changes to the building codes and redirection of Federal funds. We don't need to build more civilian housing in the path of hurricanes such as Martha's Island or Miami or New Orleans! We should be in the middle of a very massive retrofitting of all American homes in the north to take advantage of passive and active solar energy and on all southern houses, 100% of them should be already installing solar energy panels! 100% of them should be built with small windows facing the south and west whereby the most hot sunlight falls, they should have thick walls with masonary exteriors to take up the heat during the day and expell it at night like my parent's ranch did. Only the windows faced WEST and the house overheated until we built big verandahs with sun blocks!

It infuriates me, how childish adults are concerning all this. If they want natural purity, then they can join me and live on a mountain in a tent with no running water and kerosene lamps at night! Go to bed early, get up early. In winter, scream if you go into bed without first warming it with a brick! Heh. Brrr.

Makes one strong. Powerful, like I am today!
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Congress Seeks to Cut Vet Benefits Yet Again and Shoppers Slip Out of Stores

2005-12-27T00:07:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

More gloom and doom: Congress is worried about all the money flowing to victims of our stupid imperialist wars and so they want to make it harder for those welfare queens: sick or injured vets. And who votes for these stupid Congress critters? Also, the American consumer is fading fast thanks to inflation and flight of good jobs to distant shores. Fun.

From the Washington Post:

The spiraling cost of post-traumatic stress disorder among war veterans has triggered a politically charged debate and ignited fears that the government is trying to limit expensive benefits for emotionally scarred troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the past five years, the number of veterans receiving compensation for the disorder commonly called PTSD has grown nearly seven times as fast as the number receiving benefits for disabilities in general, according to a report this year by the inspector general of the Department of Veterans Affairs. A total of 215,871 veterans received PTSD benefit payments last year at a cost of $4.3 billion, up from $1.7 billion in 1999 -- a jump of more than 150 percent.

Maybe Babs Bush can go to Walter Reed and say, "Let them eat depleted uranium." Geeze. They cut taxes for the very rich how long ago? Last month?

This really steams me since they pretended four years ago that we could cut taxes and go to war, an insane proposition. Now we have to tightnen our belts but only if we are patriotic unlike the owners of those off-shore corportions and of course, Halliburton.

From the New York Times;

Many retailers hoping for a big finish to the holiday season instead had lighter-than-expected crowds over the long Christmas weekend, according to anecdotal reports, leaving stores to rely heavily on the next few days to pump up December sales.

Explanations for the lackluster finish varied: an unusually warm winter hurt cold-weather clothing sales, greater gift card use delayed purchases and higher energy costs discouraged splurges.

When oh when will businesspeople finally learn, if you spew or demand propaganda instead of intelligent analysis of reality, reality will bit like a Great White Shark. The stockmarket shot up on fake news. This cynical ploy set in motion by the big trading houses on Wall Street and Bloomberg, the mayor/owner of economic newspapers, will now leave the average investor,namely Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class Chump, out on the limb yet again. Think Bloomberg believes the garbage he sponsors?

Hahaha.

From the Times Union, Albany:

Rising natural gas prices are not hurting just consumers and businesses, but also the power plant companies that make electricity by burning natural gas.
Natural gas futures are trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at roughly $12 per 1,000 cubic feet, nearly double what the price was a year ago.

That is costing electric power plants in New York, many of which use natural gas as fuel, said Gavin Donohue, chief executive of the Independent Power Producers of New York Inc.

"It certainly is a big dramatic impact, as it is for all businesses and consumers alike," Donohue said. "There obviously is no end in sight. It's a big impact, and it obviously impacts everybody's bills."

For ever-loving Marie Antoinette, in the name of all the devils in the Yale Crypt of the Skull and Bones, it was ridiculously obvious to me since last summer that this was going to happen. Dozens of cartoons expressed this obvious truth: we are in serious trouble on every possible level thanks to rising energy costs coupled with inflation and rising interest rates!

This isn't rocket science, this is simply, I don't seen to have Economic Pundit Alzheimer's disease which seems to be required of every paid economic pundit in America. Friedman gets his stupid books and columns sold over every counter in America and they are worthless except to burn in the fireplace when the money runs out for paying the fuel bills.

Note that I run this service for free and have few readers. This doesn't matter to me for this is just another chapter in the future saga, a big fat book called, "The Fall of the American Empire/ World War III". And I won't make any money on that one, either.

Probably will have to write it on clay tablets, or maybe paint it on cave walls. Gads.
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Happy Hannuka and Remembering the Quarter Million Dead This Anniversary

2005-12-26T23:00:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

This week, the Hannuka candles are lit in many homes including that of my own family. And this is the anniversary of the Boxing Day Quake. A quarter million people were swept away suddenly. Today, we pray for them and for all those people who have died this year, there are so many, so very many, let us remember them if only for a little bit. The Gates of Death will be all our destination, too, eventually.

From the BBC:

"I think you need to come back," Swedish survivor Pigge Werkelin, who lost his two young sons and his wife in the disaster, told Reuters news agency.

"You need to go to the beach, you have to see children on the beach, you have to see everything... I must do it and then afterward I can put it behind me."

The pain of loss is on many levels. Such as this person, when you lose the one you choose to love, it causes a hole in the heart which remains there no matter how hidden. I know, my grandfather's first love, she died before they could consumate the marriage. He married my grandmother and never talked about the previous love until his last days when Elizabeth was much on his mind. He thought I was her, often times, and talked to me as if nothing had ever happened.

The loss of children is a whole different dimension. There is considerable rage attached to losing one's child. I can only imagine what it feels like, I have children. When my son was born, I nearly died. What did I say to the doctors? "Don't let anything happen to my baby, don't worry about me."

Parents throw themselves into incredible danger to save their children. This fall, when our area was hit by sudden floods, two children were swept away by the raging waters and the stepfather threw himself in to save them and they all drowned.

This is love on a heroic scale. And everyone is a hero, whether we care for a loved elderly person or a child, the patient work or the sudden rush to danger, this need to save the ones we love, nay, the desire to save even total strangers, this is what makes humanity worth loving and is why we must ask all our gods of whoever they think they are, to show us some mercy.

And for us to love the mother of all mothers, the number one in our extended family: Mother Earth. For She is of uttermost importance. If we take care of Her and show Her respect and love, She will try Her best to be gentle with us, in return.
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The Alternate Minimum Tax Is DC's ATM Machine

2005-12-26T22:10:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Otherwise eager, the tax cutters in Congress can't muster the moxie to cut taxes to the middle class. The contempt they have for the average voter never ceases to amaze me. The ones benefitting from tax cuts are only 2% of the population! Amazing.

From Yahoo:

The alternative minimum tax is becoming even stickier — and could entangle even more taxpayers next year.

Congress is expected to recess for the holidays without an agreement on how to limit the effect of the AMT for 2006. While the AMT is expected to affect about 4 million taxpayers for 2005, that number will swell to about 21.6 million for 2006 unless Congress acts to lessen the impact.

Congress has said it will do so next year, making it retroactive to Jan. 1, but it's still unclear exactly how that will play out, since other initiatives, like extending cuts on capital gains and dividends, loom in the background.

They never ever index anything the poor or middle class uses. Never. When forced to index Social Security of be hounded out of office, they did so but after a few years, rigged the statistics by leaving out all those things the elderly must pay for due to being on a fixed income and not likely to be buying the stuff young people buy, now Social Security falls further and further behind, this year being a huge insult to all retired people since the hike was less than the health care deductions so everyone had a net LOSS. Congress scrambled to make it the same as last year but no hike to make up for the huge inflation in essentials.

So it is with the taxes: the GOP cheerfully and without much debate, in the teeth of a flood of red ink, drowning in red ink, cuts taxes to the rich, the corporate, the oil barons and Wall Street. But facing the rising wrath of the middle class which has seen the tax cuts of 2001 burn in the bonfire of government created inflation as the Fed pumps money and hides the results by refusing to publish any more M3 stats....Well!

Welcome to hell, dear Middle Class America! You all thought the fires and pitchforks would be reserved for Welfare Queens. Well, your welfare irks the GOP and they will crown you all with a crown of thorns. As they rip apart your wealth, simultaneously decreasing the value of your house and cars while reducing the value of the dollar, we will all kiss our pretend prosperity goodbye.

As a very long range bad news forecaster, well known at economic sites as the Cassandra of the Titanic, I assure everyone, in this matter, I will have the last bitter laugh as everything I have put on the web for years comes true, one item after another. Lord help us this doesn't end up in the Apocalypse as desperate middle class Americans run from one side of the ship to the other screaming at the lifeboats leaving, rowed by our politicians, desperately rowing away with the rich, to far shores, anywhere, as bombs rain down on our heads and the cities burn with riots and insurrections.

Yup.

I have seen this happen to other lands. We have seen world wars and we know they can and do happen and that economic mayhem causes them as great empires teeter and fall in flames.

The fact that Congress can't just gaily go off cutting taxes they need while cutting taxes their owners don't want to pay, we end up bankrupt. Congress will pass this tax cut and "save" the middle class....by bankrupting America. Will the last taxpayer, probably a waitress somewhere, please turn out the lights as you leave, OK? We won't be able to afford the electric bill.

Grazias.
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After Secret Trips, Cheney Emerges To Cut Benefits
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The Weather Develops Long Range Patterns of Drought/Flood Zones

2005-12-26T15:12:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As global warming continues to change the ocean currents and air flows of our planet, we see vast changes on the ground. One of the most noticable changes are in the Temperate Zones which are much more active and has been having flood/drought cycles that are not seasonal but due to shifts in persistent highs as they travel from west to east across the upper latitudes.

The NOAA Storm Track Web Page:

Storm tracks and cyclogenesis/cyclolysis locations for the past 10, 30, and 90 days. Tracks are based on an algorithm developed at the Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) [Serreze (1995), and Serreze et al.

I won't quote more because NOAA has been told by Bush to be nasty to anyone who accesses this public information. He would really like to have it cloaked from view just like everything else he is able to control and have no one see it except the rich, of course. But you can click on it to see their charts and maps.

I have used some of this information (wow! I happen to be a taxpayer so I would like to inform NOAA that they get their money from me in the bitter end, eh, guys?) to make easier to read, simpler charts. The main point is, from the summer solstice cycle to the winter solstice which was just a few days ago, we have been in a persistent cycle of a high over Spain/Canary Islands and the Pacific Ocean west of Mexico. The vast majority of storms have been either on the equator, as usual, or above the 40th degree latitude.

This map shows the main tracks of major storms this half a year. Right now, right over my mountain, is a storm, it is bringing rain and warm temperatures since it is not following the usual winter track but is following the same slot all those hurricanes this year traveled. We have had some severe blasts of winter but mostly without much snow. This is because of the drought conditions over the Rockies. Very few storms are coming ashore on the West Coast, as you can see, the persistent low is over the upper Pacific next to Alaska and most storms have curved away from the West Coast and sailed back up north again. This is keeping the Rockies unusually dry.

One chart shows storms tracking from Japan, across the Pacific and then they peter out when hitting the US and then, once into the Mississippi Valley, get moisture from the Gulf and become a storm again. These dip way down into Georgia and then chug up the coast to the Northeast. This means our storms are unusually warm. No Arctic Expresses.

If you go to any website running daily Jet Stream forecasts, one sees this winter a wobbly line due to the fact that the jet stream is scrolling up and over these highs instead of plunging down across the continent.

The chart at the top of this page shows the footprint of rainfall this half a year. It was very much an all or none proposition. One reason why the spectatular hurricanes from the Gulf petered out so rapidly when approaching landfall this year was due to this persistent drought pattern. Note how a great deal of rain fell in the Gulf itself and only three pretty narrow tracks made it over land, one curling down over the Central America, the other running straight up the Mississippi Valley and the last one across Florida. We got clipped by these storms and we had a terrible drought for over two months up here. Now we are in a wet cycle with frequent rain...In winter! If this isn't standing Nature on Her head!

Past weather patterns can be thrown out the window these days. A more dynamic system is proving to be one big surprize. Like everyday is Boxing Day for Mother Nature. She boxes us and we try to duck!

One of our readers alerted me to this editorial in the New York Times:

ONE year ago today we stared aghast at images of the Southeast Asian tsunami. These were mostly improvised clips rendered all the more poignant by their amateurishness. Video cameras taken on vacation to record the everyday pleasures of the beach were suddenly turned to quivering utility as they documented the panic and mayhem of a natural disaster. Somehow, domestic pleasure turned on its head only added to the sense of chaos and loss. Who can forget the disbelief in the recorded voices? This can't be happening to us.

Human beings are never prepared for natural disasters. There is a kind of optimism built into our species that seems to prefer to live in the comfortable present rather than confront the possibility of destruction. It may happen, we seem to believe, but not now, and not to us. There is nothing new in this attitude.

I hate to differ with the good man, but this isn't true!

In warm, pleasant climes, people get careless. They ignore dangers because there are so few. Like pampered pets, they become trusting and lacsidasical. People with this sort of attitude don't last long up here in the cold mountains. We watch the weather with a very wary eye. "If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes (and it will change)" is an old joke out here. Propably the Indians cracked it when the Pilgrims showed up.

For a Temerate Zone, we have it pretty drastic here, quite often. When haying the fields in a fog, I noticed the horse and the oxen getting very nervous and anxious. Chip and Dale's great big ears with many sensitive hairs, swivveled and cocked to the west. Their noses quivered and they rolled their eyes to me and mooed. Distantly, I heard the rumble of thunder, I am nearly as sensitive to this as the oxen. I screamed to Chris and John to run for their lives and I gathered up all the livestock who were already quite alarmed and we all run as fast as possible to the stables.

Bang. Black as night, 90 mph winds, lightning, trees groaning and crashing to the ground. One of my neighbors was lifted out of the hayloft by the twister but he fell onto some more hay and wasn't even hurt, along with a calf.

But you see, people who don't pay attention don't last long. And we sniff out winter. How many days left before it comes, we weigh it carefully, those of us who live in tents, anyway! Now that I don't live in a tent, I am more careless, slightly. Don't need to worry so much.

But our ancestors had to be very wary and move fast. This included telling if a drought was settling in. This is why we are basically nomads and why we tend to range about the place. This is why we spread so far, so fast.
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Previous similar articles:
http://culturelifesciencenews.blogspot.com/2005/12/siberian-swans-come-to-merry-england.html
http://culturelifesciencenews.blogspot.com/2005/11/nature-magazine-atlantic-current-is.html
http://culturelifesciencenews.blogspot.com/2005/10/global-warming-causes-more-snow-to.html
http://culturelifesciencenews.blogspot.com/2005/10/wishful-thinking-about-mother-nature.html
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Apocalyptic Right Wing Nuts Take Over Airforce Academy

2005-12-26T09:12:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

People planning for creating Armaggeddon have built mega-churches all around the Airforce Academy because subverting American youth into cogs in the Apocalypse machinery is how they plan the implimentation of The End of Time. You see, the AF is who controls many of those wonderful nuclear missiles! It is vital that we not let insane religious nuts access to launching nuclear war.

From Online Journal:

Four Air Force officers -- all graduates of the Air Force Academy's class of 2004 -- have recently joined a lawsuit that accuses leaders at the academy of overtly pressuring cadets to undertake evangelical religious instruction. The original lawsuit was filed in October by Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force officer and graduate of the academy, whose son experienced religious discrimination while attending the school.

A number of news outlets have covered this story but few go as far as this fine article by
Devlin Buckley.

In addition to being headquarters for Air Force Space Command, Northern Command, NORAD, numerous Air Force bases, and the Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs is also home to the nation's largest, most influential and politically active evangelical organizations: James Dobson's Focus on the Family, which is so large that it maintains its own zip code, claims more than 200 million followers worldwide, and is located directly across the highway from the academy.

And more than his organization, every lunatic End of Times organization has parked a van next to the AF academy! Few people connect all the dots, of course, I must be one of the few. One fact one must remember is that on 9/11, Bush threw all the reporters off the plane and secretly, yes, SECRETLY flew to Offutt Airforce Base where I am assuming (correctly) that he talked about the Apocalypse and how they all were going to be in the front rows of it all and how they would all be Jesus' death rays, raining death on one third of humanity, Hallelujia!A professional team providing worldwide reconnaissance, real-time intelligence, command and control, information warfare and combat support to national leadership and warfighting commanders.Here is their mission:

A professional team providing worldwide reconnaissance, real-time intelligence, command and control, information warfare and combat support to national leadership and warfighting commanders.

Note what a superb job they did on 9/11---Not! Over and over one has to ask this very important question: why did all the officers, all of the Airforce officers trained in Colorado, sit on their asses on 9/11? They sat there, slack-jawed as not one but four civilian airliners were hijacked and not one but three reached their targets, one being the Pentagon, and did this over a long time period, leisurely, taking their sweet time, flying way out of the way, flying at subsonic speeds past many of the biggest Airforce bases on the East Coast and note one plane intercepted them, trailed after them, did virtually anything.

It was either the world's biggest case of rank incompetence as has characterized the entire Bush maladministration or it was deliberate and I fall in the "deliberate" camp very strongly at this point. The sad fact is, we can't trust our own Airforce anymore because they no longer exist to protect America, they exist to cause World War Three. The harrassment of Jewish on other religionists at the academy is important because they need 100% co-conspiritors who will trigger the Apocalypse on command. Right now, there are enough non-Apocalypticans in the system to raise the alarm or leak the conspiritor's plans to the public.

Bush is the leader in this conspiracy. Like Hitler before him, his family's good friend, Bush wants to take the entire planet down with him if he is going to go up in flames. This is typical of megamaniacs. Just like a drunken sot, after bankrupting the family, up to his ears in saloon bar tabs and gambling debts, strangles the children in their beds, kills the wife and then goes out and has a shoot-out with the police. Some go further like Jim Jones who famously ordered all his followers to drink purple Kool Aid.

During the late 1970's, Jones had been abusing prescription drugs and appears to have become increasingly paranoid. Rumors of human rights abuses circulated. As in most high-intensity religious groups, there was a considerable flow of people joining and leaving the group.

Bush is showing signs of someone either taking drugs again or drinking heavily again or both. He is certainly paranoid. He talks bizarrely, walks erratically, falls at odd times when there is nothing really tripping him up, careens about crashing into things, his behavior is enough to trigger an impeachment for incapacity to run the nation.

But this won't happen unless Americans wake up in alarm and the problem here is the 33% of America that wants Jesus to rain death from on high, for the heavens to open up and disgorge nuclear missiles on all those blue voting cities. The critical divide here is stark: much of the population centers, all ground zeros for the Apocalypse's nuclear missiles, voted against the born again Christians and their leaders! Listen carefully to the idle chat in the red rural areas. "Maybe we should nuke LA and kill all those kooks!"

As we note here, this crazy 33% has turned Christmas into a nightmare whit their incessant whining about lack of Jesus (he hated hypocrites above all people) and thier boycotts of businesses and strong armed attacks on businesses who tried to appeal to any and all minorities or women's groups. They have supported illegal and unconstitutional actions of their paranoid, insane leader and his gang of co-conspiritors. They reall do believe that Jesus is going to murder masses of humans so they can "inherit the earth" and consume all that lovely oil, toodling around Kansas in their Humvees, laughing diabolically.

In other words, they will become the devils they claim they will defeat.

From the People's Daily:

The cabinet and the Security Council of Japan approved Saturday a budget in fiscal 2006 to proceed with joint development of a next-generation missile interceptor with the United States.

"With the results of Japan-U.S. research so far and given the current international circumstances, it is appropriate to efficiently push forward to joint development in order to secure the capability to deal with the threat of ballistic missiles," Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe said in a statement.

For the joint development of the upgraded version of the Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) with the United States, the cabinet approved Saturday 3 billion yen (about 25.54 million U.S. dollars) as development costs in fiscal 2006 and 700 million yen (about 5. 96 million dollars) for remaining work of joint research.

The move to develop the advanced SM-3 missile interceptor is politically sensitive , considering Japan's pacifist constitution and strict arms exports controls.

Abe stressed that Japan needs to be able to defend itself against ballistic missiles and that arms exports to the United States related to the joint missile defense project are exempt from Japan's weapons export ban, under the condition that they are strictly managed.

Anyone remember World War II? Remember how the Japanese fought to the very last man on each tiny island? How the civilians on Okinawa were ordered to jump to their deaths rather than surrender? How America decided to commit a war crime and nuke, without warning, two civilian populations in Japan in order to scare the Emperor into finally surrendering? And the crazy Emperor who was raised to believe he was a god, finally ran behind the backs of the military men surrounding him and surrendered suddenly when they were preparing to fight literally to the death?

Gads. Let's give that culture a bunch of nuclear missiles!

This is why we should all be alarmed about what is happening to the Airforce Academy. We could end up as Imperial Japan. Already, we are hyper-hostile and vicious. We try to clothe our crimes in Iraq in the garb of freedom and liberty but this is collapsing even as I type, the civil war there is now roiling in ernest and our military leaders are, like in Imperal Japan, lying to us, they claim they are pulling out troops while they aren't because it is deteriorating there fast.

And yet more WWIII news here: From RIAN, Russia:

The launch has been conducted successfully," Sergei Ivanov said in a report to the Russian President. "The separation of all stages, combat and simulation blocks occurred according to pre-set parameters."

It was earlier reported that the missile was launched Wednesday from the submerged Dmitry Donskoy, a Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine, and successfully hit its dummy target at the Kura test site on the Kamchatka Peninsula.

"What is important is that the submarine was moving [underwater], it was not stationary," the minister said.

Um, the anti-missiles in Japan can't stop this! The waters around Japan are teeming with subs from China, Russia and the USA. Not to mention North Korea. If many if not all of them have nuclear warheads, this is a great place to launch WWIII. Of course, Iran/Iraq will have subs and nukes too, eventually. Thanks to the stupid war we brought to Iraq, Iran will become the world's biggest oil exporter.

From Al Jazeera:

Sheikh Ahmad Fahad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, the president of Opec, said at a press conference on Sunday that Russia was the world's second-leading oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia and a critical force in ensuring oil market stability.

OPEC never stabilized prices. But they are a great place for people to make deals of various sorts. The Saudi attempt at curtailing Saddam's power has backfired badly and now they have, on their east and north flanks, angry Shi'ites who have a nasty chip on the shoulder and who openly proclaim the Saudi royals are not taking care of the spiritual side of Mecca and they should run Mecca.

And then there is bin Laden. The man who looks like Jesus. The man who is the mirror image of Jesus and who talks like and acts like Death Ray Jesus, wielder of the Apocalypic Lightning Bolts. The remarkable similarity of him to the born again right wing Republican's idea of what Jesus is all about is amazing. It is exactly as the Bible foretold: the "Christians" would follow the Evil Jesus and worship him.

For these so-called "Christians" are in cahoots with bin Laden. This is why they didn't fight back when he supposedly attacked us on 9/11, this is why all our security forces set up to track terrorists allowed them to openly function before 9/11, this is the only explanation for why, when we supposedly had bin Laden cornered the following December, we suspended fighting and allowed him to "escape". This is why he openly called for Bush to be reinstalled as "President" and why barely a soul working for Bush mentions his name and of course the anthrax killer who is obviously very close to Bush and the born again conspiritors who are planning the Apocalypse....Note how little they talk about HIM and how feeble the hunt for this serial killer goes!

Happy New Year, everyone. Impeach Bush, put them all in jail.

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The Great 1914 Christmas Truce

2005-12-24T11:46:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Just a mere four months after WWI began, the death grinding stalemate along the Western Front was suddenly and spontaneously broken on Christmas dawn when both sides set aside their weapons and exchanged greetings. "Peace on Earth" was shouted as well as carols sung. This disturbed the emperors and industrialists who feared workers uniting across imperial boundries more than anything on earth.

From the Independent:

Live-and-let-live accommodations occur in most wars. Chronicles since Troy record stops in fighting to bury the dead, to pray to the gods, to assuage a war-weariness, to offer signs of amity encouraging mutual respect. But none had happened on the scale or duration - or the potential for change - as when the shooting suddenly stopped on Christmas Eve 1914.

Imagine if the foot soldiers in any chronicle dared to defy the guys wearing all that armor and simply refuse to fight for several days! And partied with the "enemy"?

Of course, this is severely frowned upon! The rulers and leaders might arrange truces and then warily, the footsoldiers pick up the dead and injured and secure themselves jointly. But for the soldiers to drop arms themselves and do as they please?

No! Sehr verboten!

At first, the officers on the line, relieved at this pause in the killing which was decimating their own ranks pretty rapidly, breathed easily and let the men fraternize in the No Man's Zone. The soldiers, sensing this hesitation, began to play games and share booze and in general, humanize each other. They also began to discuss the stalemate and what that really meant for them.

This terrified the generals who began to demand fighting resume. Only it wasn't enthusiastically endorsed by the troops. The germs of insurrection and defiance began to set roots and in desperation, both side's leaders forced the issue, resuming fighting by using their long range guns which were staffed by soldiers who only heard rumors of what was transpiring.

General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien's order to II Corps from his cushy rear-area headquarters read: "On no account is intercourse to be allowed between opposing troops. To finish this war quickly we must keep up the fighting spirit."

I do recommend the famous Blackadder series. There are seveal hilarious and sad WWI episodes as Black Addar, a low ranking officer, schemes to get out of "goin over the top". In one scene, he is talking to a General who is in Paris, of course, they never spent any more hours in the front as Rummy and his gang spend in Iraq!---and the General explains his plan for victory. "Oh, so the plan is to have everyone die, right?" asks Blackadder with open disgust. "Why, yes! And how did YOU know this, Blackadder? Are you the secret German spy?" Blackadder rolls his eyes.

You see, the workers of the various nations were trying for at least 20 years to form an international. This was the most terrifying thing the imperialists could imagine and they were moving heaven and earth to prevent this. One of the biggest internationalist meetings was to happen on....just after the assassination of the Archduke of Austria. Needless to say, the meeting fell apart as representatives of various unions from several different empires retreated and declared alliegence to their respective governments (or face execution!) and since the communists managed to topple the aristocracy in Russia and found the Soviet state during this war, this hiked up the terror of the industrialists and capitalists who were making tons of money off of WWI.

The last thing they wanted was a "homebase" for the internationalists but then Stalin took care of that, didn't he? Bye, bye birdie.

Well, here we are, no peace on earth thanks to America, our empire doggedly trying to steal oil from a bear trap that has fastened its teeth firmly on our hand and we are chained to Iraq and can't escape and meanwhile, our government is less and less American and more and more Soviet/Hitlerian and we are felling really nasty about each other and of course, our rulers, rather than allowing a truce in the Kulture Kampf, are fighting us in bezerker mode now.

For example, from Americablog:

Seems that the official GOP homepage doesn't say "Jesus" or "Merry Christmas" anywhere. This is beyond moronic, it is ultimately a slap in all our faces. These irritable, irresponsible people are madly and desperately trying to drive us into disasterous wars so they can feel religious and quaint.

They are bankrupting America and this month, slicing off funds going to the poor, the destitute, the lame and halt and are in toto, acting like demons from hell. The true Christmas spirit which broke out in 1914 is absent in 2005 America. This is because a significant number of Americans hate their own people. This is so sad. One wonders why. After all, there is plenty of hate to go around in this world, why generate even more over stupid things like saying "Happy Holidays," especially since the haters don't even pretend to bother policing themselves.

So HAPPY HOLIDAYS, everyone. Wasshail.

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Right Wing "Christians" Force Doll Maker To Cut Off Funds To Charities

2005-12-23T10:08:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The right wing Christian Taliban attempt at forcing Ford to cut off all contact with gay organizations and publications has failed but this doesn't stop them. Today, they managed to force a doll maker to cut off liberal donations. They are determined to prevent any and all money going to any liberal organization or event. This coincides with GOP attempts at punishing any corporation that gives support to Democrats.

From CBS News:

With $379 million in sales last year, the American Girl dolls are just like the girls who adore them — wholesome and sweet and rooted in American history.

They were a huge hit in the Wiesner household.

Claire Wiesner says, "They are so much fun to play with and they seem so real." Her sister Elena adds, "And they're really pretty."

Renee Wiesner, Claire's mom tells CBS News correspondent Mika Brzezinski, "Everything that they sold to us seemed very consistent with our values."

That was until the Wiesners found out that the American Girl company donates money to an organization called Girls Incorporated, which offers support to underprivileged girls. Girls Inc. also endorses Roe v. Wade — the right to abortion and it promotes acceptance of homosexuality. It's an association that families like the Wiesners are protesting with their wallets.

Give the little girls Eva Braun dolls! Hey! Of course, we can't prevent such boycotts. They are an American right which the right loves to wield themselves but if we do this, they scream that we are unamerican.

The neo-Nazi Pope is encouraging all this sort of thing. The lunatics who want the Apocalypse also want unfettered human reproduction because this is a race/religion war that is won using women's bodies to crank out cyphers for the churck and state. Namely, Muslim reactionaries are preventing birth control and encouraging population growth which is why their birth rate has been so high though, as they congregate into cities, the urge to have many children is dropping just like it does in any other part of the world, this ideological race is important to white, Christian racists.

Right wing Jews do this, too, for that matter. Have gigantic families so they can extend their little empires. Ditto the Mormons. All religious groups know that preaching converts few but raising children as captives of various ideologies is a great way to keep a religion or political organization expanding!

The other side of this dangerou coin is, rapidly growing populations then neeed "lebensraum" and this means killing as many people who are in the way as fast as possible. Millions and millions of people died during WWII in this race to kill off rival civilian populations. This is why all modern wars end up targetting women and babies.

Much of the planet uses English because with the industrial revolution and the introduction of the potato, the population of the British/Irish Isles exploded. The excess population was shipped out as fast as possible to the four corners. This also happened to Germany which sent so many to America, the chief language almost became German. Ich bin halb deutsch.

Emigraton was shut down in the twenties after WWI and Germans were not welcome thanks to that stupid, useless war so Hitler did two things: tried to force "Aryan" women to have lots of children and then use them as tools and an excuse to invade other people's countries and annihilate or enslave them. Kinder/Kuchen/Kirche ends in a bloodbath.

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NYC Police Deliberately Provoke Police Attacks on Demonstrators

2005-12-23T09:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

This developing story from the time of the giant antiwar demonstrations in NYC and the GOP Conventions here continues to evolve just like the spying on Americans story. We live in a bonafide police state. The GOP, just like when they controlled events when Nixon was elected, allow the police and military and spy networks to run amok, infiltrating demonstrations in order to start a fake riot by pretending to attack the police or spying on little old Quaker ladies. This has to stop, now.

From the New York Times;

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

This is insanity. The bike riders who promote healthy living and better use of our public streets have always been totally peaceful. Their goals are totally laudable and completely legal. Their actions are legal, they simply pedal down various streets in a large enough group to force cars to yield the right of way which is totally legal.

Provided with images from the tape, the Police Department's chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, did not dispute that they showed officers at work but said that disguised officers had always attended such gatherings - not to investigate political activities but to keep order and protect free speech. Activists, however, say that police officers masquerading as protesters and bicycle riders distort their messages and provoke trouble.

They are shameless. How dare they claim planting hostile police in peaceful demonstrations, police agents who hide their identity and then try to uge people do break the law or rush fellow officers and pretend to fight them aren't protecting free speech!

Far from it! Never ever in my life have I seen the police protect left wing demonstrators. They will surround blatant Nazis with cops so enraged residents and citizens can't hound them out of their own communities but lefties, well, we are on our own. We can't hold any demonstrations without the police being blatantly hostile. They won't protect us from violent rightwingers if we are outnumbered, for example.

I have been charged with riots that the police themselves deliberately started. One of the funniest attempts was when they blamed me for a riot I wasn't even aware of, being home, sick with the flue at the time. They had to apologize for that one and it was a turning point in my relations with them for they had to meet with me and listen to my good advice on how to prevent a riot, not start one.

Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said the department did not increase its surveillance of political groups when the restrictions were eased. The powers obtained after Sept. 11 have been used exclusively "to investigate and thwart terrorists," Mr. Browne said. He would not answer specific questions about the disguised officers or describe any limits the department placed on surveillance at public events.

Jethro M. Eisenstein, one of the lawyers who brought the lawsuit 34 years ago, said: "This is a level-headed Police Department, led by a level-headed police commissioner. What in the world are they doing?"

What are they doing? What police always do, every time, since the beginning of time: abuse power. They can't help it. This is what they live for. This is why the overreaction to potential terrorism inevitably leads them into trying to destroy pesky citizens who are trying to change society peacefully. Their idea of order is Ordnung. Namely, everyone obeys authority without question and keeps their heads down, passive sheep herded in whatever direction the rulers capriciously wish.

Well, they herded us all into a fake war, an illegal war and this war was hatched by former Trotskyites who switched sides and decided to unleash the full power of the police state aparatus upon what used to be free Americans. Luring police into behaving like despots is easy. And allowing the military to bloat up and abuse the planet is easy. Undoing the disasterous results of all this is very difficult.

Today, Rummy and Bush are chiming in that we will now be withdrawing troops from Iraq and Afganistan. This is exactly what bin Laden and the Iranians want and it is a signal that we lost the war Bush launched and just like under Nixon and like with Nixon, as he withdrew troops, he attacked us lefties harder and harder.

Just like in Nam, we are replacing soldiers on the ground with aerial bombing which happen daily in Iraq. We are fighting peasants there as if this were WWII. The civilian bombings by all sides in WWII were war crimes. What we are doing now is a war crime. Like in Nam, when we at least had to contend with MIG flying North Vietnamese who also had ground fire to take us down, we bomb the very poorest people but unlike Vietnam and just like this whole stupid war from day one, we disarmed the Iraqis and then bombed and killed them making this a much more serious war crime!

The whole point of the UN investigations was to insure Iraq was truly disarmed so we could sweep in. The UN still hasn't dealt with their own complicity in this great crime. Historians will record it as such. A conspiracy to defillibrate a nation.

As usual in life, one crime leads to another and the criminal culture spreads like the Avian flu throughout the population, demoralizing and destroying it. We never learn. Our founding fathers understood that a police state is a bad thing. Why can't we figure this out?

Like, read the damn Constitution for once, guys! It ain't just no piece of paper.

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Judge Posner Wants America To Become a Soviet-style State

2005-12-21T20:47:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Richard Posner, a judge, tells Washington Post readers, he wants a 1984-style Big Brother spy program so "terrorists" can be found easily. This is very scary coming from a judge.

From the Washington Post:

Richard Posner , a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, was online Wednesday, Dec. 21, at 2 p.m. ET to discuss his op-ed, 'Our Domestic Intelligence Crisis' , ( Post, Dec. 21, 2005 ), and his contention that U.S. domestic intelligence operations are not a threat to civil liberties, but rather are filling in dangerous gaps in the country's defense against terrorism.

Our borders are completely porous and he evidently thinks the way to make us safe is to have Soviet-style spying on citizens. Of course, the Soviets also wanted impermeable borders which is why Churchill called Soviet controlled states, "The Iron Curtain".

(One of the people participating in the question and answer session) : More importantly, your discussion of the computer vs. human inspection of data is disingenuous. The criterion by which the computers sift the data is determined by humans, and we do not have distinct statutes for automated wholesale invasions of privacy as opposed to human, retail invasions of privacy, to my knowledge.

Next, you make the claim that "the only valid ground for forbidding human inspection of such data is fear that they might be used to ... intimidate the administration's political enemies." The constitution does not, I believe, address the motives associated with "unreasonable search and seizure". It simply prohibits them, so your argument has no bearing.

I could go on, but I will leave it there, and assume that you will let us know more if you feel that it will be necessary to find out if some us "innocent, unwitting" people have "valuable counterterrorist information".

Richard Posner: I did not offer a legal opinion. My concern was with issues of policy. Are you worried about having a conversation of yours (say this conversation) recorded in a government database? Suppose that unbeknownst to you your neighbor is a terrorist, and you happen to mention his name in the conversation. A government computer picks up the name and learning from your conversation where he lives, arrests him.

This sort of bland talk about spying on absolutely everyone just in case someone might inadvertently spill information useful for a government which is seeking someone, this is OK?

What the???? This judge should be impeached for even breaching this point of view in public! He obviously has absolutely no idea what is in our Constitution, what our revolution against England was all about, he is a danger to our democracy and Republic...Just like much of the Supreme Court and Congress which is why we are rapidly morphing into a clone of the former Soviet Union complete with the "going bankrupt fighting Muslim fundies" subheading.

So, this insane judge thinks computers should monitor any and ALL conversations so it can ferret out information it's masters might want for one reason or another? What? Why not put monitors in every home's rooms and track everyone every day. This way, no pedophiles, no druggies, no wife abuse, no tax cheating, no crimes at all. The perfect, safe society.

Sounds like North Korea! Geeze. What a wonder that is.

Why does the right wing which gets all batty over UN helicopters perfectly happy with Big Brother spying on everyone all the time? Here is the "judge" talking about the war on terror as if it is a real war:

...invasions are outside FISA's domain. The Administration position is that the joint resolution of Congress authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda is in effect a declaration of war, and that the activities that the non-FISA surveillance is aimed at thwarting is in effect an attempted invasion of the United States. If that is a sound position, it would justify the non-FISA surveillance that the National Security Agency has conducted, at least as that surveillance has been described by Administration officials.

This is the problem with rhetorical excess.

We are not at war. Just like in Nam, we are attacking people but this doesn't mean America is at war at home. This may sound old fashioned, but declarations of war are written out pretty specifically in that document Bush and his buddies despise so much, our Constitution. Namely, only CONGRESS can declare war and they haven't done this since 1941. So destroying our civil liberties because of the war on drugs or the war on terrorists isn't the same thing at all. These are not countries that can surrender.

These are individuals, often citizens, whose rights are covered by our Constitution. They can't surrender because "drugs" or "terror" aren't states, they are situations. Like declaring war until victory over jaywalkers or sidewalk spitters: it never ends because it is a behavior, not a territory or organization. The war on the Mafia is like that since it is crime spree stuff not Italy. We don't bomb Italy every time a Mafioso blows up a business here or murders an union boss.

This is like the Puritans wanting total power over people so long as "sin" existed. Since sinning never ends and can pop up any time and any place, this means hyper control over everyone all the time and no privacy since one might sin. This uneven human condition means iron controls.

In 1984, Orwell makes it very clear that the various states maintained a condition of permenant, sporatic warfare and terror bombings to keep everyone enslaved. So it is, here. Our policies provoke attacks and then our rulers scream that people are attacking us so they then provoke more attacks, the attacks happen and they scream again, and so on.

Here is the judge again, explaining how it won't harm us to be spied on all the time, the rulers will not notice what we say except when we say the wrong thing...Urg.

Richard Posner: I think it would be highly desirable to explain to the public the tradeoffs between security and privacy. Effective counterterrorism does entail some reduction in privacy. I don't think most people would mind the government's scrutinizing their conversations for information of potential intelligence value if they trusted the government not to misuse the information.

All governments misuse information. If it is OK to pop key words into a computer to monitor all conversations in places where one wants to know what is going on, like election plans at the Democratic Party Headquarter in the Watergate Hotel, what on earth is going to stop them from applying the code and then eavesdropping on important conversations?

Like the devil knows well, give someone the key to the bankvault and tell him no one is guarding it, he will loot it and run.

Always, every time our rulers slyly ask for extrordinary powers, they tell us, "We won't misuse it." And inevitably, they do. They can't help it. The lust to do it is too much to resist. Like putting donuts out and telling cops not to eat them, no?

When the Patriot Act was passed, many of us on the left with long memories of Nixon warned everyone that the assurances they wouldn't spy on Quaker ladies or Franciscan priests or kids checking books out in the library but then....They did. And this will never, ever change. This is why we have a Constitution. This maladministration has curtailed the ability to petition our rulers, to peacefull demonstrate in public, to talk back to our rulers in public, to travel in and out of America without being interrogated about what books we read as happened to this Antiwar.com editor. He went to a peace conference in Malaysia and on his return, was pulled from boarding his jet and interrogated and examined carefully over political matters, what books he was reading, etc.

All extremely unamerican and very Soviet. I remember how one had to be careful about what newspapers or books one carried overseas. One can't enter Saudi Arabia with a Bible, for example! We are supposed to be better than that! As night falls upon our great experiment with being a country and not a huge jail, as our dictator double talks about gulags and concentration camps and torture and how the Constitution and Geneva Conventions don't apply to the "war on terror", we have to strike back.

This means finding out where your politician's offices are and visiting it and telling them, we do not feel safe with a police state. Police states are alway bad, in movies, in books, in comic strips, the police state is the bad guy, never the good guy. Rocky and Bullwinkle were all American and Boris and Natasha were working for Fearless Leader. Bush isn't a Fearless Leader simply because he is a frightened rabbit, but nonetheless, he wants to be Fearless Leader.

Time to escort him off the plane. This judge can leave, too. Move them all to Bagdad and have them live under Sadr's rule.

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After Secret Trips, Cheney Emerges Into Daylight To Cut Funds To the Poor

2005-12-21T11:39:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I hope there is a baby Jesus who will do something about this! Cheney, our resident VP Vampire, sneaking home after sneaky trips to where we are spending over a billion dollars a week, killing Iraqis, comes home to cast the tiebreaking ballot on the budget that cuts funds that go only to Americans. Obviously, the plan is to spend all our money warmongering, eh? Kill Tiny Tim time!

From Yahoo:

The Republican-controlled Senate passed legislation to cut federal deficits by $39.7 billion on Wednesday by the narrowest of margins, 51-50, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote.

The measure, the product of a year's labors by the White House and the GOP in Congress, imposes the first restraints in nearly a decade in federal benefit programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and student loans.

"This is the one vote you'll have this year to reduce the rate of growth of the federal government," said Sen. Judd Gregg (news, bio, voting record), R-N.H., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, in a final plea for passage.

Cut our military budget by 50% and we won't see budget deficits. Heck, cut the funds to Congress and cut Bush and Cheney's aircraft and ground support. Make them fly in regular planes like the peons. And make them walk in public and use public transportation.

After all, if they are so honking popular, why all the troops and security and scrubbing away all real Americans whenever these bubble boy toys?

Our imperial empire is tremendously expensive to run and protecting the world's most unpopular emperor is ruinously expensive. Of course, like all cruel despots, to make the appearance of being fiscally responsible, has to attack the poorest, the weakest people in the empire! As Bush drapes himself with gold and purple cloth lined with ermine, he is telling the poor to go beg at someone else's palace, he hasn't a dime to spare for them!

Far from being a scrooge, he is proligfate in spreading the cheer for his fellow courtiers. More tax cuts, more spending on pork projects, the sky is the limit on seeking loans for one thing after another! To hell with the poor! Let them go to Venezuela for heat, for food! Are there no workhouses there? Ship them out!

Reminds me, Great Britain, when a vast empire, did exactly that. And this is how large parts of America were colonized! From Scotland, from Ireland, from the teeming cities in England itself, they were herded aboard ships and removed to where the Crown, living in palaces, didn't have to see or hear them except when they revolted or rioted.

The French tried this, too. Still didn't stop revolutions and insurrections from happening. The Russian empire shipped out the poor and troublemakers to Siberia and still were annihilated in the end.

Maybe Americans are happy with this Brave New Chickenhawk World. All I know is, I am not. And everyone who isn't must let their voices be heard, don't we? This is going to be one long, hard winter and is the beginning of other, harder winters. We can't just sit here.

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Honda Announces They Will Build New Tech Solar Panels

2005-12-21T10:49:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Japanese company, Honda, announced they will begin production of a revolutionary new type of solar energy panel, the first factory will be built in Japan, of course, and sold only to Japanese first, of course. The Japanese always take care of home base first before reaching outwards. I explain why Japanese companies can afford to have many ventures and try new things.

From Yahoo:

Honda Motor Co. said on Monday it plans to start mass-producing solar cells in 2007, eyeing growing demand for environmentally friendly energy sources.

Japan's third-biggest automaker said in a statement it would build a new factory for solar cells on the site of a car plant in Kumamoto prefecture, on the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu.

The company aims to generate annual sales of 5 billion to 8 billion yen ($40 million to $70 million) from solar cells once the factory's output reaches full annual capacity of 27.5 megawatts, enough to power about 8,000 households.

Japan has to import much of its energy that isn't water power or nuclear power. So the government and the business consortium that runs Japan have a very strong self interest in making Japan as self sufficient vis a vis energy use as possible.

Why are all the Japanese corporations expanding and doing so much research? Let's visit Honda's world-wide research facilities. Honda's research facilities are in three major countries: the USA, Japan and Germany. Note the symmetry here. The USA defeated, temporarily, the Japanese and German empires and then, in a power struggle with the Russian empire, we rebuilt the rival empires and militarily secured them virtually for free. Instead of ending this over the years, we extended this fatally as all empires tend to do. When we "defeated" the Russian empire by bankrupting it with the help of bin Laden, we didn't immediately retract our own military obligations and resize ourselves so we could devote those wasted trillions for military occupations and instead, invest it all in business research projects, we handed the keys to the future to our former military rivals, Germany and Japan.

Germany has had to cope with absorbing the mess of East Germany which has been a huge financial drag on them but at least they don't have to invest vast sums in a military system. Japan has no such problem being unified in all ways possible.

The Japanese, since they process much of the American red ink, have been able to keep interest rates way below world levels. The super cheap loans plus direct government grants, give the Japanese companies room to experiment and play around with future technology. So they happily build robots and rockets, for example. Meanwhile, our businesses are collapsing, contracting and squeezing themselves to death, paying back loans at a ruinous rate vis a vis the rivals in Japan who have it extremely easy.

These super cheap loans aren't accessible to us. They exist only for Japanese nationals. This is because Japan actually has people running it who think preserving the protecting Japan is their number one priority! There is no way they will allow Japanese workers to become fatally discontented! This would mean riots in Tokyo and other things and could bring down the business/government duolopoly.

Honda has brought the world a myriad of leading-edge technologies, such as the CVCC (Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion), the first automobile engine to meet US Clean Air Act requirements. More recently, we led the world in bringing to market a fuel cell vehicle, the FCX.
Our ongoing efforts in research and development play a central role in helping us to create original, innovative products that meet both the expectations of our customers and the needs of society. The Wako Research Center focuses on fundamental research in such fields as electronics, biotechnology and new materials. Four facilities share the initiative in developing new products for tomorrow, with a focus on increased durability, reliability, and performance. The Asaka R&D Center handles motorcycle R&D; the Wako R&D Center is primarily responsible for automotive design development; the Tochigi R&D Center handles automobile R&D; and the Asaka Higashi R&D Center oversees power product R&D.

Note the directions Honda is moving in! They spend a lot on research so they can get patents and lock in control over future use of technology! Meanwhile, America tries to milk money from whatever we have left in our eternal fire sales. Company after company is trying desperately to raise stock value in the short run by cutting funds to research. Or farming research out to China or India.

As Americans get degrees in fields ripe for research, they can't find work here in America unless they hire themselves out to foreign competing companies. This means they end up with divided loyalties as our country fritters away its social base. Instead of protecting our shores, they must work at opening up our markets even more to foreign domination. As we give up being the inventors and become mere consumers, we lose in many ways down the line.

A dear friend of mine just earned his first patent for IBM this month. Congratulations, Van! He didn't get a degree in "Inventions" but we knew as he attended classes at the tech institute that he was a genius for figuring out ways of doing processes. We encouraged him to roam about freely, his tinkering we tried to reward. Verbally, we told him over and over that being able to see something new is a special talent and it was annoying, watching him try to build a career at first.

But then, when he got a temporary job at IBM, they began to relax the controls over him and allowed him to roam more and more and in less than five years, here he is, creating stuff! And I see many patents in his future. He is working for a company that is struggling to keep their research and development alive. It is very hard for them. Our government is handing out money for research but it is often for military stuff and can't be shared with anyone so it is like inventing inside a cave under a dragon's mountain.

Namely, only when the dragon emerges to kill do you get to see it.

Young inventors need to see each other and the work being done around the world. They need to chat, to look at blueprints (sic---now it is strictly CAD data!) and to muck around since creativity is very elusive, you need the right amount of sunshine and water and soil to get those blossoms to bloom.

Honda has announced they are developing robots to use at home. They have a light weight, inexpensive private jet ready for sale in the near future. They have so many things and what do we have?

General Motors.

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Toyota Races Towards Number One World Wide

2005-12-21T09:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

For many, many years, Ford and GM and other American auto companies dominated the world. Thanks to domestic sales to unionized workers and white collar middle class, we sold more cars than the rest of the world put together. The sun is setting on American owned/American designed auto industry and Japan is colonizing our country, building assembly factories like crazy in North America.

From the New York Times:

Toyota and General Motors will be in a neck-and-neck battle for the title of the world's biggest carmaker in 2006, a race that will pit the industry's strongest company against a struggling giant.

Toyota announced in Japan today that it planned to produce 9.06 million cars worldwide in 2006, a 10 percent increase for a company whose plants are now spread across every major continent.

General Motors has not forecast its production for next year; it had planned to build 9.1 million cars in 2005. However, G.M. has announced it will shut three plants in North America next year, part of a plant to close all or part of 12 plants through 2008.

Toyota isn't closing plants in Japan. They are merely building more over here to secure the market here. They are increasing output worldwide while General Motors is shrinking rapidly in the USA. The plants GM is building overseas or in Mexico isn't a good sign, it is a very bad sign for, unlike Toyota, this means they are abandoning their country of origin in search of cheap labor and easy profits. There is no way Toyota would do this to Japan. At the very least, the Japanese insure that cars made for Japanese people are made at home, period.

And, indeed, some analysts said G.M. could stay ahead of Toyota, given the American company's expansion outside the United States. G.M., which now makes more vehicles overseas than at home, plans major investments in China, which it wants to make its second-largest market, behind the United States.

The pretense will be, these factories will make cars for sale to the Chinese by you and I know these cars will end up here in America. The cars made in Mexico are sent up north already.

During the third quarter, for example, Toyota earned a $2.6 billion net profit. G.M., weighed down by heavy pension and health car costs, lost $1.63 billion, and some analysts expect it to lose as much as $5 billion on its North American operations this year.

Toyota has long been coy about its ambitions to become No. 1, preferring to stay out of the spotlight as it grows.

Now why is that? Isn't that odd, not! The reason they don't want us to be aware of the growing power they wield is because they don't want us to do anything! Duh! Our industrial kingpinheads all do dumb things because they really don't understand or care to understand what is happening to the world. Efficient, well designed vehicles have been thrown to the wayside by many Americans who simply wanted fast, fat, gas guzzling monsters so they could feel like brutal bullies. Crowd everyone out, king of the road, me, number one dude, dude!

Our love affair with the gas guzzler/mega bubble lifestyle runs head long into reality and is crashing the planet earth. From the New York Times:

American emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming reached an all-time high in 2004, rising 2 percent from the year before, the Energy Department said, nearly double the average annual rate measured since 1990.

Great. Just great.

The Kyoto Accords negotiations just ended in Canada and we managed to mangle it all and even pretended we aren't so terrible, really, we have reduced pollution only this was all one big fat lie, as per usual these days under Republican controls. The Europeans and Asians want some sort of structure to cope with all this and we just want to guzzle to our heart's content. This is dumb because industries and countries that do curb pollution and prevent gas guzzling are flourishing and ours is dying.

The financial figures that has everyone so happy are dire. We now are in 100% deficit mode, running in the red within our companies, within our government, within trade. This troika usually ends up in causing a depression and this coming depression won't be a fun ride! The government, the financiers and industry owners all think breaking unions, dropping wages, suppressing or diluting labor will make them rich. This impulse to prevent workers from gaining any money or power always ends up in depressions when workers can't buy anything because they have no money.

Since Asia wants the American worker spending money, they lend it out to banks who then tack on a 21%+ interest and relend it to the fast fading workers who then go out shopping.

One reason the hurricanes didn't kill the economy....yet....is only because a boatload of money was lent to us to tide us over and some of this was handed out to the populace at large who then spent most of it on Christmas-style presents. Many of the people surviving the hurricane wanted to feel better so they bought inappropriate things. Now they need more money and it is getting harder and harder to get the government to give it to them. So that boost to the economy is about to end. Starting cold, hard January.

The budget cuts to aid programs set in after January. The money stream flowing to the lower classes is rapidly being shut off. And with the new bankruptcy bill, it will never open up again, either, since one can't "start over again" anymore except if one is very rich.

Then the government steps in and insures rebirth.

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Winter Solstice Madness: Bush Fends Off Impeachment Talk While Saddam Imitates Bush's Fake Piety

2005-12-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The illegal and capricious spying on innocent Americans practicing their First Amendment rights is causing Bush endless headaches. His hit squad of right wing TV and print squawkers are busy yelling that this was neccessary to protect America from Vegans and little old Quaker ladies. Meanwhile, Saddam rips a page from the Bush satanic playbook and is pretending to be pious.

From Yahoo:

A noticeably calmer Saddam Hussein sat quietly in his defendant's chair at the resumption of his trial Wednesday, two weeks after he called the court "unjust" and boycotted a session. When the judge refused to let him take a break to pray, the former leader closed his eyes and appeared to pray from his seat.

Saddam is a much better actor than Bush. Bush has a very hard time sitting still in a church or at funerals. I have watched him crane his head as he looks all around, seeking something distracting to focus on, hoping for bananas, I assume. He squinches up his face when pretending to pray. At solemn occassions he smirks inappropriately. The full force of his right wing buddies in the media have to be applied to make him appear pious. These same idiots spend a lot of time attacking real Christians like President Carter. His piety annoyed Americans because it is sincere.

Humans absolutely love fake piety which is why this is the one thing that irritated Jesus the most and why the rich and the pretend pious, especially if they were both, were the ones doomed to hell.

Meanwhile, back at the homefront stormfront, Rumsfeld broke the ironclad Bush rule of never speaking about bin Laden, old family buddy. From Yahoo:

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden may no longer be able to run the militant network and has not been heard from for nearly a year, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday.

Um, the last time old bin spoke was just before the election where he taunted us to reinstall Bush and was looking forward to Bush bungling for four more years. I am assuming he laughed himself to death when we meekly obeyed and reinstalled the world's most inept leader.

Rumsfeld's comments echoed earlier assessments by the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Ryan Crocker, but contradicted the assertion of al Qaeda's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, in a video interview this month that bin Laden's battle against the West was only just beginning.

Since al Qaeda has been a busy little bee for rather a while and seems pretty unstoppable despite every despot in the world focusing on stopping it, I wouldn't be crowing about bin Laden's silence. What does he have to say to anyone? "Bwahahaha"? Seriously. He has achieved a great thing: he is much bigger than he actually is, namely, he is now a symbol of anti-Americanism and that force is flowing stronger and stronger each day.

We should never forget bin Laden's ultimate game stategy: to tangle America up in a thousand small actions in Muslim lands whereby we must kill religious people with impunity and thus, by forcing us to spend an extra $200+ billion a year on security and an extra $200 billion for the Pentagon which, according to his and my calculations, will bankrupt us in about 5 more lousy years, and voila!

No more American empire. Note how swiftly Russia had to shrink when they went bankrupt! They not only lost all their provinces, Russia itself began to shatter! They are still fighting raging civil wars there.

Since both Rumsfeld and Bush seem to be operating as agents of the bin Laden bankruptcy plans aided and abetted by American capitalists and financiers in Asia, one is very puzzled about this "war on terror." Once the villain announces his nefarious plot, isn't one supposed to use that information to avoid falling into said villain's snares? So why are all our leaders falling into bin Laden's obvious trap?

Smells like traitors, doesn't it? Looting the treasury during wartime is, to me, the ultimate treason. Arrest them all. Sigh.

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Bush Celebrates Handing Power in Bagdad Over to Sadr

2005-12-20T19:29:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Once again, the American media and Bush celebrate drunkenly over events that presage disaster. This latest stupidity concerns the election in Iraq. Seems we just handed over Bagdad to Sadr and his merry band of religious lunatics! Way to go! Alarmed Iraqis cry foul but it won't work since Sadr won power via an election. Next: the civil war explodes in our face.

From Yahoo:

Sunni Arabs alleged Tuesday that last week's parliamentary elections were fraudulent, especially in Baghdad province, and they said if the irregularities are not corrected, new balloting must be held in Iraq's largest electoral district.

An electoral commission official said that while more than 1,000 complaints from the Dec. 15 vote had been received and were being investigated, only 20 were "very serious," and he didn't expect them to change the overall result, which will be announced in early January.

The United Iraqi Alliance — a Shiite party — won about 59 percent of the vote, according to returns from 89 percent of ballot boxes counted in Baghdad province. The Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance Front received about 19 percent, and the Iraqi National List headed by Ayad Allawi, a secular-minded Shiite, got about 14 percent.

The Iraqi Accordance Front, a coalition of three major Sunni groups, rejected those results, warning of "grave repercussions on security and political stability" if the mistakes were not corrected.

Anyone who thinks the election in Iraq was the light at the end of the tunnel is stark raving mad. Even if Sadr and his militia can impose order on Bagdad, this won't mean we can pump all that oil in peace and leave Iraqis nothing. After all, they are in a close alliance with Iran next door who has gone bonkers, too.

If the Jews running Israel think this war is going to make them safe, they are bonkers, too.

So now instead of Saddam menacing Iran we have Iraq and Iran as one major nation with lots of oil who hate our guts and want to see us destroyed.

This is why Bush must be impeached. Not because he is a lying coward who spies on Americans who are peaceful and breaking no laws, he has not only allowed Atta and his gang unhindered passage to destroy parts of America and now he is setting up things so a tidalwave of America haters can now fight us! Every day he remains in power, he and Cheney and the GOP, we get closer to destruction.

From Yahoo:About 24 top former officials in Saddam Hussein's regime, including a biological weapons expert known as "Dr. Germ," have been released from jail, while a militant group released a video Monday of the purported killing of an American hostage.

The first results of Thursday's parliamentary election were released, with officials saying the Shiite religious bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, got about 58 percent of the votes from 89 percent of ballot boxes counted in Baghdad province.

Across Iraq, meanwhile, demonstrations broke out to protest a government decision to raise the price of gasoline, heating and cooking fuel, and the oil minister threatened to resign over the development.

Gads. Are we insane or what? Not only are we pumping the oil, we want them to pay world prices for their own stuff from their own country! While living on third world wages! Exactly like Nigeria which is doing the same thing and contending daily with near riot conditions.

The trial of Saddam is collapsing just as I predicted a year ago. The release of these people shows that trying to try them for, say, wanting anthrax is insane since our own government refuses to even try to find our very real and very American anthrax murderer who is pretty high in the military/secret research accessibility complex. Only a tiny handful of people could have gotten and used the anthrax and of course, there is absolutely NO dragnet to find them. From the President on down, all who have access to this stuff should have been interrogated (heh, at Gitmo!) and examined.

But they weren't and so we can't prosecute them for thinking about using what someone here in America actually did use.

Here is a review of the not so distant past: From China Daily:
Updated: 2004-04-06 13:48

US civil administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer on Monday declared Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as an "outlaw."
A bunch of Marines died trying to capture Sadr. Now we hand over the keys to the Iraqi National Government to him. Here is what he did us last year:
Although he is criticized by many people as too young, radical and inexperienced to lead, al-Sadr has gained support from the young seminary students and unemployed people. He advocated the application of strict Islamic law in Iraq.

Al-Sadr was firmly opposed to the presence of US troops in Iraq. He called on Shiite spiritual leaders to play an active role in shaping Iraq's political future.

Last June, al-Sadr established the Al-Mahdi's Army in spite of military control by the coalition forces.

He was held responsible for the assassination of Abdul Majid al- Khoei, a moderate Shiite leader who was stabbed to death by a mob at a Shiite shrine in the city of Najaf last April. An arrest warrant has been issued against him for murder.

Violent clashes broke out Sunday between al-Sadr's supporters and the US forces, leaving eight US soldiers and at least 28 Iraqis killed.

The events were ignited by the decision of the coalition provisional authority to close the Hawza newspaper that speaks for Sadr and the arrest of one of his top aides, Shaikh Mustafa Al Yaaqubi, last month.
This is a stunning reversal of all we wanted. This shows that the deaths of so many Americans and Iraqis was stupid. We have no idea of what we are doing, where we are going or what will happen next.

We only have hopes that oil will become very cheap again and we can continue to suck it down without hinderance and live riotous lives, goofing off and laughing ourselves silly.

This desire won't happen because the historic forces are gathering against us and will overwhelm us. Like the hurricanes, instead of doing sane things in preparation, we are throwing parties and hoping the storm will swerve at the last minute. There is nearly no time left to withdraw our troops and just leave this mess. We will stubbornly stay and force events. The day the last helicopter leaves from the roof of the last of Saddam's palaces, as he triumphantly drives us out or the Shiites shove us out, we will lust for victory.

The victory of fools. And like with Nam, we will make movies where we beat up the little brown people and strut around, chest out, snarling, "We're Number One!" Next: the bad news about our industrial base.

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New York Transit Strike Will Hit Business Hard

2005-12-20T08:43:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

It is official: NYC most vital systems for moving people around that very dense city has been shut down. This is going to impact businesses in more than a few ways and will be an unfortunate hardship for workers who will find it very difficult to get to work. I will explain some of the forces at work here and what they mean.

Ever since the USA has chosen to destroy the relative power of unionized workers in pursuit of cheap prices (ie, to kill inflation caused by war and energy price hikes both of which go hand in glove), we have seen precious few strikes that affect the general public. The few exceptions are in service industries. The hotel unions in Las Vegas, for example, have had successful strikes and so have dock workers moving cheap goods from China and expensive goods from the citadel of protectionism, Japan, can effectively flex muscles.

In other industries that have gone from protected businesses to ruthless "free trade, no controls" businesses have seen their workers lose ground, lose benefits and lose power since the factory owners can either simply replace them with quasi-legal labor let in from our porous borders or move the factories to anti-union former slave states or to China, the favored destination.

So only a very few unions are left who can negotiate on level ground with management and of course, most of these are government related jobs such as transit workers.

The NYC transit workers have gone on strike before, I was there when it happened. It was very hot, in the middle of torrid summer. Since I worked in the neighborhood instead of Manhattan such as when I worked at 43rd and Park Ave, I wasn't hit directly by the strike but David, my husband at the time, had to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center every day and it was a bit of a hike but not too bad in that weather, he packed a drink and wore comfortable shoes but of course, everyone who did this showed up at work pretty sweaty. We lived very near the Brooklyn Bridge so it was little problem for us.

But it was for others who walked from much further away. I could see them streaming home in the evening, tired from work and more tired from the looming hike so I set up a first aid station on Flatbush Ave in front of a store run by a Lebanonese merchant I was friendly with. Bandaids and drinks and a whole bunch of folding chairs and access to a telephone was what we offered. I connected this with fundraising for our Park Slope Day Care Collective and other parents and kids who were not commuting long walks joined in. We had a lot of customers. Just to sit down for a while, people were happy for the chairs. More than one lady had bleeding feet from wearing shoes not made for long hikes. So we did lots of first aid.

The NYC transit union has had a past of not being very effecient especially the ones working on cleaning and maintaining the cars who, long ago, spent much of their time without oversight thanks to the way the staffing hierarchy was set up. This is why that strike happened years ago, they wanted to keep the status quo which was unacceptable.

This strike is quite simple: they need a pay raise because living in NYC is very expensive and inflation is now raging as I keep pointing out. Our economic system can't rely on cheap loans below the rate of inflation forever so rates have been climbing and so have prices of all those things one can't escape or go to China for a cheaper version: health care, energy, education, food and housing.

There really should be a two-tier inflation index. One for people with "purchasing power" and one for people who don't have this. After all, the percentage of income going into various types of purchases makes a gigantic difference with the inflation rate. Our government has deliberately misalighned the inflation index by minimizing or even excluding exactly those items that have the highest percentage impact on fixed or low incomes!

NYC, like all great cities, has in inflation rate different from rural areas. Like all dynamic systems, pressure to raise prices is much greater in cities during times of accelerated economic activity so when brokers on Wall Street make lots of money, the price of everything shoots up in the city because everyone has more money to throw around so real estate prices shoot up, the price of entertainment jumps, all sorts of things suddenly go up and up. This internal inflation is actually healthy unlike external which is what we are going through right now, namely, huge jumps in energy costs.

The tendency is to fight energy costs by reducing money flowing to labor and we will see this at work with a vengence yet again. The joy our rulers take in announcing they have prevented inflation is only due to the sad fact that most workers are helpless to pass on the inflation in their own lives and are basically eating the inflation at their own level by increasing their debt loads and working more hours or doing without.

All of which are not good things at all. Of course, the few who can pass this on like transit workers will try their best and the best way to strike is to do it when it is most inconvenient. Just before Xmas is exactly that time frame. It hits businesses really hard, crimps Wall Street, plays havock with the flow of events by disrupting Xmas shopping the same week it is at its most intense. No one will want to carry an armload of presents, hiking home in the freezing cold, walking five or more miles each day.

Day one, it is an interesting challenge. Day five, exhaustion.

The unions have to play it this way for if the pain is great, the strike will end all the sooner. This also makes public employee strikes very unpopular since the public at large bears the brunt of the whole thing. It makes people irritable and then, even if they, themselves, belong to unions, they become hostile towards the union, not the management especially when the management is the government.

The Mayor of NYC won his recent election thanks to 100% support from all the major newsmedia owners who literally buried the opponent, a Hispanic from the Bronx, on the back pages as a nobody, no run candidate. The deadly blanket of silence fell up him and Bloomberg exhaulted in his lofty position by laughing as he trounced someone who was hogtied on the ground by Bloomberg's drinking buddies.

Bloated with pride, Bloomberg thought playing hardball with a pesky union would be fun and games. HE doesn't have to walk miles to work nor does he run a small business which will see Xmas drop off the cliff and never come back. HE doesn't have to freeze his nose off trying to huff his way through vast crowds of equally miserable workers. He, like his ilk, can avoid all this and play tough. And his media owning drinking buddies will join him in attacking the union for daring to strike, attacking them for not eating the bitter fruits of raging inflation, demanding they back down. The other public service unions are watching this dance of death with great interest because they have carved out a considerably nice niche in the middle ranks of the middle class and they don't want to fall down the pit of inflation, either. So there is a great deal of hidden tension here.

The mayor has to play tough so he can strongarm the other unions and the other unions have to support the transit workers since this is an inflation fight, not a fight over other unrelated issues.

Virtually all workers are being forced to the ground except for these few. Sometimes, when miserable, humans want others who are similar to be equally unhappy but not those who are above it all. This simple human formula is exploited carefully by the media who want us to worship wealth and celebrity while grinding fellow workers under our own boot heels. This is why Americans don't care how many people die making all the stuff being shipped over here. We just want it cheap and want it now.

This is also why few want to examine who is funding all this debit card shopping. The strings attached are carefully hidden by the traitors running America who know perfectly well what is going on and why. The dynamics of this out of control system have to keep on running because it is making the American elite very very rich. Even as workers suck out all the inflation caused by the runup to the Hubbert Oil Peak, their efforts are beginning to flag. This is why labor unrest in China is beginning and it rages in Europe. Here, in America, it is just beginning. Even up to this season, when factories suddenly closed and relocated you know where, workers simply hunched their shoulders and and took it on the chin and shuffled off to another Gold Rush City, in this case being Las Vegas and other gambling hubs. But the money flowing there is being tapped by too many and this is why the Abramoff scandal is so vital: using politicians, his job was to prevent the opening of more casinos which would compete with his clients. So he bribed the greedy Republican power bosses and manipulated Christian groups with the help of super cynic, Ralph Reed. Now that is being investigated and hopefully all the GOP leadership will go to prison.

And Bush.

Arrest them all.

Meanwhile, once workers begin to seriously push back and once they realize that tax cuts that allow executives to pocket all profits because it won't be taxed much, they will take serious political moves and begin the process of wrestling with our own government to fix things and fixing this mess won't be easy at all. We have to first solve the riddle of the Hubbert Oil Peak and begin to seriously reorganize the way we run our culture.

Meanwhile, to my fellow New Yorkers: if you are forced to go to work and have to walk far, dress with layers so you don't sweat and then chill and cover the face. This makes the entire body warmer. And stop frequently at small stores. Give them a little business. This will make a cheerier holiday season for them and one finds the most charming stuff this way. I always patronized the little stores that crowd around downtown Brooklyn and Chinatown on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge.

And yes, that bridge is very beautiful on a winter's morn.

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Spying Illegally on Americans Has Been Near Continuous

2005-12-19T16:04:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Looks like our little dictator has been caught doing the naughty-naughty: spying on citizens without warrant. Of course, since Bush's happy 9/11 Trifecta which he "won", we have lost all our civil liberties and live in a bonafide police state. This isn't the first time! We went through this stupidity before! I remember Nixon....

First, today's bloggers trying to figure out what is going on: From Americablog:

Did Bush domestic spy program eavesdrop on American journalists?
by John in DC - 12/19/2005 12:15:00 PM

I had an interesting discussion this morning with DC political consultant Marc Laitin. We both came to the conclusion that it sounds like Bush's super-secret illegal domestic spying program may be targeting US journalists and that may be why Bush never got it cleared by the court and is worried about it coming forward now.

The media has three classes of "reporters": those who work for the government secretly, those who are just plain stupid and lazy or venal and then real reporters.

Real reporters get murdered. Forget the spying, the spying is done not only by government agents BUT FELLOW REPORTERS! Isn't that cute? Real reporters get shot. "Accidents" happen or they commit suicide by flying through windows, shooting themselves repeatedly in the back of the head and other mischievious and devious ways. Oh, and falling off of bridges or plane crashes.

Never seems to happen to government tools or the fool reporters!

I have had alarming relations with doomed reporters. This always upsets me, seeing them die. But the spy issue takes me back in time to when I was a crazy teenager in Berkeley, California, just when Nixon took over America and instituted his lovely police state while we were "fighting for freedom in Vietnam" (sic). Of course, the CIA had to track me, I was a company brat who knew too much who had the interesting life of knowing more than quite a few stellar lights in the left wing firmament. So they tapped my phone.

Friends asked me about this and I said, "Of course, my phone is tapped. It is in my name. It goes without saying." But they wanted proof because I warned everyone to not say anything on my phone or else. So, being a crazy teen, I called a friend and told him Chairman Mao sent me $600.

Voila! The next day, the reporter tools working for the CIA had tucked it into a news story with a big headline!

I called and told them, "I wish he did give me the money but he didn't so my life still is crappy. Do you have an extra $600 you can give me? Heh."

Well, it seems only my blog talked about Anderson's death the other day and you know, Nixon tapped his phone. He tapped his own phone, for crying out loud! Our present dictator isn't that full of hubris but you can bet, he has tapped phones illegally....BEFORE 9/11! The minute he entered the White House, he conspired with his buddies who hold positions of power in the military and CIA as well as the FBI, to tap phones and do all sorts of nasties because he was running scared from day one and if you think Al Gore's phones weren't monitored, think again!

They always do this, you know. Spy on Americans. Look at the right wing! They consider enemy number one to be any liberal who can stand up to them and gets some press! Next is anyone overseas who gets in the way of corporate profits like South American leaders getting elected in fair elections! No way.

They always spy on those they fear and they fear us tremendously.

From SF Gate:

Civil rights groups said a teenager's free speech rights were violated when a suburban school district let the FBI question him for scribbling the initials "PLO" on a school binder two years ago.

The family of the boy, now 16, and the civil rights groups said Elk Grove School District officials violated their own policy by allowing the questioning Sept. 27 without informing his parents.

Lord help you if you wave a little red book! But wait, I read in the news that a student studying the history of China was interrogated for asking an University library for a copy of that little red book! And they told us they won't spy on the libraries except in very particular situations!

And the godless Chinese own us now so what the hey? Hell, they LIVED with me for several years way back in the mid eighties! I asked the State Department if they wanted to talk to me and they said no but the first day my visitors moved in, my phone went on the fritz and the phone company came and told me my line was tapped. HAHAHA. Well! Surprised, I am not!

This need to corner helpless, faceless citizens is illegal, frightful and just plain stupid! Staring at us in the face is the real dangers. I told the State Department they better chat with me about the Chinese leadership because they figured out how capitalism worked and I said, "We are f-ing doomed now!" But no one wanted to talk to me, certainly the CIA didn't want to hire me, they only want to tail after me and mess up my phone service. Rats.

From Editor and Publisher:

NEW YORK The expulsion by U.S. military officials of two embedded journalists in Kuwait, reportedly for photographing a shot-up military vehicle, has prompted outrage from Military Reporters and Editors (MRE), which is calling for a change in embed rules that apparently led to the action.

Sig Christenson, MRE president and a military writer with the San Antonio Express-News, said no rule barring photographs of damaged vehicles existed when he first embedded in 2003. He said the alleged rule is one of several that have been added to the embedding program since it first began nearly three years ago, and should be changed.

"This rule does not have any legitimate purpose in preventing future attacks," Christenson said. "I'm pretty sure the rule was not in the agreement I signed. I think the insurgents already know about the vulnerability of the vehicles."

MRE Vice President Jim Crawley, a military writer with MediaGeneral, cited the original embed rule list currently posted by Reporters Without Borders that does not include such a restriction. He also pointed to a number of photos on the U.S. Army and Marines official Web sites that clearly show damaged vehicles.

This is an example of "pesky reporters who want to know what the hell is going on." They are lucky to be alive. You can be sure, their future in reporting will be rapidly terminated as everyone stops asking them for stories and eventually they will be fired. They did the ultimate no-no, they interrupted the flow of propaganda. Imagine if they were there during the statue pulling down incident wherein our media pretended people were so pissed at Saddam, they spontaneously pulled down his statue when we took over Bagdad!

Like the Al Jazeera reporters, they would have been murdered.

And so it goes. Will Americans tire of dictators running around interrogating children about grafitti? Will we ever go looking for bin Laden and the anthrax killer? Hahaha. Guess what?

They are not being sought out. No way in hell. That is very verboten. Any sleuth who does dig them out will probably have an accident. Or commit suicide like all those officers sent to Iraq to investigate corruption. DOA. Dead. Suicidal. Yup. Seems to be an affliction strictly limited to muckrakers.

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Bad Santas in New Zealand--Born Again Santas Attack Walmart

2005-12-19T10:49:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The war over Christmas rages on. It always was thus. Theft and riots, paganism vs puritanical aesthetes. This war is particularily pathetic since all one has to do is imitate Jesus if one wants to have that. Of course, this means acting like the original St. Nicholas which is boring since all he did was go to prison, starve himself and give away everything he owned. Sort of like a guy named "Jesus."

From Yahoo:

A group of religious protesters demonstrated outside a Wal-Mart superstore Saturday, hoping to turn away customers by calling attention to the retailer's decision to use "happy holidays" rather than "merry Christmas" in its seasonal advertising.

But even shoppers who agreed with the protesters weren't willing to interrupt their quest for holiday deals.

"I believe in Christ, and I don't like the use of 'xmas' or the use of 'happy holidays,'" said Steven Van Noy, 39, as he left the store loaded down with packages. "The bottom line is that they had what I needed at Wal-Mart, so I went to Wal-Mart to buy it."

The picuture here has to be seen to be believed:

Why is this man wearing a Santa suit and waving the "War on Christmas" book doing this? The red coated, fat, furry Santa has absolutely zero to do with the pro-Christian mythologically inspired but rather real person, St. Nicholas who gave away money to save people such as giving a father money so he wouldn't put his daughters in a whore house, for example. Unlike the present crop of Christians who seem to think Christmas is all about saying "Merry Christmas" while dropping bombs on Muslims! And shopping for one's own self and family.

According to the Catholic EnyclopediaSt. Nicholas was a thin aesthete who died in early December in the mid 350s and he lived in Lycia, Asia Minor, not the north pole. He was a thin, intense bishop, not a fat, jolly man hanging around elves churning out toys, indeed, he probably didn't approve of toys at all in any way, shape or form, much less eating candy canes and sugar plums. Indeed, the early Church was big on denial of comforts and fasting!

But in 1087, some wily Italian merchants stole his body (they took whatever wasn't nailed to the floor just like Norse traders who found it more lurcative to loot, too) and transplanted it into Italy where the much nicer incarnations of old Kris Kringle was created. The insane man demonstrating against Walmart should be screaming at the shoppers to not buy any presents but to give to the poor only that is who shops there, for the most part. Actually, he should be in front of the higher end stores doing that but he isn't and he won't and you can bet, he will be arrested and beaten into the ground if he did dare do that.

It is all fake. Now for the other half of the Santa yin/yang yazoo:

From Australia:

A group of 40 drunken people dressed in Santa Claus outfits went on a rampage through New Zealand's largest city, Auckland, robbing stores, assaulting security guards and urinating from highway overpasses.

The rampage, dubbed "Santarchy" by newspapers, began early yesterday afternoon when the men, wearing ill-fitting Santa costumes, threw beer bottles and urinated on cars from an overpass, said Auckland Central Police's Noreen Hegarty.

She said the men then rushed through a central city park, overturning garbage bins, throwing bottles at passing cars and spraying graffiti on office buildings.

These men are another manifestation of A Clockwork Orange ethos. Namely, disturbed, alienated, drunken louts roaming about in gangs, looking to mock the bourgoise pretentions of stuffy normality. This insane sort of behavior is rather amusing only if you are watching from afar, it is no fun to be the victim of such creepy men.

A number of countries that were part of the dead British Empire have problems with detached males running amok. In England itself, they plague football games and run around in public, harrassing and intimidating other residents. They hate foreigners yet haven't the faintest idea about how they were the foreigners who took over a number of countries to run them as they pleased. So, like all dying imperil powers, the populace becomes brutal and angry and takes things out on helpless victims rather than pull up and do something useful.

They won't be sent into imperial battles to kill off or tame the excess male population so the problem grows worse each generation.

In America, we are following the same path which is why we recruit more and more overseas, handing over our miltary to mercenaries just like England did in its final years. We fret about our comforts even as we show irritability about the whole thing and go more and more into thrill seeking that is aimless and painful. The riots wracking Australia this winter are due to the same sort of thing: the populations of previous imperial population flows clashing over receeding resources. Like in America, the social safety net is being withdrawn and instead of understanding why this is happening, the population joins the leaders on imperialist adventures they can't afford in places like Iraq and then recoil when the side effects of this cause malfunctions at home.

Both England and Australia couldn't wait to join in the imperial looting expedition in Iraq that has turned into a hyper expensive rout. They aren't paying even 1% of the burden of this mess in troop losses or money but they are shrunken artifacts and can't even sustain this miserable bit of imperial misadventuring without losing a lot at home.

If England and Australia chase out all immigrants, they won't be stronger, they will be weaker since the weakness is internal, the arrogance of imperialism has cause terminal mental rot as the populace is unable to understand, they no longer lead the world and can make the world work for them. Note how busy the Asians are in reorganizing themselves and taking over business and diplomatic affairs! Our adventures have turned us into beggars at Asia's gates.

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Citizens Seeking Information About Foreign Lobbyists Are Stopped By Justice Department Lies

2005-12-19T09:28:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As America becomes more and more unconstitutional and capricious, citizens who still believe in democracy struggle to force out vital information as per the Constitution. One group wants information about foreign lobbyists. The malfunctional Justice Department claims, copying the data from the computers will crash the system so it has to remain hidden.

From Fox News:

The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Justice Department's database on foreign lobbyists (search): Copying the information would bring down the computer system.

"Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating," wrote Thomas J. McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department's (search) office for information requests.

Advocates for open government said the government's assertion that it could not copy data from its computers was unprecedented but representative of generally negative responses to Freedom of Information Act (search) requests.

"This was a new one on us. We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them," Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity said Tuesday. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He said the group expects to appeal the Justice Department's decision.

And the dog will eat it, too! Wah! Again and again, the Bubble Boy administration comes up with some of the oldest, tiredest excuses. Obviously, their mommies were monumentally dumb since they really believe such twaddle will pass muster.

This is an overall characteristic of the juvenile delinquents running our country. Of course, the real reason this data can't be accessed and I am very interested in it, is because our government is riddled with traitors. The entire Bush clan works for foreign govenments or people like the Korean tax dodger, Rev. Moon. Much of the Republican party salutes another flag and ditto many Democrats.

There are many countries that stand in line in front of Americans. Note how proud the Republicans are, cutting $45+billion from aid for Americans while voting over $250 billion in aid to Iraq! Our ambassador to Iraq isn't a native to America and just like so many people working in our government, he has other priorities. This whole system owned by outsiders and run by dual or hidden citizens of other nations, has taken over our country and the results are obvious.

Not one foreigner runs Japan and note that Japan has a trade surplus with the world and has many levels of support systems for their own people and very jealously guard the borders, not allowing much immigration or integration or anything to ooze past the vigilant guardians. They will conspire with the gan jin and do business with them but they always put Japan first.

The Chinese are struggling with double agents and corrupt officials and people selling China to the highest bidder and their tool is to execute by firing squad those who are caught. The country always teeters on the edge of violence due to this, the rulers know they have to patrol themselves or be killed by enraged mobs. So they keep a nervous eye on the greater masses who are just beginning to feel some sort of patriotism.

In America, it is rotted to the core by our donning of the British Imperial robes. We allow any and all to come here and then hand over our government to them and they, in turn, exclude Americans born of several generations. The Bushes have been here for a long time but they have opened the floodgates because they know these people will cling to them since the broader American public might rend them to shreds if they have any inkling about the depth and breadth of the external corruption.

Pictures of Bush and the Saudi Princes literally holding hands and kissing doesn't yet motivate the average "America First" right wingers into fury but then, they too, are traitors, eager to sell fellow Americans down the river. They and the Bushes have conspired to drive us all so deep into public debt that we must go to China and Japan for our money to run our goverment and if this isn't really the highest level of rank corruption, totally traitorous, I am puzzled.

Owing vast oceans of money to other imperial powers is no way for an empire to stay alive. And why is America an empire? And why do we financially support first world nations like all of Europe, much of the Middle East, Japan, Korea? If this isn't the definition of insane, I don't know what is!

Japan can't pay for our military simply because then they own it and by the way, they do own it just like Saudi Arabia owns part of our military and Israel does as well as all of the former Soviet States, we pay THEM to "protect" them and the question is, why and what?

Let's pretend there is a Muslim empire. Why would that harm us? We live over here, not there. Africa should stop being a collection of tiny, despotic states and be united as one empire, or two. Then they might have some clout! Instead of 50 or so states, they need to be turned into one if they want to compete for world resources and have some power over their own fates. Europe, belatedly, is trying this in a very inept way, this is why they are torn between sucking the American empire dry and trying to become a loose empire themselves.

Since America allows foreigners to run our affairs and slant our government into allowing parasitical relationships with a host of nations, we are going bankrupt. All our systems are now screaming in the red, the red zone is rapidly rising to full alarm status and this is because we have riddled our system with foreign influence to a degree it is becoming like New Orleans after the levees collapsed: even the cops are running into undefended stores and looting!

The loot is shared with our politicians who need endless money to pay foreign powers or people who have an agenda for other nations who have bought up and now run our media, to run lies and dirt for them. In other words, to collude with media owners who think America is Number Two, the politicians have to go to foreigners for money to hand over to the corrupt media owners.

And so the looting continues.

All this is being put on our tab. We will have to live in misery in the future to pay for all this. The red ink matters. Our trade deficit isn't due to business. Otherwise, Japan would have a huge trade deficit with places like China and they do not! Our entire mess is due to allowing money to corrupt democracy, to make people pay for appearing on TV and allowing hostile entities to dominate our airwaves.

Of course, fixing this will be hard. Anyone suggesting the media stop charging an arm and leg for commercials or to give equal time will cause them all to unite to attack whoever suggests this. They love McCain because he is a fake reformer who takes the heat off of them with his inept, remember he also took money from lobbyists who were corrupt!--Think "Japan"---and he is perfect for them, the fake reformer supporting inane reforms.

These people wave our flag in front of our faces whenever anyone questions them. But just like Homeland Security's boss, an Israeli Firster, they can't wait to drop the Stars and Stripes and don their much more beloved flags.

This has been a problem since the founding of America. We wanted immigration and we have it and it has made us very strong. But the danger of allowing foreigners to run our foreign affairs is now painfully obvious. I was trained in other languages and my parents lived abroad a lot over the years. They understood we needed to learn and understand other nations in order to work with them. But the lazy way is to simply hire foreigners and this is what our nation has been doing. Instead of encouraging people here to learn languages and expand horizons, we are doing the opposite. Language instruction is collapsing here. And when filling embassy positions, we simply hire foreigners to build them, run them and even be the ambassadors.

And so it goes. Like all other empires, we head down the same steep slope.

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Human Evolutionary Success Tied To Innate Need to Slavishly Imitate

2005-12-18T11:06:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists discover that chimps can rationally take short cuts while humans, once exposed to a time wasting methodology, will slavishly imitate this despite being able to see there is a short cut. This reveals how prone our minds are to imprinting. Ask any propagandist about this. Or Madison Avenue!

From the NYT:

Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution. His study would build on a paper published in the July issue of the journal Animal Cognition by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten, two psychologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Horner and Dr. Whiten described the way they showed young chimps how to retrieve food from a box.

The box was painted black and had a door on one side and a bolt running across the top. The food was hidden in a tube behind the door. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Before they opened the door, they pulled back the bolt and tapped the top of the box with a stick. Only after they had pushed the bolt back in place did they finally open the door and fish out the food.

Because the chimps could not see inside, they could not tell that the extra steps were unnecessary. As a result, when the chimps were given the box, two-thirds faithfully imitated the scientists to retrieve the food.

The team then used a box with transparent walls and found a strikingly different result. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door.

The researchers turned to humans. They showed the transparent box to 16 children from a Scottish nursery school. After putting a sticker in the box, they showed the children how to retrieve it. They included the unnecessary bolt pulling and box tapping.

The scientists placed the sticker back in the box and left the room, telling the children that they could do whatever they thought necessary to retrieve it.

The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. "It seemed so spectacular to me," Mr. Lyons said. "It suggested something remarkable was going on."

I got to this article via Battlepanda. Although I comb the web for material, it is awfully easy to miss something which is why visits to other bloggers is most useful.

Humans are "crazy apes." Namely, our brains don't work like a monkey's brain in certain specific and unusual ways. One of the strongest forces in the human mind is the ability to ritualistically follow a set order of things but obvious and not so obvious. Namely, we do and learn many things reflexively and once learned, we tend to want to stick to it which is why changing one's habits is extremely troublesome and in many cases, impossible.

Ask any therapist!

Humans that imprinted swiftly and thoroughly had more survivors than those who had to rationalize and think through things all the time. But of course, as per always in evolution, the rationalizers were not eliminated, only marginalized. Less than a quarter of the population.

Now, quick, how many "original thinkers" pop up in our mass of humanity? See? Of them, a great number are "insane" because their rationalizations have no connection with any useful reality. Sometimes, the insane are successful due to historic forces. People like Jesus, for example. Anyone acting like him today would be shut up in an asylum.

Humans are so set on imprinting bizarre processes upon their own young they have managed to extend this deep into the animal world. I have spend rather a few hours making Sparky, my horse, do things he rationally knows are stupid, from his point of view. Carry a human on the back and turn when asked? Har! No way.

I have to use the old carrot/stick/voice/bit routine repeatedly to get him to conform. When training any animals, I use my voice, hand gestures and rewards as well as sharp "No"s.

The need to copy parental actions is a survival technique. When humans first walked this earth, there were no cribs nor fences or any restraining systems. All of the monkey and ape kingdoms have one thing humans don't have at all: lots of body hair which babies can clutch. I happen to believe that we evolved the no hair look because we lived mostly on the sea's edges and swam a great deal. Hair was in the way except for on top of the head. The underarm and pubic hair evolved as sexual transmitters of potent smells to either repulse or entice but baby couldn't clutch that!

To transport the young required carrying them in the arms or learning how to make slings to carry. And young females who watched mother's actions in seeking out materials to build a sling, weaving or shaping the materials or the sons watching fathers kill and skin animals and using the pelts to make slings by universally handing it over to the mothers to chew and pull and shape, all this learning was enabled by rank imitation. Since the art of speech grew slowly as the mouth and brain evolved to enable it, using imitation of actions was and still is the prefered way to communicate vital action information.

If the researchers took older children and instead of showing them how to get into the box, gave them written instructions or worse, verbal, most would skip many of the stages not because they can't follow instructions but because if the instructions are verbal, it is "in one ear and out the other." All teachers find that showing while talking has the maximum effect. This is because humans are hardwired to imitate. Processing things via reading means engaging the conscious mind which then begins the rationalization process which is why writing and rationalization walk hand in hand.

Often, when doing complicated to explain things like when I am building something that is easy for me to visualize but hard to explain technically, I just tell people working with me to "watch what I do and do the same," and while doing it, once they imitate me, I will explain the process and why we are doing something.

Whenever, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, I just explain before doing something odd, always the people trying it out will question my wisdom, methodology and process! Always. Then I waste hours trying to explain the rationale behind the process and in return, they will merely find rational objections to nearly every step! To nip this off at the bud, I found that making them imitate first eases the process considerably.

The military understands this very well which is why anyone who questions any process is immediately punished. Religions do this by various means often ending up with threats of eternal damnation or burning at the stake.

The mind often is used to rationalize memorized imitative processes. This mental activity is very creative. Like the earlier story here about how people rationalize their choices when researchers cheated and pretending the subjects chose a face they disliked and assured them the disliked faces were the choices! People would then set the brain in gear to justify this by deceiving themselves into believing they chose via free will instead of being grossly manipulated by the researchers.

So our brains exist mostly to lie to us. Far from being truth machines, the brain is a dangerous entity that strives to delude us. People who circumvent this set up either go insane or are geniuses. As a person who does this myself, namely, forcing the brain to think rather than rationalize, I can assure it, it is no way to win popularity contests or keep out of prison as a political prisoner or sleep well at night.

I subscribe my strange brain to being hit by lightning.

Anyway, the dangers of a thinking mind are many-fold. Scientists are trained to learn to think with the mind while not falling into rationalization traps yet it happens all the time. Like the rationalization that the universe is rapidly expanding clashes with the facts on the ground showing vast black holes sucking in other galaxies even now, not just in the "distant past." Since this means rethinking Einsteinian physics as taught, mostly through imitation, it baffles astronomers who just don't deal with it yet. But some smart aleck chimp-thinking astronomer will pull together a new theory of the cosmos and win everyone over to the new format.

Just a matter of time!

Criminals often are people who are outside the box, too. They look upon the whole human/learning process with a cold eye and are uninfluenced by it and are often willing to exploit other human's trusting learning process to manipulate them into doing things that are bad for themselves as well as others. Some of these criminals rise to the very top of many countries and wreck hideous damage and kill many humans.

Which is why understanding there are psychopaths out there who are not fettered by the limitations of the mind's desire to learn and please others is so important. They want to have us mislearn and mislead.

Monkeys are skeptics. Humans are believers.

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Nixon's Bane, Jack Anderson, Leaves Us Bereft

2005-12-17T19:52:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

A rare breed like Robert Parry, real reporters, real investigators, Jack Anderson was the bane of more than one President. We owe a lot to him and wish more reporters could emulate his incorrigable investigative determination.

From Yahoo:

Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking columnist who struck fear into the hearts of corrupt or secretive politicians, inspiring Nixon operatives to plot his murder, died Saturday. He was 83.

Anderson died at his home in Bethesda, Md., of complications from Parkinson's disease, said one of his daughters, Laurie Anderson-Bruch.

Anderson gave up his syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column at age 81 in July 2004, after Parkinson's disease left him too ill to continue. He had been hired by the column's founder, Drew Pearson, in 1947.

Nixon hated Anderson as well as many others (hehe, nyaaaa, Nixon!) and we have the joy of having audio tapes of all the cheezy things Nixon plotted in the Oval Office. Wish we still had that system but nooooo.

Alas. So we can only speculate which is wrong. I believe the Oval Office should be bugged at all times and spies working for us covering the President all the time so we can figure out what they are doing, none of this secrecy stuff! After all, these creeps spy on us!

Anyhow, at one point, Nixon wanted to spike a drink with LSD. He figured this would drive Anderson to suicide or insanity. He never tried this on, say, me! Rats! Geeze, you know, the CIA had real honest to god LSD. That stuff is awesome. It isn't like the later production stuff, it really goes straight to the Id in the Brain and blooie. You get to see yourself from the inside and outside all at once and the world is illuminated with a brilliance, the main thing is, you can remember stuff. Timothy Leary, for example, once had access to real LSD.

Ahem. Heh.

Well, I suspect even Nixon knew that spiking Tim's beer with LSD would be really dumb. "Wow. Awesome beer!" Heck, if we knew back then that Nixon was in the habit of handing out real LSD tablets, we would have voted for him. And asked him to our parties. Heck, he might even had scored a chick or two if he only knew the potent power of offering them LSD!

Being an idiot, he wanted to give it to Anderson who had zero interest in enjoying communion with the cosmos or talking to chipmunks at dawn in a park.

This sort of waste always irritates me. Like Anderson, the FBI was watching me and giving me a hard time. My phone was tapped, my car bugged, I guess. Bet they wired the bedroom. Whoooeee. Wouldn't put that past them. After all, they were all men. And I was active. Very.

All long ago, no longer quite so today and besides, I am too creaky for LSD and I doubt Bush uses that. We do know that irritating reporters got anthrax letters that were traced back to a top secret military base used by the CIA. And of course, the person who sent the letters was never *cough* found *cough* but this is only because we don't have any tapes of what is going on in the White House, do we?

Rest in peace, Jack. You were a bright beacon in our lives. You looked under the bed and in the closet and you even found out about Reagan's Iran/Contra stuff just like Parry. Too bad you didn't understand that Reagan was a traitor who worked for Tokyo. Oh well. Everyone sort of gave up, didn't they? This is why Parry was fired and Anderson was pretty much shunted aside.

Well, may his spirit live on in us! Us bloggers, at least!

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The Earth Is Changing Its Shape And This Is a Violent Process Indeed

2005-12-17T15:59:00.000-05:00

Original map here, Live Science
By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists just released a map showing how not only much of the north American continent is rising due to glacier retreat but it is also moving in various directions, too. This is important information for predicting future earthquakes. In addition, the planet is changing its size and shape due to global warming.

From Live Science:

North America isn't exactly coming apart. But it is constantly on the move, and the latest discovery of geologic creep has surprised scientists.

During the last Ice Age, large portions of North America were blanketed by giant glaciers. Although they’ve been gone for more than 10,000 years, the land they once rested upon is still recovering from the weight.

Parts of North America and other continents are slowly rising due to an effect called post-glacial rebound. That much geologists knew.

But it turns out this slow recovery is also causing a very small horizontal shift, said Eric Calais, a geophysicist at Purdue University in Indiana. The movement varies from one spot to another, but the overall effect amounts to a 1-millimeter shortening per year of the distance between Florida and the Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada. That's about an inch every 25 years.

This new map should be posted in every FEMA office, at least when they aren't primping themselves to appear on TV and passing catty emails. The circles I drew show intersecting spheres of influence and the red arrows are major earth directional movement, the green arrows, lesser movement.

Where many red arrows going in opposite directions and their spheres of influence intersect are earthquake zones. Maybe these don't happen all too often, after all, the whole eastern half of this continent is relatively quiet. This quietness is deceptive. The Northridge earthquake, for example, happened very suddenly and it was a bit of subduction never noticed before by scientists.

Looking at this map, the New Madrid site is pretty obvious with two red arrows in exact opposite direction. This means, the land is bulging there again and will have yet another earthquake. The only question is when, not if.

One big surprize is the Missouri River. When I first looked at the map, it looked like "directions of vote stealing in the GOP, note how prominent Florida is, for example. And of course, all swirling around DC! But it is a geological map.

Looks like western Kansas and eastern Colorado just might get some nasty jolts in the future. But the big one is DC. Everything from the Great Lakes is moving south to the Ohio River which interrupts the flow and then with a slight change of direction, continues. But along the Appalachian mountains the continent is moving north. Guess they will clash at Gettysburg!

New York City is going into New Jersey which is heading towards Gettysburg, too. Meanwhile, Dc is heading south along with the rest of Delaware. The interesecting circles of influence, thanks to Abramoff, I suppose, are setting the stage for a big earthquake in DC.

Guess Fritzgerald is going to indite Rove.

When Rove collapses in a faint, the shaking will be felt far and wide. We shall see...Heh.

From Space.com:

Accelerated melting of Earth's glaciers in recent years has forced the planet to let a notch out of its belt as its midsection gains girth, according to a study released today.

The increased water flowing into the oceans each year since 1997 is equal to a square block of ice that would cover much of Utah, accounting for about half of a mysterious equatorial bulge first reported in August.

The other contributing half appears to involve changing ocean currents that have redirected water from polar regions to tropical areas.

The puzzling redistribution of mass actually involved a measurement of Earth's gravitational field.

Well, the entire planet is changing shape, just like I deduced. The weight of the ice as well as the releasing of water which flows naturally to warmer waters is causing the equator to bulge plus the warmer the water, the more it bulges plus releasing the weight on Antarctica means it rises but then this unlocks the other tectonic plates which shift uneasily and we have see the results of that: Australia out of control, careening in a cartwheel fashion straight towards Japan.

Which has had quite a serious of jolts this year but nothing compared to where the rift opened next to Indonesia! That is still shaking. We are nearly at the Christmas anniversary of that quake and if this latest change in our planet follows previous ones, the period of great quakes isn't over, not at all, yet.

More to come.

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Siberian Swans Come To Merry England Early

2005-12-17T13:46:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Siberian swans from Russia suddenly show up in England in one big flock. This means a very cold winter is coming as if we don't already notice this here in America without any swans telling us this! Also, British scientists claim they know why we bicker during holidays. They blame the food. Heh. Yeah, right.

From the Guardian:

The sudden early arrival of a large flock of Bewick's swans at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust nature reserve at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, could signal a white Christmas.
Most winters some 250 Bewick's swans arrive in dribs and drabs at the reserve from Siberia, but this week 188 have arrived en masse.

The trust manager, Neil Woodward, said: "The birds try and stay one step ahead of the weather. I would say, because of their early arrival, we are going to have a very cold Christmas and hopefully a white one. If I were a betting man, I would put money on it."

The migratory patterns this year have been rather odd here in America, too. The wild geese usually ride the cold north wind south but much of our winds have been blowing from the south which makes migration a drag, quite literally, so the geese have waited until the wind picks up and then, last week, it did, with a vengence and I saw lines and lines of geese noisily honking as they sailed south at a fast clip.

Because of the unusually warm fall, the Siberian swans probably felt the same way, why beat your wings frantically to fight a head wind? So when the very cold temps suddenly surged down from the polar icecaps, off they took, en mass, moving as fast as possible. We shall see if this is a harbinger for a very cold winter in England itself!

Also in the British news is a story about scientists wanting to explain why humans at holidays, when with close relatives, bicker bitterly and do all those annoying things relatives can't help doing at home when there, en mass. Seems the veneer of civilization collapses as the physical distance between people who know each other too well as well as not at all, refusing to see or understand family members seems to be a requirement for survival, I assume. Well, the scientists think this can be fixed!

From the Guardian:

The traditional Christmas lunch: a touching scene of familial togetherness ruined only by the inevitable outbreak of hostilities between relatives, even before the Queen has uttered a word.
Now scientists believe they can explain why so many families descend into bickering and belligerence over the festive dinner table. The answer, they claim, is all in the food.

The traditional Christmas overload of turkey, sprouts, spuds and pudding can lead to repeated changes in blood sugar levels, according to Paul Clayton, a pharmacologist and president of the forum on food and health at the Royal Society of Medicine. Such yo-yoing of blood sugar, coupled with the effects of salty foods and excessive alcohol, are ideal ingredients for making us irritable and tense, he says.

Heh. Don't feed the bastards. That will fix them. No drinks, either. Yeah.

Boy, that would produce an interesting holiday fun time! No service=no complaints!

Indeed, all holidays will be most peaceful since irritating relations will all camp out somewhere else like at a local saloon. No clean ups, no headaches. I suppose all holidays should happen far from home, the further the better! At least, that is the scientific solution!

From the Guardian"

Nortours, which organises "Santa Claus tours" to Scandinavia and the Baltics, called in the administrators today and cancelled trips in the run-up to the festive period.
Around 500 families are thought to be affected, though they should be able to receive full refunds.

Amid stiff competition in the travel sector and a consumer spending dip, the administrators said high-end operators such as Nortours, which employs 12 staff and has an average annual turnover of £9m, were struggling to attract business.

And now for the energy news. Soaring energy costs is cutting down on Santa tours? Next, his reindeer won't fly? And little children everywhere will have to blame Shell Oil or Exxon? Heh.

When our rulers happily report there is no inflation it is only because few businesses can raise prices. So more and more will cease just like the Santa Tours and we will all end up hungry, cold and miserable, but no inflation!

Well, this fits in with having no food or drink for irritable relatives.

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Japanese Manipulate the Price of Gold

2005-12-16T17:56:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Suddenly, today, the world price of gold which has been climbing rapidly ever since our government went wild with printing dollars and world oil prices began to sprint to the high heavens, fell. This fall wasn't mysterious. It was premeditated and deliberate. The Japanese temporarily stopped gold from topping $600 to the ounce. This is part of propping up the dollar so the yen stays cheap.

From Bloomberg News:

Gold in New York plunged 2.8 percent, the biggest drop in a year, on speculation demand will slow from Japanese investors after the Tokyo Commodity Exchange increased the cost of trading the metal.

The Tokyo exchange, the world's second-largest metals and energy futures market, boosted minimum deposits for trades to curb speculation after gold surged to a 24-year high of $544.50 an ounce on Dec. 12. Gold sold in yen climbed 18 percent in the five weeks ended Dec. 9. Tokyo gold trading last month was the most since February 2003 at 1.92 million contracts.

Tokyo's higher margin payments have ``pulled some of the speculative interest out of the market,'' said Paul McLeod, vice president of precious metals at Commerzbank Securities in New York.

Gold for February delivery fell $14.60 to $509.50 an ounce on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, the biggest one-day decline since Dec. 8, 2004, and the lowest closing price since Dec. 2. The metal fell 1.4 percent yesterday.

Every time there is some escape from relentless forces at work, governments redraw the boundries, reset the game and ream everyone out. Many people have been lied to about the ability of gold to protect oneself from currency manipulations.

I have always contended, this is a false hope for governments can and will and have ruthlessly dealt with people who have little or no faith in paper currency. There are many tools in the government's kit to knock down gold as a currency haven. This is why I don't bother with such things. You see, the only really safe investment is to organize with others to effect political change. Period.

Of course, all governments resist changes and ours is certainly at the head of the class in this regard. The seeming wealth of America is all fake. We have mortgaged our future and will pay through the nose for it and running off to gold when our currency tanks won't work.

One can avoid personal danger by avoiding certain things: houses that consume vast quantities of energy to be habitable, deep high interest debts, learning how to eat healthy and be as fit as possible and of course, be aware and alert and be able to step into the public arena and take a stand---these things are the key to a good future. This is why I am often antiwar. I feel, unless there is really good reason to fight, sacrificing lives and our finances on risky imperialist adventures is a bad choice as we can plainly see today.

Speaking of community exerting influence, in my Ford articles about the decision to cut off all contact with the gay community has not only backfired but forced Ford to backpedal. From CNN:

Advertisements featuring Ford Motor Co.'s eight vehicle brands will run in gay publications, the automaker said Wednesday, acting after gay rights groups complained when Jaguar and Land Rover pulled their spots.

Ford is not ordering those luxury brands to resume their specific ads. Rather, the company's ads in the publications will promote all of its lines, which also include Ford, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury, Volvo and Aston Martin.

Kudos to Americablog and John Aravosis! See what he managed? Just using the magic of the internet, he forced a major corporation to change course. It is a small but significant victory and should teach us that giving up is stupid, fighting back is smart!

This blog isn't as big as Americablog but we are just one tiny vioce in the growing chorus of activists. The more we support such blogs and join in various actions including spreading information the mainstream supresses, our success at forcing the Downing Street Memos into the public eye in America is just one of many examples of how even this small effort on the web is possible.

We can, over time, win even more victories. I hope, a great number of them. Thank you, readers, for joining me on the web. Onwards and upwards! Have hope and faith in ourselves. We can win.

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Chavez of Venezuela and Our Coming Energy Crisis This Winter

2005-12-16T16:41:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

It is interesting watching Americans spending $200+billion to hang onto oil rich Iraq while being told to basically shiver to death this winter at home because Bush as no money to fund home heating costs, meanwhile, the man villified by the NYT and WP and all the mainstream media, Chavez of Venezuela, rides to the rescue on his white horse, unlike the Scrooges with Bush, he can spare Tiny Tim some oil for Christmas.

From the US News and World Report:

Falling gasoline prices make it easy to believe the nation has seen the last of the energy woes that swept in behind this year's Gulf Coast hurricanes. But they don't fool an unemployed woman on the Crow Indian Reservation, using the electric oven to warm her house on increasingly crisp Montana nights because her natural-gas heat has been cut off. For brickyard workers in Mill Hall, Pa., unemployment looms after the holidays, because it will be too expensive to fire the clay kilns this winter. And one retiree in a mobile home in Millinocket plans to take her asthma medication once daily instead of three times as prescribed, to save money to pay the kerosene bills that will soar in Maine's bitter cold.

This is the same trip that California had to take when Bush and his Lay buddy at Enron decided to loot California and soften them up for Schwarzenegger. It didn't matter if it tipped America into a recession. They backtracked and cut taxes and began the most ferocious public spending spree ever witnessed in our history running up almost $3 trillion in red ink. In the middle of this spending spree, they continue to cut taxes, making things worse and simultaneously piously telling the poor to go hang.

Into this breach stepped the understandibly popular President of Venezuela, shaming America by personally funding susidized oil for communities that ask for it. So far, Massachusetts and the Bronx have signed up. It will be interesting to see how many upstate NYers will die this year before NY's Repub govenor asks for help? Then the NYT will have to say something nice about Chavez which will tick them off since he isn't a tool of either America or Israel.

"A frozen New Orleans." A winter failure (in NYC, for example) could prove catastrophic, because any extended loss of heat could cause water pipes to burst in residential and commercial buildings alike. Also, the thousands of "traps" where steam escapes (and billows from manhole covers) could freeze and fail, causing distribution pipes to crack or lose pressure. Former Central Intelligence Agency chief Jim Woolsey, now active on energy issues, argues that parts of the city "could resemble a frozen New Orleans." Also, repressurizing the system could prove laborious and hazardous, because of the power of steam escaping from cracks. "Nobody could simulate the kind of disaster that could happen," says Adam Victor, president of TransGas Energy, a company that has been trying to build a backup power plant in the city but has run into opposition from residents and city officials who prefer building parkland at the old industrial waterside location. Con Edison downplays concerns about the system. "You can't say never because something can always break," says Chris Olert, utility spokesman. "But we've upgraded the plant so it's in tip-top condition, and we've bought plenty of gas for the steam system." Power will be available for New Yorkers, he says, though at a cost up 30 to 35 percent over last year.

As a super in NYC in the past, when it went below zero and we didn't get an oil delivery in the middle of the oil crisis back in the seventies, I frantically tried to keep the pipes from freezing and failed. Once we got heat going again, we had to fix the entire building and it cost the landlord so dearly, he abandoned the property.

The cascade of problems when the heat fail are significant and very expensive. Not to mention, avoidable. Most buildings and most systems are designed to use energy to create the bubble of comfort rather than, like my house, exploit as much of nature as possible to run without energy. This refusal to be sensible is going to be our collective downfall. Houses that can't be converted like operate like mine will be abandoned over the years or turned into very low quality slums with no water since the pipes will burst. Copper thieves will tear them apart, seeking the metal in the pipes.

From Yahoo:

As oil and natural gas prices soar, public schools are having to make some tough decisions: turning down the thermostat, finding alternative sources of fuel, even cutting back on the school week.

At Menomonie High School in western Wisconsin, principal Tom Wiatr has dropped the temperature a few degrees. Students started wearing zip-up sweatshirts and fleeces to stay warm, raising questions about a school rule against wearing jackets indoors.

I remember the seventies and early eighties (imagine that!) I tried to get my daughter's school in NYC to let me cover the leaky windows with plastic so the kids wouldn't freeze in the classroom facing the Atlantic Ocean's winds. They refused.

The hike in taxes to keep schools running thanks to Bush and his windfall oil buddies reaping vast profits for themselves will wipe out what pitiful pennies remain of the famous Bush tax cuts. The President could demand his rich buddies start a "Leave No Child Frozen" fund and the oil companies could dedicate, say, 2% of their vast profits to fund it and heat for the elderly and poor but of course, this will never happen unless Americas notice the grim mirror image of Bush and Mr. Scrooge only Scrooge denied himself comforts unlike Bubble Boy who lives in a splendidly warm and pleasant enviroment.

From the BBC:

The leftist front-runner for Sunday's election in Bolivia, Evo Morales, has ended his campaign saying his movement is "a nightmare for the United States".
Mr Morales has vowed to end free-market policies and legalise the growing of coca, which has traditional uses but is also used in the production of cocaine.

Bush was nearly chased out of South America. His appearances in varioius countries had to be held far from the maddening crowds and forelorn and pathetic, not to mention stewed to the gills, he stumbled about, denouncing Chavez in quavering tones.

So what has he done for anyone? Got oil?

Chavez has oil and he is using it deftly as a tool to gain political power and he is determined to shoo us out of South America. Since popular sentiment is on his side, this isn't hard to do, is it? The "free trade" free booters who work for US corporations are desperately trying to keep control of various countries but one by one, the people are electing those that we don't want. Historically, the USA murders or corrupts those it doesn't want down in the south and Bush frets about this, desperate to unleash dictators upon the populations even as he bays about how America is for freedom and democracy.

Well, we will get democracy in spades, here at home, I pray, as well as abroad. The DeLay Texas mess whereby he gerrymandered and gerryrigged an electoral map that would keep right wing whites in power is now being torn up in court just as he and his ilk are now standing trial for rank corruption. And down there is all that oil. The oil the Texan elite refuse to share with fellow Americans.

This is going to be a very interesting winter.

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Novak Says Bush Knew All Along Who Outed Valerie Plame

2005-12-16T08:54:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Novak knows what Bush knows and what Rove knows and they all know that Fitzgerald knows and they are now beginning to snipe at each other and at the rest of us. They are on the verge of a mental breakdown only they are insane already so it doesn't matter. All that matters is, their ship is sinking...Fast. Let's punch more holes in the hull.

From Reuters:

The White House took issue on Thursday with a claim by syndicated columnist Robert Novak that President George W. Bush knows who the source is who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

"I don't know what he's basing it on," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan, declining to comment further.

Novak said Tuesday the public and the news media should be asking Bush about the source rather than reporters who received the information.

"I'm confident the president knows who the source is," Novak told a luncheon in Raleigh, North Carolina, according to the Raleigh News & Observer. "I'd be amazed if he doesn't."

He added: "So I say, don't bug me. Don't bug (Washington Post reporter) Bob Woodward. Bug the president as to whether he should reveal who the source is."

Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, has convened a new Grand Jury and is relentlessly pursuing his prey. The fact that a so called reporter/pundit, Novak, knows a lot about all this but refuses to enlighten us is very amusing for the old man is losing his grip and is on the verge of spilling them old beans.

Bush is freaking out over this and won't fire Rove for this would be admitting his office was Leak Central. So instead, his personal Titanic moment continues to crawl along in slow motion. This is causing problems because it is all attached to the mess in Iraq. Namely, Bush is a war criminal and the reasons to invade were not only spurious but seriously fake.

Bush also has destroyed our American civil rights in this pottage of pulsimony. From CNN:

President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States -- without getting search warrants -- following the Sept. 11 attacks, The New York Times reports.

Keeping track of little old Quaker ladies talking about demonstrating quietly in front of recruiting stations always ends up being the scariest thing on earth to these criminals. They have to lure the poor into fighting these illegal wars and these old ladies are interfering with the program.

This happened under Nixon.

So as usual, as we predicted during the Patriot Act passage, the military and the dictator in DC always abuse the powers handed to them, they always lie and assure us they won't spy on little old ladies yet they can't help themselves, like sick peeping Toms, they rush off to the oldest lady's house in town and press their noses against the window.

Even as Bush spies on the elderly, he refuses to allow American citizens a voice in running the USA. He teeters between buying everyone off with cheap loans with some horrible strings attached as well as bankrupting America with tax cuts, he passed even more of those this week in the teeth of the biggest trade/budget deficit in our history...And meanwhile, the clock ticks.

The elections in Iraq have to be the most expensive on earth. We spent $250+billion so far to have elections there. If the American people are happy with this business deal we are in deep trouble for this money hasn't been paid out yet, it is in the form of short term loans which, as the interest rates rise relentlessly thanks to inflation, will cost more and more. In other words, since we are charging this war, the interest payments will end up costing as much as the principle so it will be half a trillion so far.

And it isn't over. Why people think voting won't lead to terrific violence baffles me. Here in America, we have nearly come to blows over the blue/red state divide and it will get much, much worse, you will see, due to energy problems if nothing else. In Iraq, like in America in the first 50 years of our Republic, each election makes things worse until they blow up. In Iraq, I give it about one year. This year of grace, we can leave. If we stay, boom.

And about Rove: arrest him. Arrest Bush. Arrest all these idiots. Thank you.

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Fox TV's Christmas Party Celebrates Sinking of Titanic

2005-12-16T07:42:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As we all know, Fox TV has cynically decided to wage war against civilization by screaming about how we are taking Jesus out of Xmas yet they are the first to do so. This year's Xmas party for the staff has decided to use the sinking of the Titanic as their theme. Seems about right to me. Glub, glub, Murdoch.

From Campus Progress:

ThinkProgress and The Majority Report have been covering News Corp (the parent company of Fox News) and how they invited everyone to a "holiday party."

Well it turns out that Fox is apparently a full-on combatant in the war on Christmas, since it wasn't their only one. At the end of this post is a scan of an invitation to another NewsCorp "Holiday Party," this one with a Titanic theme, which, in itself, is really, really weird.

So maybe it's time for Bill O'Reilly to start explaining why he's not objecting to his bosses having multiple parties refusing to acknowledge Christmas. (How can his heart possibly go on?)

Do click on this URL. The invitation is amazing. To think that adults will celebrate the baby Jesus by making fun of the icy, horrible deaths of over a thousand passengers on the Titanic boggles the mind. This comes on the heels of a deliberate program of fanning the flames of religious bigotry at Fox TV. On all shows featuring loudmouthed pundits, they have been pounding away at this idiotic theme and now they will get drunk and laugh themselves silly celebrating the sinking of a passenger ship!

This rampant, cynical hypocricy is the avian flu of the media. Just like them all pretending they were outraged by Clinton getting a blowjob, O'Reilly, for example, had to pay an outraged former employee millions to shut her up when she charged him with sexual harrassment. But was he fired? Did all the media attack him for being a blackguard and hypocrite? Did he apologize to Clinton?

Of course not! He roars and bellows and waves baby Jesus in the air as he tosses the Holy Child into the watery deep.

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Washington Pest

Consumer Prices Fall Because Windfall Price Hikes In Oil Drops

2005-12-15T19:27:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Like naughty children, the economic pundits and professionals munch on the data and spit out bad results because they refuse to look closely at the numbers and closely at system dynamics. We are heading off a financial cliff and they claim there is no inflation just because oil companies stopped the windfall profits temporarily.

From the NYT:

A record plunge in the cost of gasoline pushed consumer prices down by the largest amount in 56 years in November while industrial production posted a solid gain.

The new government reports Thursday provided further evidence that the economy is shaking off the blows delivered by a string of devastating hurricanes. But analysts cautioned that the huge drop in consumer prices was overstating the improvement in inflation.

The Labor Department report showed the Consumer Price Index fell by 0.6 percent last month, the biggest decline since a 0.9 percent fall in July 1949. It reflected a record fall in gasoline prices, which have been retreating since they surged to above $3 per gallon right after Katrina hit.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve said output at the nation's factories, mines and utilities rose a solid 0.7 percent last month following a 1.3 percent rise in October. Industrial output had plunged by 1.6 percent in September, reflecting widespread shutdowns of oil refineries, chemical plants and other factories along the Gulf Coast.

The decline in consumer prices was better than the 0.4 percent drop that analysts had been expecting. Outside of the volatile food and energy categories, so-called core prices were up 0.2 percent, matching the October increase. Both months showed a pickup in core prices from benign readings of 0.1 percent in the previous five months.

So, once again, when we go through energy price hikes, this causes inflation and everyone recognizes this but after six months, the economists will all be back to their same old tired tricks. Pretending it doesn't fuel inflation and that manipulating currency values and interest rates will fix everything.

Of course, this doesn't work except in a very brutal form: people cut back on energy because they can't afford it and thanks to higher interest rates, can't afford to go into debt to maintain older rates of energy use! Ie: you travel less, are more uncomfortable or even freeze or over heat to death and everyone looks the other way.

Note that prices are going up, there is inflation. And the energy companies said they didn't have any windfalls yet the sudden rush of inflation is an indication they were charging windfall prices. They can't have it both ways.

In other economic news, the number of people who have lost jobs because of the string of devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes climbed to 602,200 last week. That gain reflected a rise of 1,500 jobless applications linked to Katrina and Rita and an additional 1,000 claims linked to Wilma, which hit Florida in October.

Gross numbers can conceal vital problems. As we all know, the red slips are going out this Christmas and they are mostly aimed at high paying, unionized jobs. The quality and type of pay and work matters a great deal. If we have a zillion more nannies and gardeners this isn't a sign of a healthy capitalist system if the number of factory workers and high skilled labor plummet.

Overall, energy prices were down a record 8 percent, reflecting not only the fall in gasoline but also declines of 6.1 percent for home heating oil and 0.5 percent for natural gas. Those drops still left prices higher than a year ago and homeowners will feel the pinch when they pay heating bills this winter.

You ain't kidding. Fuel bills are horrible. Everyone I know is very worried. For political reasons, Bush's Windfall Buddies in Texas decided to import like crazy and drive prices lower because they were terrified of Bush's plummeting popularity and talk of impeaching him and investigating them!

So bingo! Our trade deficit goes through the roof and we owe the world immense amounts of money which the Fed is printing with Weimarian madness. This is why analysis that looks only at one tree and ignores the forest fire is bang stupid.

This story has been delayed by 8 hours because my computer was malfunctioning and I went to the Apple store at Crossgates Mall in Albany which is hours away from my mountain and we fixed what was wrong, sort of. But what I noticed was how deserted the mall was. No hordes of merry shoppers. Every store had big "prices slashed!" signs up. The data for October and November don't show the real tragedy here for both months were wonderfully warm here in the Northeast, nay, the wind blew from the south, not the north, confusing migrating birds and many remarked that it looked like late spring, not mid November which is usually a dank and dark month up here.

Well, Old Man Winter came with a roar and temperatures plummeted this last two weeks and the last five days, record setting cold gripped the Northeast. It went well below zero here which is mid January weather.

The reverberations are already moving through the system, the world price of oil climbed again, imports of oil climbed again, all the bad stuff, up and up. And as per usual, when oil climbs, everyone cuts profits to keep inflation at bay and this causes them to lay off workers and the workers get ill paying jobs and go bankrupt and this same old stupid obvious cycle is rolling along, the worst effects will be next year when unemployed workers or poorly paid workers can no longer fund this merry-go-round sponsored by Asia.

Why do you think we, the main target country for all Asian exports, were excluded very pointedly from discussions at ASEAN about the future of trade in the Pacific? Eh? Gads, I wish I was there.

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Scientists Prove Bees Recognize Human Faces

2005-12-14T22:25:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists have done yet another study that proves bees can be as smart as people. Like recognize faces. Well, as a long time beekeeper, I assure you, we all know bees recognize faces and I will tell you why we know this.

From the Discovery Channel:

Don't be too proud of never forgetting a face: It turns out even a humble bumblebee can distinguish and recall different human faces, say researchers who have conducted experiments on the surprisingly canny insects.
Researchers in the UK have found that bumblebees show a remarkable ability to spot the same human face even days after training.

The training consisted of showing the bees the very same series of black-and-white pictures of faces that are used to test human memory. The bees got tasty or sour rewards for choosing correctly and incorrectly.

The newfound bumblebee ability is likely connected to their ability to recognize different flowers, says discoverer Adrian Dyer of La Trobe University in Australia and Cambridge University.

On the other hand, the discovery is one of a long string over the last decade about various animals which all point to one startling revelation: It doesn't take a huge human brain or even a mammalian brain to recognize individual human faces or do a lot of other complex tasks.

So, they figured out what we beekeepers have said for generations: bees know who is who.

The scientists speculate this is connected with recognizing flowers. This is totally stupid. As a beekeeper who works around hives in tee shirt and shorts all summer long, the bees are perfectly content not because they can tell me from a flower or something but because they know who I am, the person to cleans around their hive, chases away pesky wasps and bears and in general, work like a hive-sister so the guard bees will take but one glance at me and happily buzz in front of the hive. I often walk within 6" of the hive entrance in summer when they are busiest and not one bee will even give me an angry warning buzz.

Oh, they have different sounds for different purposes. When they are angry, they literally turn up the volume of the buzzing. Suddenly, one or two bees will be angrily buzzing in your ear. This is deliberate, they are telling you to go away. Since stinging is a suicide mission, they prefer warnings instead.

But never do I hear that buzz of danger unless I turn criminal. Namely, in the fall, after they work all summer, slaving away, flying around the community, visiting all the lovely flowers, working hard at home to make and stow away as much honey as possible, along comes the beekeeper in hat, veil, suit and smoker to steal that sweet honey.

The fury of the bees is unimaginable! Once, I tried to fool them and put a decoy honey comb on the hillside and ran off with the top box of the hive, all the bees flew to the decoy but one. She followed me into the house, flew back out the door and less than three minutes later, the entire hive was plastered to the kitchen door, buzzing with intense fury. I couldn't go outside.

All day, they buzzed the house, seeking entrance. Lord help anyone who would try rining the doorbell!

After a while, they gave up, grudgingly. But for weeks afterwards, when they spotted me, a few guard bees would buzz furiously in my face, just to tell me off. After that, I gave them daily doses of sugar water colored bright red. They not only forgave me, they became the loving insects they were before the raid.

See? I am still smarter than they! Heh! Fooled them yet again!

But trust me, you have to be on your toes with even insects. They are pretty clever. Smarter than Bush.

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America Totally Locked Outside of ASEAN Meeting

2005-12-14T20:36:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Bush/Condi diplomatic disaster just keeps on going. Record trade deficits not only in total but individually with each of our major trading (sic) partners. We would have to sell 5000 Boeings each month to break even. Meanwhile, Japan plays coy with various suitors.

From the Washington Post:

Asian leaders agreed Wednesday to create a new, loosely united regional grouping, including India and Australia, to work on combating Asia's economic, security and political problems.

The 16-nation association, which will hold annual summit conferences, significantly widened the traditional circle of cooperation among Asian nations represented by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and a sister group, ASEAN Plus Three, including China, Japan and South Korea.

Its formation, decided at the first East Asian Summit, marked an attempt to respond to a growing conviction among Asian leaders that their region requires a stronger independent voice in world affairs and a new forum without the preponderant role that has been played here by the United States since World War II.

They are slamming the door in our stupid face. Japan will be the doorkeeper. We will come and go on their say-so. Namely, the choke chain around our military's neck will be firmly in the hands of the Japanese who obviously won WWII which is why, when Koizumi visits the war criminal shrine and bonzais, Americans are respectfully silent and obedient.

Underlying the ambiguity about the new group's role and degrees of membership was concern over evolving power relationships as China becomes stronger and increasingly willing -- even eager -- to exercise regional leadership and Japan moves strategically closer to the United States.

China and Japan also have been divided by increasingly tense differences over Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's regular visits to a shrine honoring Japan's war dead and rival claims to oil deposits and several small islands in the East Asian Sea. Those differences were on vivid display here in Kuala Lumpur, where Premier Wen Jiabao refused to sit down with Koizumi for a regular China-Japan-South Korea meeting.

You know, if we are insuring the safety and working to defend these so-called allies, we should have been at this meeting, right? Right?

Seeking to soften the atmosphere, Koizumi leaned over during a signing ceremony Wednesday to ask Wen to loan him a pen. When the Chinese premier smiled and handed it over, assembled diplomats applauded.

Note the diplomatic finesse! Note how small gestures translate into policy? Note how everyone there understood the secret negotiations which were 100% about AMERICA. We will learn the results in due time. Gack.

And so, Japan shoves us outside to stand at the locked door and to wait for further orders. Japan will make whatever deals she wants with China and then inform us of what we are to do next. In these secret negotiations you can bet, Japan waves the American sword as a leverage vis a vis China. And we have no idea what the heck is said, do we?

Well, I can guess! From the NYT:

The United States' trade deficit ballooned to a new record in October, the government said Wednesday, with imports climbing much faster than exports even though prices for imported oil declined.

The trade deficit widened by $3 billion, to $68.9 billion, confounding forecasts on Wall Street that the gap would narrow and signaling that the nation's huge trade imbalance has not begun to stabilize.

Stabilize? We are sinking faster than the Titanic! The stern of our ship is pointing straight up in the air! We are going to be running nearly a trillion a year in the red!

The trade deficit with Japan has grown immensely. Aiming for over $76 billion this year. With China, $200 billion. China's larger deficit isn't as bad as Japan's because Japan is poaching on our top industries not lower level, low per unit value stuff. Soon, China will be doing what Japan is doing, already, they export more electronics than America exports and this is going to grow vastly.

What can I say? With our present leadership and our present philosophical system, economic pundits and professors and those idiots running the Fed, except for a few lorne voices, indeed, virtually none, all screaming for a flat fucking earth and free fucking trade.

Can you all read the writing on the wall??? Gads.....!!!!!

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Voting Rights Activist, John Bonifaz, Running for Office in Massachusetts

2005-12-14T13:04:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

John Bonifaz, a McArthur Foundation recipient, life long liberal activist, election fraud lawyer has decided to put on yet another hat and launch a new career as a full fledged politician. No longer an advocate on the outside, he feels it is time we work to put real activists into positions of power. The right wing is on the wane, the Democrats no longer have to chase after the right wing, it is time for the pendulum to swing towards the liberal side and time to get the Democratic Party back to its FDR roots.

David Swanson, homepage, Let's Try Democracy has been kind enough to send me regular email alerts of various actions he is sponsoring or assisting. Just this week, I recieved an email about a conference call with Joe Trippi, former campaign aide to Howard Dean and John Bonifaz who is now running for the office of State Attorney General in Massachusetts. As my state's Attorney General, Elliott Spitzer shows, this office is both important, it leads to higher political office and it can be a platform to address the nation on vital issues such as the present voting mess we are in.

The conference callers asked mostly questions about this vital matter. As we all can now see most clearly, incompetent, corrupt, ackward voting systems can have terrible repercussions. The very basis of everything that impacts us grows out of the deliberately flawed, unfair voting systems Americans are forced to use. Using these suspect, easily manipulated, utterly unreliable patchwork quilt of voting machines and protocols has enabled the far right wing to politically dominate America to our great suffering.

On November 8th, 2000, I was very aware of this and rushed down to Washington, DC, with a pile of letters to all the Senators. The title was "Uniform Voting Methods for America" and I suggested very strongly that we need a voting holiday, easier registration and a unified system for voting that is tamper-proof and reliable. All other matters were secondary, this was an emergency.

Trent Lott kicked me out of his office. But the Democrats all claimed it was a great idea and they even talked on TV that evening in the news. One senator even showed my letter. So when the Supreme Court ruled that the votes in Florida couldn't be counted because they used too many diverse systems, I said, "Yes! Now for the obvious reforms!"

Dead silence. The media assured Americans that all was well, democracy was alive and the ruling Constitutional. I wasn't the only person outraged by this. John Bonifaz immediately got to work, pushing for reforms. He told us the Supreme Court ruling should have mandated Congress to act but thanks to Scalia, they added the unconstitutional provision that the ruling can't be used by lawyers to sue to force Congress to act.

So Congress didn't act. Even when the Democrats took over, they refused to be alarmed about this and called us activists "conspiracy buffs" for suggesting that the voting systems of America were corrupt and unreliable. They always had something more important to do and when activists pressured them to act, Bush's Trifecta of Terror, 9/11 happened and everything was dropped and instead, Congress threw in the towel and granted dictatorial authority to Bush who used it to utterly corrupt the voting so that we got wonders like the five 18181 vote tallies on Diebold machines all for Republicans, a statistical improbability of the highest order and this latest election mess in Ohio which featured some of the squirreliest vote tabulations yet.

John, ever ready to spring into action, launched lawsuits in Ohio. He has worked long and hard to not only expose the problems there but push them into the courts, forcing the law to be applied, forcing events. Being a lawyer, he knew where to work on this issue and even though Kerry went wimpy on us and chickened out, you can bet, there will be no occassion that John Bonifaz will wimp out.

It isn't just voting that gets John into gear. He is also trying to force our media and the Democratic Party to respond to the war in Iraq. Here is one website he participates in, After Downingstreet.org. As we can easily see, the entire Democratic party is torn to bits over the Iraq war issue. Even seemingly "liberal" politicians have sided with Bush on this obviously illegal as well as moronic war. There are many reasons for this, one of which, in the Northeast, is the very powerful Likudnik-right wing pro-Israeli lobby. Even though liberal Jews are very much against this war, their voice doesn't penetrate very far with our local politicians who get lots of money from right wing organizations as so they support this dangerous war that is bankrupting America.

Which takes me to John's other big thing he pushes: campaign finance reforms. Like myself, he wishes to take private money out of elections, witness the Abramoff scandals that are sucking down one corrupt pol after another, like a black hole of black bag money, this is bad for America and bad for democracy.

John wants to change all this. He pushed for laws to pass in his home state giving public funds to candidates and it passed overwhelmingly only the state government refused to fund it and he had to go to court to force the issue. This is why he decided to ride the horse instead of shoveling the rear debrie all the time. And so he is running for office and needs everyone's support, even if we live far, and I live only a stone's throw from his homestate, for we are in this all together. The present occupant in this office is a Democrat but he obstructed the finance laws. And even in liberal states like Massachusetts, we need more liberal liberals. Namely, we can't move the nation to the left by only supporting the middle, it is now time to stop the "business as usual" attitude in the Democratic party and force them to take us seriously.

They need us and we are doing good things.

The other people in this conference call live in many different states, Virginia, North Carolina, California, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, just off the top of my head.

I typed busily as the call progressed and guess what? This is the night my computer decided to play me for a fool and when I went off to do some evening chores like tending the fires, it was -6 last night!---My computer died on me and I lost everything I typed! Rats! A conspircay theorist should come up with something to explain this!

Luckily, I sitll have a pretty good memory. And look, at Trippi's webpage, he has the recording up. So anyone who wants to listen to us gab, can.

This coming election is important, all elections are important. I hope we can be a force of good. Keep the faith! Hope rises eternal. One vote at a time, one office at a time, we will rise up from the ashes, a Phoenix of Light and Life!

Thank you, John, for your past efforts. I hope I can thank you next year and congratulate you, too.

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Pill Popping Rush Limbaugh Still Free While Cops Arrest Little Old Ladies Selling Pain Pills

2005-12-13T16:40:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Prosecutors lose in court right to see Rush Limbaugh's medical records. Meanwhile, the same authorities who can't find the anthrax killer or bin Laden concentrate on the real terror in America: little old ladies selling some of their pain pills so they can pay the heating bills.

From CNN:

Dottie Neeley, 87, was fingerprinted, photographed and thrown in jail, imprisoned as much by the tubing from her oxygen tank as by the concrete and steel around her.

The woman -- who spent two days in jail after her arrest last December -- is among a growing number of Kentucky senior citizens charged in a crackdown on a crime authorities say is rampant in Appalachia: Elderly people are reselling their painkillers and other medications to addicts.

"When a person is on Social Security, drawing $500 a month, and they can sell their pain pills for $10 apiece, they'll take half of them for themselves and sell the other half to pay their electric bills or buy groceries," Floyd County jailer Roger Webb said.

Since April 2004, Operation UNITE, a Kentucky anti-drug task force created largely in response to rampant abuse of the powerful and sometimes lethal painkiller OxyContin, has charged more than 40 people 60 or older with selling primarily prescription drugs in the mountains.

"It used to be a rare occasion to have an elderly inmate," Webb said. "Five years ago it was a rarity."

Well, many, many criminals go free but not little old ladies! Can't have them hobbling about the countryside, whispering, "Hey, wippersnapper, want to pop a pill?" Nope. America will collapse, Christmas will be called off, the anthrax killer will laugh even harder than he is laughing right now if we don't capture and handcuff these dangerous 90 year old women!

The War on Drugs continues to grind onwards, crushing millions of people under its steel wheels. Ever wonder where Rush got those pain pills in Florida? From CNN:

Judge David F. Crow ruled that Florida laws do not prevent doctors from talking with prosecutors if the discussion is relevant to the prosecution of a crime.

The decision gave prosecutors permission to subpoena doctors and their staff, but it also protected confidential material in Limbaugh's medical records.

The judge noted that Florida law prohibits the discussion of a patient's medical condition and information disclosed by a patient during treatment.

From just such ladies. Oh, the humanity. Well, he is making millions on the radio, his show broadcast to our armed forces, even as the cops try to corner his elephantine mass, they are having a hard time of it. But ancient women with walkers: tackle them, mace them, throw them into the slammer and don't let them out.

Time for a rant: If there really is a baby Jesus upstairs, why can't we spend this xmas holiday screaming at him to throw some of that brimestone to Rush? Give him a lightning bolt jolt. At least have the Spirit of Christmas Future visit this blubbering ass and kick him to the curb?

Rich people can break any laws they want, the more connected, the more they can ignore the letter and intent of the law. Rich people don't say, "Shall I toss and turn at night due to the pain in my old joints and sell my meds or should I take my meds and get kicked out of my cheap apartment?" Desperate for some spare money as the monsters and clowns running America have created a fake, lying crappy "inflation index" that deliberately and maliciously excludes nearly everything that old grannies have to buy every month: food, energy, medicine, and then throw them in jail as they try to make ends meet?

What the hell is America coming to? Is this what we want to be? Shall we throw old women into prison for public begging? Or if they are too proud to beg, will we look the other way as they starve to death or eat dog food? The rip-off perpetrated by the GOP in changing the way we calculate inflation is going to KILL PEOPLE.

We are murdering people for oil, for money, for power and we are watching our rulers murder us as they, safe in their vast, expensive, inflation indexed bubble float over our heads, ordering cops to arrest little old ladies trying desperately to stretch a dying dollar.

Let them eat pain killers.

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Inflation Roars: Rubber Worker's Unrest In Asia Raises Rubber Prices

2005-12-13T11:20:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Muslims fighting Buddhists in Thailand shuts down rubber plantations causing the world price of rubber to shoot up. As the pain of inflation is taken out on the backs of workers, unrest and fury rises even in America, there is growing unease and anger.

From the International Hearld Tribune:

Rubber prices may rise to the highest in 21 years as violence in Thailand prevents the world's biggest supplier from meeting Chinese demand.
Plantation owners in Thailand, which supplies 38 percent of the world's rubber, are being hampered by fighting between Muslim activists and the police in the southern part of the country. Production, already hampered by heavy rains, may fall further because a curfew and fear of attacks are reducing the time workers spend tapping rubber trees.

Ok, timely story for me! As my blog has detailed, the Amazon is having one of those pesky droughts which seem to be alternating with torrential rains. Of course, the rain is falling in South East Asia this year so they have way too much and the Amazon, way too little. This is one of the many side effects of global warming/forest cutting in jungles dynamics.

Chinese automakers are increasing output by about 15 percent and their demand for rubber is rising. Rubber supplies have plunged 78 percent this year in warehouses monitored by the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Commodities from copper to crude oil are surging because of orders from China. Prices for copper, oil and iron ore rose to records this year, helping lift the Total Return index of the Goldman Sachs Commodity index 22 percent in the first 11 months, compared with a 3 percent gain by the Standard and Poor's 500 index.

Geeze. I saw this happen before! The price of oil shot up and then the price of all other raw materials shot up, too. Because of timelag effects, when massive inflation rears its ugly head, the effects at first are contrary, namely, the price of consumer goods which are not time-dependent like health care or food, tend to fall rapidly as sellers desperately try to eliminate excess capacity and inventory.

So the inflation which we know will show up with a vengence, doesn't at first. This always gives the professional economists and pundits cause to bray that high energy costs don't cause inflation. Always, when energy costs escalate rapidly, gold suddenly takes off in value because all consumer nations respond by encouraging the printing of dollar bills so the energy price hikes can become meaningless. The holder of these increasingly worthless, vis a vis oil, dollars then retaliate by buying gold to lock in value.

One time, when the Iran/Iraq war was raging, the price of gold hit $850 per once. Inflation then began to rage in the USA and interest rates shot up to over 11%.

Well, the Fed just decided to stop publishing the M3 statistics which tracks how many dollars the Fed prints up. For obvious reasons. They feel they can fool someone this way. Who?

The American consumer.

Great wars have been waged over commodities like oil as we see clearly today in Iraq. But great battles have been fought over rubber, too. And vast labor struggles. Rubber gold rushes have been just as amazing as gold rushes, huge cities suddenly springing upriver in jungles. During WWII, we had to evict the Japanese from Asian rubber plantations as quickly as possible to cripple not only the Japanese but the German war efforts.

When rubber, copper and gold shoot up in price alongside oil we will see a lot of inflation. Once the big manufacturers cut down on their own inventory, to restore the profit margin, they will begin to hike prices even if this means fewer customers. After all, it is the profit margin that matters, not how many you sell. And market share, but only if you make a profit. The American auto makers ate up their profits this year trying to unload stock. Now their credit rating stinks, General Motors just had theirs degraded yet again this week!

And the biggest customer for loans, the US Government, is raising interest rates yet again and simulatneously announcing they have killed inflation and so won't need anymore raises.

Gads. In a rat's ass! Talk about liars! They are my age or older, these clowns. They should be able to remember the past but I bet, they cannot. For they are delusional and deliberately so.

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Koreans Battle Police In Hong Kong at WTO Meeting

2005-12-13T08:45:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The scariest thing for any ruling elite is to see workers uniting or farmers on the warpath. All revolutions happen with these two forces coincide and cooperate. We are seeing this beginning to happen as the capitalists work hard to make a flat earth with workers and farmers flat on the ground under their bootheel. I feel a rising windstorm here.

From Yahoo:

Several dozen protesters struck security forces with bamboo sticks and tried to ram through a police roadblock Tuesday as the World Trade Organization meeting opened in Hong Kong. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

The confrontation occurred after several thousand protesters marched through the city against the WTO and globalization, which many of them believe benefit primarily the rich and powerful. Some of the protesters — mainly South Korean farmers — punched their fists in the air and beat drums and gongs, while others held signs saying "RIP WTO" and "World Threatening Organization."

Riot police with helmets and shields tried to fend off the protesters with pepper spray a few blocks away from the WTO meeting venue. The scuffle lasted about a half-hour and died down as police reinforcements arrived.

Earlier, dozens of South Korean farmers jumped into Victoria Harbor and tried to swim a few hundred yards along the coast to the WTO venue. Police intercepted them before they reached the venue.

Koreans have become ferocious street fighters. They know they must be visible and strong in order to shove events in their favor. At previous WTO meetings, they have committed ritual suicide, they drum loudly and refuse to retreat when the frightened capitalist tools inside order the police to get rid of them.

I have met some of these protestors in the past, at protests, of course. I, too, drum, I learned Asian drumming in a temple and can whale away without much effort for it is a skill, holding the sticks and going basically into a trance. There are whole organizations devoted to ritual drumming and nothing is more energizing than to walk into a cherry tree grove, hearing dozend of drummers striking their drums in unison, the ground trembles.

One Japanese religious cult, the one I learned this from, goes about the world, drumming for peace.

From the BBC:

The BBC's Chris Hogg in Hong Kong says there was a carnival atmosphere with protesters carrying colourful banners with slogans denouncing globalisation.

Other demonstrations are planned for the opening day of the summit on Tuesday, and also for next Sunday.

Around 10,000 activists are converging on Hong Kong to demonstrate at the summit, which will bring together nearly 150 rich and poor nations.

The demonstrators say the meeting will largely benefit rich countries at the expense of developing ones.

But supporters of the summit maintain that an international trade deal could generate billions of dollars in benefits and possibly lift millions out of poverty.

If WTO meetings were so uplifting, they wouldn't be so hated, would they? Many countries have witnessed ferocious WTO riots when that organization forces governments into draconian economic actions.

Now there is a new conflict that is tearing in two directions. In places like America, Japan or France, the farmers, thanks to quirks in proportioning districts and political power, have much greater influence on political choices than farmers in China, for example. So they are coddled by the government which gives them huge subsidies and help (which is why they hate welfar people who get the same!).

The first world countries produce too much food so they ship it to third world countries. The USA used to run a trade surplus with food vis a vis the world but thanks to various free trade agreements, we now are a net importer. Of course, to create the impression of free trade, Congress and the bubble boy President have worked hard to "free" American farmers from being on welfare which is now causing greater and greater distress. America, unlike Japan and France, for example, has pretty much killed off the small farmer, now the big guys are beginning to hurt, thanks to the rising cost of energy upon which they depend.

Japan, this week, has decided to let a ritual amount of American beef into the country but only if it is raised "properly" which restricts the amounts allowed pretty severely. The mad cow disease, like the avian flu, have hit farmers hard across the planet. These blows along with the cutting down of rain forests for temporary farming advantage coupled with air pollution in the form of acid rain and rising global temperatures are causing increasing problems for farmers. I see it first hand, on my own property, as I struggle between flood/drought cycles that are becoming monotonously on each other's heels. All rain or no rain is terrible in my climate.

Acid rain is also killing my forest which is a money maker for me and the best woods I raise, red oaks and maples, are rapidly dying instead of living hundreds of years. So farmers are naturally in the forefront of the battle for planet earth, both as destroyers and protectors. The tensions created by this complex convergence is roiling the planet, politically and physically.

Smart farmers know you have to nurture the earth and carefully cultivate. The Dust Bowl disaster in the USA was partially farmer-made. Scientists knew you need hedges and tree rows and contour plowing as well as cycling fields by not planting the same crop over and over again. Yet, farmers were forced into doing the bad things because of competition. Bad farmers could, in good years, drive out good farmers.

So the government rewarded good farmers and paid them to NOT overproduce and kill the land! This evolved into welfare for big farmers who didn't plant hedgerows or trees or contour plow. It ended up going to the bad farmers who wiped out everything in their path, overproducing. Alas. Over grazing public lands while taxing farms like my own to death, farmers raising beef responsibly, like myself, were driven out of business by careless ranchers who create desertfication.

So now we should have a world-wide "good farmer" organization that protects ecologically balanced farming and works like a giant collective, encouraging tree planting and careful forestry. Protecting the world's wetlands and glaciers that feed so many important rivers.

Something like what the WTO should be but is not.

On with the struggle. It is going to be quite vicious.

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Another Win For Us Tea Drinking Old Ladies: It Prevents Ovian Cancer

2005-12-12T22:27:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As a lifetime big time tea drinker who drinks cups and cups of tea while babbling away at this blog, it pleases me immensely to hear this good news: tea drinking protects women from ovian cancer. I have had my ovaries operated on when only 13 years old and my doctor told me to consume vast quantities of tea to ease the pain and so, he was right. I still have both ovaries and lots of tea kettles and tea cups and tea cozies. Would you like one or two lumps of sugar?

From Yahoo:

Swedish researchers have found tantalizing but far-from-conclusive evidence that drinking a couple of cups of tea every day might help reduce the risk of developing ovarian cancer.

The study involved 61,057 Swedish women who answered a questionnaire about their diets and then were tracked for an average of 15 years through 2004.

During that time, 301 women developed ovarian cancer. Those who reported drinking two or more cups of tea a day were 46 percent less likely to develop the disease than women who drank no tea. Drinking less than two cups also appeared to help, but not as much.

The researchers did not break out the results by tea types, but most of the tea drinkers consumed black tea. Both black and green tea contain polyphenols — substances thought to block cell damage that can lead to cancer.

My mother's godmother who was born at the beginning of the Civil War always had high tea time. She would sup her tea under the verandah, surrounded by her beloved wild birds with the California jay being the most audacious of the tea drinkers. The birds would perch on the lip of the cup and splash tea all over us with their bills. Then they would take the nuts and fly off to the mulberry tree and jay-jay-jay at us.

I am very happy I was surrounded by tea drinkers so drinking it was a natural thing. I collect tea and have many varieties as well as from various countries. Nothing is more wonderful than to participate in a proper Japanese tea ceremony. Drinking Chinese tea while eating peaches is also spiritually pleasing. Sitting on the deck, watching the clouds seethe about the mountains while sipping tea is highly recommended.

So is drinking wine, heh. But not five cups a day. As a five+ a day tea drinker, I assume my ovaries which caused endless problems back when I was very young (that, a long story, not pleasant) will be hearty and hale when I read 105 years like my mother's godmother, at this rate.

Or maybe not. Next week they will probably come out with a study showing bloggers don't live long because we annoy our readers to death. Argh. Oh well. Rock and hard place and all that. Time for another cup of tea.

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Newsweek Reads Us Bloggers: Calls Bush Bubble Boy

2005-12-12T21:28:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

On the left side of the blogsphere, the intelligent side, we have alternated between calling Bush a chimpanzee or bubble boy. Looks like the mainstream media is sufficiently unafraid of him to pick up the bubble boy formula, now if they only see how degenerately Darwinian Bush is....Well, Bush blew up today about all this.

From Yahoo:

Bush had been asked about an article in Newsweek magazine that says he is isolated and features a drawing of Bush in a giant bubble -- the traditional term for the layers of aides between a US president and the US public.

"I don't feel in a bubble. You feel in a bubble in the sense I can't go walking out the front gate and go shopping like I'd love to do for my wife -- although I may, and I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to buy her," said Bush.

"I just talked to the president-elect of Honduras. A lot of my job is foreign policy. And I spend an enormous amount of time with leaders from other countries, and they come right here in the Oval Office and tell me what's on their mind. And I tell them what's on my mind," he said.

Bubble boy can ask Karl Rove what is going on outside the super strong solid steel in an undisclosed location bubble he inhabits! Of course, this has a wee problem, especially with the cops hot on Rove's ass.

Here is the Newsweek bubble boy picture from MSNBC:

President Bush has always shown an admirable ability to ignore the Washington pundits and make fun of the chattering classes. Yet his inattention to Murtha, a coal-country Pennsylvanian and rock-solid patriot, suggests a level of indifference, if not denial, that is dangerous for a president who seeks to transform the world. All presidents face a tension between sticking to their guns and dealing with changing reality. History suggests it can be a mistake to listen too closely to the ever-present (and often self-aggrandizing) critics. But likewise, the idea that any president can go it alone is, to say the least, problematic.

Bush mocked his own courtiers who work for rich people who wanted tax cuts and raiding the Treasury. So they put up with the patrician frat rat's mockery as he sneered at their obvious grovelling. But the little pig overstepped the bounds of grace and is not being mocked or hated by many victims of his misrule. So the press can now attack him so long as their tax cuts keep rolling in.

Of course, we are going bankrupt, our nation is bleeding red ink, hemmoraging a sea of red ink, but they and the media owners barely mention this. But they can mention Bush's obvious bubble which they helped construct. The news story won't mention this glaring fact. It will pretend that Bush build this all by his little own self! Sort of like a personal Habitat for Inhumanity.

Here is one picture of bubble boy I did in the past:

If you google "bubble boy" at the top of this blog, many a story will appear for I and a host of other bloggers have called this idiot that name for quite a while.

Well, let's hope this iron bubble of his is popped. Fitzgerald, you hear me? Pop.

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Billionaire Bill Gates' Dad Frets About American Red Ink

2005-12-12T08:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bill Gates' dad recently warned us about the impending bankruptcy of America. Both of the Gates are very pessimistic about all this stuff which is why they are rapidly relocating to China and India. Great. Some help, they are.

From the Seattle PI:

Bill Gates Sr., co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, gave a CityClub gathering their money's worth Friday at a luncheon to review the year almost gone.

As a participant on a panel that included Sen. Patty Murray, state Secretary of Health Mary Selecky and Issaquah developer George W. "Skip" Rowley, Gates, along with the others, was asked to tell about someone he'd been impressed by and to say why.

He picked Wall Street big shot Pete Peterson, who, Gates said, has warned against "the pending bankruptcy of the U.S."

His response drew shocked laughter from the crowd. But Gates wasn't kidding, and he would return to that theme later in the luncheon.

He also thought outsourcing is a great idea and that the world should be flat and that everyone should "rise" to the same level without mentioning this means sinking an awful lot of little boats.

"We need to get over it," he said. "Seems to me it's the only way to raise all ships" and create what he described later as a truly "flat earth."

The present era's left-right polarity came in for a thumping by panelists who warned generally that it isn't a good thing. As a solution, however, the best they could do was plead for "more community."

Oh dear, once again, the happy news/happy face people get mad at us for daring to argue and make noise instead of polite laughter as our doom approaches! Hahaha. Laugh, clowns, laugh.

As peasants across the planet die in clashes with imperial authorities, they do this because they are angry and desperate. They don't want to be polite when they are being oppressed, when people are stealing their lands, their crops, their sons and daughters. They are understandably angry and won't let it all slide.

Others are angry. Like Atta. Goofing around, smiling and patting ourselves won't stop angry people like Atta from taking action. Our response to his action was to drive America very deep into debt, ravage our own economy by waging futile wars and spending money like there is no tomorrow. How the hell are we going to avoid bankruptcy if we are pouring all our future wealth into weapons and wars that don't make us one bit safer?

And the debate about all this has to be loud, long, hard and might even end up very violent. Like in China. The Chinese people have finally figured out that if they don't make a tremendous noise, they will be stripped of everything good. So the agitation against authority rises higher and higher as it ought. And here?

The last unions are quietly packing their bags and departing. The people who benefitted from this system are quietly going bankrupt or cutting back to the bone, retreating silently. Occassional cries of pain, suicides and murders leave a bloody trail but our rich don't want to hear any leftist debate about all this!

This week, the Chinese have overtaken America in electronics exports. As I also predicted, they are busy building the intellectual infrastructure to challenge our own research and developments in this area just like the Japanese have homegrown many things and now beat us on our own turf. The Gates family has relocated research and development to China and India so they can make oodles of more money. This is why they love outsourcing. Not because there are no Americans who can be hired, it is because it is cheaper in other lands. And since few Americans with degrees in computer programming can get stable jobs, fewer and fewer are taking the courses and so the giant corporations say, they need the overseas facilities due to lack of interest in America as if we suddenly didn't care about good jobs or need them!

So, even as the Gates family stuffs their moneybags full, they have the temerity to warn us about thieves. This is why I avoid all Microsoft products if I can. I am happy the Gates family is against the Republican desires to cut taxes all the time. But there is a futher step for them: to stop stealing money from the masses via their near monopoly. To stop crushing other businesses. To stop outsourcing. Stop it, now.

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"Happy News" Blog Story Reveals Mental Collapse of Right Wing America

2005-12-12T07:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As the right wing drags us ever deeper into terrible times, as we struggle to keep up with all the crappy news this creates, the right wing's leaders and followers both run away from reality prefering only "happy news." So it is no surprize to see all the media go ga-ga over a blog that compiles what right wingers consider to be "happy news" like soldiers handing candy to children in Iraq and aren't blown up.

From Yahoo:

Carrie Rodgers is so engrossed by cable-television news shows that her husband calls her a news addict, but lately she has found another source to balance the onslaught of stories about war, crime and natural disasters.

Two or three times a day, the 28-year-old insurance agent in Columbia, S.C., turns to a Web site called HappyNews.com.

She often clicks first to a section called "Heroes," which recently featured stories about U.S. troops rescuing two cheetah cubs in Ethiopia and the induction of 12 people into the Hall of Fame for Caring Americans.

"There's so much going on in the world that is so sad," Rodgers said. "You can go anywhere and find depressing news. I'm glad somebody has stepped up and shown there are still good people in the world."

HappyNews is the brainchild of Byron Reese, chief executive of Austin, Texas-based PageWise Inc., which publishes several how-to and advice Web sites. He decided the world needed a refuge from all the unpleasantness served up by newspapers and television news shows, so he launched HappyNews in July.

As the Mothership of the right wing neo-nazis famously said, ""Why should we hear about body bags and deaths," Barbara Bush said on ABC's "Good Morning America" on March 18, 2003. "Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

All over right wing America, people are tuning out. The refusal to view the body bags pouring into America from this woe-begotten war isn't just Bush. These people never want to see that which they wrought. It is getting so bad, the military has ceased honoring their dead when they ship them, like crates, home. From Channel 10 News:

Dead heroes are supposed to come home with their coffins draped with the American flag -- greeted by a color guard.
But in reality, many are arriving as freight on commercial airliners -- stuffed in the belly of a plane with suitcases and other cargo.

John Holley and his wife, Stacey, were stunned when they found out the body of their only child, Matthew, who died in Iraq last month, would be arriving at Lindbergh Field as freight.

"When someone dies in combat, they need to give them due respect they deserve for (the) sacrifice they made," said John Holley.

I still remember the Vietnam war in gory detail. I used to go to the airport in San Francisco to leaflet. Many people didn't want leaflets reminding them about the war. I used to observe the dead coming home, there was no honor guard after 1967. The sad dark boxes were hustled out of the hold of planes and studiously ignored. This is when hyper flag waving and screaming at antiwar people demanding the war stop was at its height. This is also when the same right wingers were actively, like Bush and Cheney and the entire leadership of the GOP, scheming and pulling strings to avoid fighting in this war.

The exact same disconnect from the reality they want that we see today.

The happy face was created when America was very divided. We were all supposed to put on a happy face, take tranquilizers or sniff coke like Bush was doing at that time, and laugh and drink and be merry. My tedious job was to shove the dead bodies into people's faces and force them to see reality.

From Yahoo:

Moderates are imploring colleagues in Congress to tone down the rhetoric on Iraq as debate about President Bush's war policies has become increasingly bitter and partisan.

Their pleas are likely to be ignored.

The war is expected to be front and center in the upcoming congressional election year, particularly in several races where candidates are Iraq war veterans. Neither party has much incentive to pull its punches, with Republicans eager to paint Democratic critics of Bush's Iraq policies as soft on defense and Democrats looking to exploit his woes as polls show declining support for the war.

Nevertheless, some senior lawmakers are appealing for courteousness, saying that while debate is essential to democracy, politics and partisanship should stop at the waters' edge.

Good fucking grief. When a country runs amock abroad, you should have screaming debates at home. The screaming should be deafening. Our representatives representing us antiwar people should make life hell for the pro-war creeps who have created this mess. How dare anyone tell us to shut up? Why is being cute and friendly good when we are murdering thousands of people? Eh?

Always, we are told to not fight. Yet whenever the right wants something, they cheerfully go forth and call us names, attack us, suggest we be blown up, spread hate talk, and worse, the loopy idiots who want happy news lap it all up and ask for more violent talk, more hate. So long as they are hating fellow Americans.

Buzzflash:

In many ways -- although this is our observation and not Pickett's -- the interview with GOP/FOX shill Cavuto reminded us that so many Democratic leaders are missing the boat. The battle is not between two visions of public policy, although the differences are night and day. The major political conflict of our time is between propaganda and the truth. That is why the Bush administration is spending so much time buying off journalists and news coverage here and in Iraq.

The Vietnam war at home, our struggle for the hearts and minds of Americans, was hobbled by the desire to be happy no matter what. "Laugh-In" is an icon of the times. We were supposed to laugh and play and ignore things. Luckily for us, the news on TV wasn't profit driven at that time so reality would leak into the conscience of the audience.

Here is an interesting study about how we deceive ourselves. From Live Science:

Do you always get what you ask for? A new study finds that when you don't, you might not even notice the difference.

Swedish researchers showed a pair of female faces to 120 volunteers for 2 seconds and then asked them to choose which one they thought was more attractive. The researchers then asked the volunteers to explain their choice.

The trial was repeated 15 times for each volunteer, using different pairs of faces. but in three of the trials the faces were secretly switched after a decision had been made.

Surprisingly, not only were a large number of the volunteers oblivious to the switch when ultimately allowed to take a longer look at their choice, they were actually able to gave detailed explanations for why they preferred the face that, indeed, they had actually rejected.

It would be asking for an apple and then explaining exactly why you wanted the banana you got instead.

Everyone likes to think they control their own brains but as we well know, propagandists and con artists prey upon people's innate need to think they are in control even as someone is forcibly guiding them into a box they can't escape. The reason why news services iike mine exist is because I feel one needs to know what is going to happen next. Pretending it won't happen is futile. This is why I look to the far future, the obvious future when our planet is destroyed by our local star. Being a worry wart, I want to have the living creatures of this planet spread to other star systems. This is why I support the space program.

Many death traps in nature are set up so the victim enters willingly and can't escape. Spider webs, venus fly traps, flowers filled with fluid and cupped so one can't escape, human traps are alway baited with goodies for the unsuspecting. And this is why news is important: so one can see the traps, see the danger.

The tendency to turn our news into Pravda is very strong. All despots order news to be only happy news. Five year plan exceeded! Look at the cute kitten! Everything is coming up roses!

Here is news about the approaching mess I call WWIII: From the London Times:

ISRAEL’S armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed.
The order came after Israeli intelligence warned the government that Iran was operating enrichment facilities, believed to be small and concealed in civilian locations.

Iran’s stand-off with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over nuclear inspections and aggressive rhetoric from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, who said last week that Israel should be moved to Europe, are causing mounting concern.

This was not a headline in America. Anywhere. You are reading it here and you hair better stand on end. This is bad news everyone should know. Relentlessly, our allies in the Middle East are shoving the world towards the Apocalypse and at home, the happy news consumers like the lady in Texas in the article at the top, are enabling this to happen because she voted for the people who are sponsoring this stupid event and many happy news readers actively desire this event because their churches have assured them that happy Jesus will happily pick them up and save them while we sinners will be ripped to shreds while they and Jesus laugh happily in heaven.

Gads. What a moronic mess. Cassandra was never popular but she was also never wrong.

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Washington Pest

Scientist Claims There Are No Super Rats...Ha.

2005-12-11T15:30:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

According to the Associated Press, there is no such animal as a "super rat." We know Karl Rove is one. Indeed, there are infestations of such animals in DC! But aside from that, I actually fought and killed a real live "super rat" in NYC.

From Yahoo:

City officials — hoping better educated foot soldiers can wage a smarter battle against an all-time high rat population — have opened the Rodent Control Academy, an insitution of higher learning about vermin that scurry around in low places.

The city enlisted Bobby Corrigan to teach a decidedly creepy curriculum that strives to show city workers how to properly bait, trap and poison the rodents in ways that don't just drive an infestation down the block.

Rodent complaints and health department exterminations are at unprecedented highs in New York, and the little ruffians are everywhere — scampering through subway tunnels, rooting through trash, dashing across parks, burrowing into the walls of apartment buildings. They can transmit disease, start fires by gnawing on electrical cords, and sometimes bite, usually children and the elderly.

I had to deal all the time with the rodents as well as roaches. I used to be a super in slums in NYC, superwoman super. The biggest cockroaches I had to remove were about six feet tall and pretty foul mouthed. The insects were smaller but not by much. When working in the cellar to restart the boiler or fix a broken pipe, I would hit the roaches with a hammer. Bam.

But the rats. Well, they love cellars. This is their subway system. So if you want to meet a rat, go into a damp, dark NY slum cellar like I used to do. I had this wonderful street cat named Mr. Thomas. He walked like a bulldog and was scared of nothing. He roamed the neighborhood and ruled the roost. He was top tom cat. His head was broad and completely covered with scars and one ear was torn in half. I took him with me when working down below and he would remove and eat the rats. He loved eating rats. He would chomp on them and leave the head and spit out the kidney sacs as well as other unmentionable stuff. Yummy.

But some rats he left alone.

One day, I was walking down Prospect Place when I saw what I thought was Susan's black cat, Coco, trying to jump up to the cat door which was high up to prevent rats from entering. I wondered why the cat was struggling so I went over to pet him and help him.

A gigantic warf rat (who was not Karl, he can't jump!) turned and squeaked a warning at me. Susan heard something and came to open the door. "NO!" I screamed, "Keep it shut!" She looked out the window and right into the face of the furious, giant rat. She fainted.

I yelled, "I'll come in and help you," for I was worried about her, she had health problems. So I picked up a broken brick (lots of those in thes places) and aimed at the rat and struck him with considerable force. He screamed in pain and bunched up and flung himself at my face!

I grabbed a garbage can lid and he hit it with a loud, ringing bang. I slammed the lid to the sidewalk.

Now, I had a giant rat under a garbage can lid and I couldn't let go of the damn thing.

A crowd gathered, this being NYC. "Oh my god, I can't lift the lid or it will attack me!" I said, looking for help.

"I'll call 9-1-1," said Oxana, a neighbor. The cops came. The rat was running around insde the lid and every time his fat body passed under my feet which were holding the lid down, it bulged upwards.

"OK, where's the rat," said the first cop.

"Want to see him?" I asked. He showed me his teeth and decided this was a really bad idea. "Why don't you shoot it when I lift the lid," I asked.

"We can't do that, every bullet has to be accounted for and we will get in trouble if we shoot a rat, unless it is six feet tall," (yes, he really said that). The cops decided to call the NYC rat control office. This is what they said to me, via the police radio: "We will dispose of the rat if you bring it in."

This being a super rat and the idiot in the office a super idiot, I said, "Someone bring me a steel box so I can personally bring this rat to them!" Alas, we didn't have one.

The cops decided to put a heavy weight on the lid. They found some big bricks and as the little boys yelled with suspense, we piled them on and I started to step off. Super rat shoved the lid and his head came out. I stomped on the lid, being nuts. A truck driver showed up and told the cops all the traffic was stopped and he couldn't move. He was angry until the crowd told him about super rat. He came back with a huge tire iron. I took the club of the cop and he and I stood on opposite sides of the lid and began to bang on it trying to hit the bulge showing where super rat was.

We hit and hit and blood flowed out but this rat kept on going round and round. "Damn," said the trucker and hit really hard. The watching boys were jubilant. The rat shot out of the now utterly smashed lid and whirled around to attack the trucker and he and I hit it simultaneously.

Finally, super rat breathed his last.

We put him in a plastic bag and a pot dealer came with his scales and weighed the rat who bent the scales at nearly five pounds.

Months later, I and my plumber cornered a criminal. When the cops showed up, it was the same pair as before and they said, 'Good thing you surrendered. She is the lady who killed the super rat with her bare hands."

"Don't exaggerate," I said, "I used your club."

If you don't believe me, ask the 98th Precienct.

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Chinese Arrest Official Who Ordered Shooting Rioting Peasants

2005-12-11T10:34:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The leadership in China is justly afraid of the power of the peasants for there are literally nearly a billion peasants who can, if they are motivated enough, can rip apart the capitalist experiment. So they arrested the official who ordered the shooting. In America, we often see knee-jerk support in favor of shooting anyone who is rioting. So this is a surprize to me.

From the BBC:

Authorities in southern China have held an official who ordered police to open fire during a disturbance last week killing protesters, media reports say.
The arrest comes after officials broke several days' silence to say that three villagers were shot dead in the protest, in Guangdong province.

Local residents have alleged that up to 20 people were killed.

The party leadership has good reason to be scared. The peasants have been hard hit by the avian flu scare and this has interefered with them raising massive numbers of animals. Almost all plagues that have swept the northern hemisphere these last 1000 years have begun in the successful Chinese peasant's mix of human and animal husbandry which is the most efficient on earth, namely, using ducks to fertilize the rice paddies and clean them of all insects and grubs, ducks are very good for this, I used to turn them into the garden here to eat insects for they leave the plants alone, the pigs would turn the soil after crops were harvested, eating the remains, in the case of rice, pulling up the roots so the plants don't form a hard mat, and the oxen who live like a family member just like my dear ox team who always wanted to come inside with me, using recycled human waste as fertilizer, layering all this carefully means the human/animal complex causes germ mutations and diseases hop from species to species easily and the large population is a grear ecological niche for disease.

In all, the Chinese peasant, intelligent and hard working, has many problems that should keenly interest the rest of humanity. Dealing with all this is our responsibility as well as the Chinese, namely, we should be the beacon, the light of hope and intelligence but we are run by fools who hate science and hate humans.

The Chinese peasant has basically been told to produce as much as possible. In the USA, since the Great Depression broke the back of the small independent farmer, the government has paid farmers to not overproduce. This has been cast out by our rulers who now have everyone running from one crop to another seeking money frantically, the small fowl farmers and small pork producers driven out of business by animal concentration plants that house animals in unsavory, anti-animal sheds that give them no peace, no freedom and no happiness before we butcher them.

All farming systems are in chaos today. In Hong Kong, the New World Order WTO people are meeting, trying to destroy the last vestiges of farm protections, making everyone "equal" so we can all be peasants. The Third world resents the subisdized food flooding in from Europe and America and I don't blame them but I think we should all have strong barriers, not the exact opposite. Japan, for example, protects their farmlands from competition, thank you. Ditto, France. Countries that turn their farms into export machines end up like the USA: manufacturing flees! All nations that want to be smart must understand they, like the Chinese peasants, need all the skills to be near at hand, the blacksmith, the farmer, the furniture maker, the teacher, spead evenly across the land, not everything in one or three cities, worse, in far flung countries.

The many coal mining deaths finally alarm Beijing. From Xinhuanet:

Beijing expects to close down 83 coal mines in its year-end coal mine safety rectification drive, said an official with the Beijing Mine Safety Supervision Bureau.

The city will set up a coal mine safety system which demand coal mine directors and managers to go down the shafts in shifts to ensure safe production and reduce chances of accidents, sources with the bureau said.

The new regulation will be issued next year, said Jia Taibao, deputy director of the Beijing Mine Safety Supervision Bureau, adding that each shift of underground coal production should be accompanied with at least one leading cadre of coal mine, Jia said.

Thanks to the internet, we can influence China to do the right thing. Wish that worked on our own government! Keep on blogging! This is about time, I must say. It grieves me to see the stoic suffering of all those hard working miners. It is a sign of just how morally corrupted the Chinese communists are, letting this fester.

And speaking of festering, the same week Condi has been snarling and snapping at Europe to shut up about our illegal, black hole, anti-Geneva Conventions secret CIA torture prisons in Polands, Bush and his gang turn around and throw the ritual mud at the Chinese. From Xinhuanet:

China strongly opposes to the assault of the US government on the pretext of human rights issue, Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said here Sunday.

Qin made the remarks in response to the US State Department spokesman's statement on Saturday's International Human Rights Day, in which the US side criticized China's human rights situation.

Qin said China has scored remarkable achievements in the field of human rights protection. The Chinese people fully enjoy human rights and freedom according to law.

"The Chinese government and people expressed their strong opposition and firmly opposed to the US government's practice in the name of the so-called human rights issue that wantonly assaulted China," said the spokesman.

The United States itself has severe problems of violating human rights, and it is being strictly criticized by the international society as it refused the investigation of a special rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Commission, said Qin.

"However, the US government still intentionally depicted itself as a human rights guard, often criticizing other countries' human rights 'problems' with the attempt to shift others' attention," Qin said.

Whenever Bush attacks other countries over democracy and voting, I want to rip out throats. The sheer nausea of America lecturing anyone about democracy, voting, civil rights or human dignity is disgusting. The Chinese correctly see this no longer as mere propaganda, they are very offended by this and for good reason.

I am offended, too. Arrest Bush for violating human rights. Put him on international trial. Then we can sit down with the Chinese and begin to explain to them how to run China. Har. As if.

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French Investigators Warned CIA About Niger Lies Year Before Powell's UN Performance

2005-12-11T09:09:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

French spies warned CIA repeatedly for a year that the Niger yellow cake allegations were fake. Day by day, news leaks out about the lies Bush and his gang created to drive Americans into a totally illegal war. Meanwhile, Powell seems to have become the Invisible Black Man. Where is his "undisclosed place"?

From the Los Angeles Times:

PARIS — More than a year before President Bush declared in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy nuclear weapons material in Africa, the French spy service began repeatedly warning the CIA in secret communications that there was no evidence to support the allegation.

The previously undisclosed exchanges between the U.S. and the French, described by the retired chief of the French counter-intelligence service and a former CIA official during interviews last week, came on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002.

The French conclusions were reached after extensive on-the-ground investigations in Niger and other former French colonies, where the uranium mines are controlled by French companies, the official said. He said the French investigated at the CIA's request.

The account of the former intelligence official, Alain Chouet, was "at odds with our understanding of the issue," a U.S. government official said. The U.S. official declined to elaborate and spoke only on condition that neither he nor his agency be named.

However, the essence of Chouet's account — that the French repeatedly investigated the Niger claim, found no evidence to support it and warned the CIA — was extensively corroborated by a former CIA official and a French government official.

The repeated warnings from France's Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure, DGSE, did not prevent the Bush administration from making the case aggressively that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons materials.

I remember Powell at the UN. His slide show was hilarious. HIs allegations were backed up with no data, his interpetation of the photos were a joke. The kicker was the vial of poison. Oh my. I wondered at the time if that was the left over anthrax from the Send Only To Liberals And Democrats Anthrax Attack right after 9/11 in order to scare Congress into passing the Patriot Act. It was amazing that Powell dared to flaunt this vial since the government called off the FBI when the anthrax trail led straight to a secret government lab here in America! Since that day, not one American official or politician utters the words, "Anthrax killer" any more than they say, "Bin Laden".

Ditto the news media.

Here is Powell concerning the WMD just before our war: From the Guardian:

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell said yesterday that UN weapons inspections in Iraq "will not work" and there was little point in prolonging them.

In an outspoken interview with five US newspapers, Mr Powell expressed a growing impatience in Washington for the confrontation with Iraq to be brought to a head, and his remarks were all the more significant in light of Mr Powell's role to date as the chief dove in the Bush administration, who helped persuade Mr Bush to take the case against Saddam Hussein to the UN.

"Inspections will not work, Mr Powell said. "It's the scepticism that we had all along ... How much longer should inspections go on? One month, two months, three months? What will be the difference if they are simply trying to get time in order to frustrate the purpose of the inspections?"

And in a speech yesterday, President Bush referred to Iraq's formal declaration last month accounting for its banned weapons programmes as "12,000 pages of deceit and deception".

Powell aides admit he knew he was lying at the time and was pretty angry about having to lie but like a good Nazi, lied anyway, with as much fake passion as possible. From the Downing Street Memo Site:

A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life.

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."

At least one man in this vast conspiracy to create a war feels guilty. And guilty, they are. Even as the media desperately tries to minimize the gravity of our collective crimes, the fact is, we are a rogue nation, this whole mess has utterly blackened our name. This is why there is all that harping about painting schools and giving candy to children. See? We are good to the kiddies. Just yesterday on my local TV, I chanced in to see what propaganda ABC was peddling. And guess what?

Look at the children of Iraq. We give them toys and candy and paint their schools and the ungrateful families kill us. Well, five soldiers were killed in Iraq yesterday and probably five more will be sniped or blown up today. And Powell is safe at home and so is his son who is the age where he could fight this war daddy launched at the UN but like Bush and Cheney and all the GOP, he is a chicken who wants to poop on our heads instead.

Send all the Bush/Cheney/Powell kids to war. Now.

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New York Times Calls Our Sucking Up of All World Financing "An Addiction"

2005-12-10T15:26:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As Americans pile into their huge SUVs that are polluting the planet and go off Xmas shopping using credit courtesy of Asia and Europe both of whom are frantically offering us billions in debt instruments so we will keep on buying their stuff while we lose one factory after another here at home, the NYT calls this "an addiction". Well, I call it "Traitors in America selling us down the river."

From the NYT:

t's an addiction. Every day, the United States sucks in more and more of it from abroad, just to keep the nation going. We speak, of course, about foreign money.

At our current rate of trade and budget deficits, foreigners need to purchase $2 billion in dollar-denominated assets each day just to keep the dollar stable, said Axel Merk, who manages $60 million at Merk Investments and runs the Merk Hard Currency Fund.

Over half the national debt is now financed by foreigners, according to Roger Ibbotson, chairman of the financial consulting firm Ibbotson Associates in Chicago and a professor at Yale School of Management. That's been true since 1980, but the difference now, he says, "is the scale of the game."

"I guess everyone wants to keep this game going," Ibbotson said. But if one of the countries we're most dependent on drops out, it could be "like a bank run."

When empires fall apart financially, the whole world trade systems collapse. It happened to the Spanish empire. It happened to the British Empire. It will happen to our empire. Anyone who knows anything about history minus the stupid propaganda points (like pretending we were fighting for democracy during WWII) knows that when an empire reaches its apex it nearly always goes into a financial frenzy, building palaces and stadiums, getting more and more reckless with their currency, wild military exploits that bring home no spoils, only corrupting the empire further. Diminishing returns on a shrinking market as the distant provinces demand support. All empires react by pulling back but only after they go bankrupt and it is pointless.

Why is the interest rate in Japan so pathetic? They have inflation. They import 100% of their oil, for example. Yet they are flourishing while our economy is on the ropes, kept alive only by history's biggest spending spree. One last time, we rush to the stores to buy stuff we no longer make. Once more, we fall into the same, stupid trap. As the sun sets on our empire, we send our leader (snark) abroad to be insulted and laughed at, a caged bear with a begging bowl, covered with fleas. Even now, the lesser provinces like Israel and Poland, drags on our diplomacy, demand we pay them tribute, not the other way around.

We now pay the highest interest rates in the world and the money we print like crazy comes flowing back home in a tidalwave of red ink. We then shoot this into our arm to feel no pain and to feel invincible even as our health declines and we are obviously in serious trouble. I have known heroin addicts. None of them made it past their 40th birthdays. Over doses, shoot outs during bungled muggings or break-ins. Committing ever graver crimes and getting less and less a hit off of a shot.

Spending all their time looking for horse.

Dead. And this is what America will be, financially, when we can no longer demand the entire planet feed our frenetic addiction. Our desire is bottomless. The bottom line isn't infinity.

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Cradle of Humanity, the Rift Zone in Africa, Opens Wider After This Week's Earthquake

2005-12-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Scientists locate new major fissure in the earth developing rapidly where humanity first walked, in the Somali/Ethiopian rift valley. Saudi Arabia is acting like a great knife, shaving off East Africa which is curling around the Middle Eastern landmass.

Probable future of coastline of Africa, give or take 10 million years.
From Yahoo:

Ethiopian, American and European researchers have observed a fissure in a desert in the remote northeast that could be the "birth of a new ocean basin," scientists said Friday.

Researchers from Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. have been observing the 37-mile long fissure since it split open in September in the Afar desert and estimate it will take a million years to fully form into an ocean, said Dereje Ayalew, who leads the team of 18 scientists studying the phenomenon.

The fissure, now 13 feet wide, formed in just three weeks after a Sept. 14 earthquake in a barren region called Boina, some 621 miles north east of the capital, Addis Ababa, said Dereje.

It is almost the anniversary of one of the greatest quakes registered by modern equipment. It was major in many ways, the numbers of people killed, the destruction, the changes in the earth's geology. It was not only great on the Richter Scale, it was huge on length, opening a rift over 150 miles long under the ocean running alongside Indonesia.

So now another rift valley drops deeper, as the rest of the crust readjusts. There are several rift valleys on the earth, they are easily located because they are below sea level. Death Valley, the Dead Sea and the Rift Valley in Africa are the major rift valleys and all seem poised to gape even deeper this year. Of course, I am talking again about the inevitable San Andreas quake as California readjusts. There is no avoiding this hazard.

Japan has been having the shakes. Volcanoes are sprining into action such as the one on the small island of the Vanatu chain. It, too, is only a matter of time, five years or less, for a major eruptiion somewhere. Even St. Helen's has hiccupped this year.

Here are some interesting maps speculating about future tectonic plate movements:
From History of the Universe

This shows one possibility with Australia pushing into Alaska. This is far, far future stuff. Here is another map from University of Texas
Neither of these seem right to me. I believe Australia will cartwheel into Japan. Why? Here is a map I drew showing rift valleys and places where the continental pressure is squeezing everything upwards.

If the Mediterranean basin is going to disappear and the Alps rise like the Himalayans, this upwelling will extend across Russia. India will continue to push into Asia but since it has slowed down, the activity is moving to the China Sea which is shrinking, not growing, namely, Australia is already crowding the neighborhood and will increasingly do this until the last drop of water is wrung out in another 100 million years.

By then, we probably won't care much about sea lane changes!

A movie from Berkeley where you can play with tectonic plate movements in your spare time.

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As Americans Tell China, Stop Killing Peasants, We Kill Peasants in Muslim Lands

2005-12-10T05:57:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The NYT name for the photo here is "Desert Protectors" as we see our storm troopers herding helpless, dirt poor peasants into a helicopter to be flown to some horrible place to be tortured. Meanwhile, the same American press hisses at China for killing dirt poor peasants!

From the NYT:

On the final day of a town-to-town military sweep in November along the Euphrates River, hundreds of men in Ar Rabit, a farming village, were rousted from their homes by American and Iraqi troops and shepherded into long rows on a harvested cornfield.

With the help of a group of locally recruited informants, most with their faces concealed by balaclavas and scarves, the troops pulled 12 suspected insurgents from the lineup, bound them in handcuffs and blindfolds, and took them away.

The Nazis did this a lot. So did the Japanese when they tried to subdue China. This is typical. We find quislings willing to turn in neighbors and then we do the dirty work. Israel does this which is why such informers are assassinated by outraged Palestinians. Who likes a ratfink? Especially one working for an alien invading force? Eh? Would you want your neighbors dropping dimes on you if you were against some invader? Look at France during WWII!

Meanwhile, in China, the poor peasants resisting the loss of land are being shut down and shut up. They will be, like the peasants in Iraq, severely punished for defying the capitalist authorities who steal from peasants whenever possible, they being poor and helpless! From Yahoo:

Armed with guns and shields, hundreds of riot police sealed off a southern Chinese village after fatally shooting as many as 20 demonstrators and were searching for the protest organizers, according to villagers and a newspaper report Saturday.

If that death toll is confirmed it would be the deadliest known use of force by security forces against Chinese civilians since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989, and marked an escalation in the social protests that have convulsed the Chinese countryside.

During the demonstration Tuesday in Dongzhou, a village in southern Guangdong province, thousands of people gathered to protest the amount of money offered by the government as compensation for land to be used to construct a wind power plant.

You know, if anyone in America dares throw molotov cocktails and bricks at cops when protesting, they too, are shot dead. Instantly. All you have to do is march in the wrong place and stop traffic and the cops will smash your head in and beat you to a pulp here! We are so cowed, we just shuffle from place to place, seeking refuge, hoping by moving we will find Shangri La La Land and all will be well and we will win the lottery. The government here has put in place anti-consitutional laws to insure a rock solid police state if we do balk like these poor peasants.

As the budding new Soviet State of America, we are picking up all those nifty KGB tools and forging relationships nearly identical to the KGB ones Eastern Europe loved so much. From Alert Net:

Poland was the heart of the CIA's secret detention network in Europe until recently, an analyst of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch organisation was quoted as telling a Polish newspaper.

"Poland was the main base for CIA interrogations in Europe, while Romania played more of a role in the transfer of detained prisoners," analyst Marc Garlasco was quoted on Friday by Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza as saying in an interview.

He said the allegations were based on information from CIA sources and other documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. "We have leads, circumstantial evidence to check but it's too early to reveal them," Garlasco said.

Poland is asking for more money so we can run their military for them and in return they will help us torture Muslim peasants and the intelligensia working with the peasants. America has killed off any form of left wing activity in Muslim lands, note the mess in Egypt! The "elections" there turned into a total farce as the only remaining opposition to the American/Israeli puppet prime minister is the fearful Muslim Brotherhood who, unlike Nassar, are religious right wingers and are now wildly popular compared to the ruler of Egypt, a hopelessly corrupt man who depends of billions in American money to keep in power. Like all the others, he oppresses peasants. Looking at pictures of the military attacking voters in Egypt, desperately trying to prevent them from voting or going to rallies or anything, it is obvious who the "enemy" is: Peasants.

Across the planet, the peasants are on the move, quite literally. In South America, as real elections happen, more and more people supporting the needs and desires of these peasants are rising in power. As the American empire concentrates on oppressing dirt poor peasants in Muslim lands, the iron control over peasants in South America is slipping. From Euronews:

Chile's presidential election campaign has drawn to a close with polls showing the country could be about to vote in its first woman leader.

Leftist candidate Michelle Bachelet is leading in surveys, although she may not get the 50 per cent of votes needed to avoid a run-off ballot in January.

The doctor, who is a former defence minister, was imprisoned and tortured during the Pinochet dictatorship.

She has campaigned on a promise to continue the free-market reforms and social programmes of President Ricardo Lagos, who cannot run for re-election this time around.

The goal of any oppressive regime is to detatch the intelligensia from the peasants. Successful social change only happens when the two join together. In Egypt, since the rulers snuffed out liberalism, only radicalized religious activists remain on the battlefront for the rulers dare not suppress them or there will be instant rebellion so they try to co-opt it all. From the Chicago Tribune:

Police barricaded polling stations and fired tear gas and rubber bullets Wednesday to keep supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood from voting in the final day of parliamentary elections. At least eight people were killed, including a 14-year-old boy.

Supporters of the banned Brotherhood fought back, hurling stones and Molotov cocktails and cornering security forces in some towns.

The last day of the vote, which stretched over a month, was by far the most violent. At least 10 people have been killed during the three rounds of balloting, which began Nov. 9 and are considered a key test of President Hosni Mubarak's pledge to open the autocratic political system.

Hundreds have been wounded and more than 1,000 arrested, mainly supporters of the banned fundamentalist Brotherhood, which has fielded candidates as independents.

In Egypt, it is obvious a revolution of some kind is going to happen if things continue the way they are going. Namely, the religious peasants gain nothing by supporting the regime at this point so open rebellion is flaring spontaneously and will only increase over time. The military is still willing to shoot unarmed peasants but they are on the verge of switching sides, this always happens very suddenly, the rulers of Egypt will command they shoot peasants and suddenly, the officers are shot dead and the troops storm the palace. I expect this to happen within the next ten years unless liberalism is extended again, haha. As if. The last thing America wants are pesky peasants actually voting.

Back to Iraq, it disgusts me to see our military reduced to stomping on rag-tag men wearing rags. The world's biggest empire, trembling with fear in front of these determined but tremendously poor people, disgusts me. Far from being proud, it sickens me.

But then, history is a long chronicle of the well fed, well dressed stomping on the hungry, those dressed in rags. I recall Jesus talking about all this. I remember, he was on the side of the ragged peasants, not the rich. Camels through needles and all that stuff.

Which brings us to the entire "Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Man" stuff. Christmas stuff. Stuff the right wing hates. The war against Christmas is also the war against the peasants.

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Washington Pest

Wanderlustige Earth's Magnetic Pole Picks Up Pace, Heading To Siberia

2005-12-09T16:10:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Not only is Santa Claus losing his elven workshop as the ice melts in the Arctic, his candy cane pole has developed a serious case of wanderlust and is hiking rapidly towards Sibera. The reindeer prefer Lapland, of course. This is quite a conflict.

From Yahoo:

Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said Thursday.

Despite accelerated movement over the past century, the possibility that Earth's modestly fading magnetic field will collapse is remote. But the shift could mean Alaska may no longer see the sky lights known as auroras, which might then be more visible in more southerly areas of Siberia and Europe.

If God is an intelligent designer, wouldn't he make Santa's job easier? I mean, capriciously moving the North Pole around forcing poor Santa to spend many precious hours trying to find his home base that just won't stay put! Off he flies on Christmas Eve only to come home and find no sign of the candy striped NP marker nor his wife or even Ruddy the Red!

Or maybe, Rudy is"Red"? A secret agent for the nacent communists in Russia?

Actually, it is very interesting, this awry polar circumanvigation. After all, like my property lines are being screwed up by this north polar preambulations. Border disputes are breaking out as we claim this tree or that rock, using our compasses to track where the imaginary lines were drawn back in 1785! Border disputes can start wars and if my property line is wavering, you can imagine the mess going on elsewhere! After all, I detailed how Congress is messing around with the designated lines for the Arctic Wildlife Reserve!

There are other effects, too, namely, what is going on in our planet? Why does this happen? Do we really understand what is at work here? Will it happen soon? Will it screw up our computers and such if it suddenly switches poles? Will the Australians get to call themselves "Northerners" while Canadians pretend to be the far south? What will the South say in the USA? "We won the Civil War because we are the North!"????

It will be a hellacious mess.

Computer similation of magnetic forces

From APOD:

Paleomagnetic records indicate that the geomagnetic field has existed for at least three billion years. However, based on the size and electrical conductivity of the Earth's core, the field, if it were not continually being generated, would decay away in only about 20,000 years since the temperature of the core is too high to sustain permanent magnetism. In addition, paleomagnetic records show that the dipole polarity of the geomagnetic field has reversed many times in the past, the mean time between reversals being roughly 200,000 years with individual reversal events taking only a couple thousand years.

These observations argue for a mechanism within the Earth's interior that continually generates the geomagnetic field. It has long been speculated that this mechanism is a convective dynamo operating in the Earth's fluid outer core, which surrounds its solid inner core, both being mainly composed of iron. The solid inner core is roughly the size of the moon but at the temperature of the surface of the sun. The convection in the fluid outer core is thought to be driven by both thermal and compositional buoyancy sources at the inner core boundary that are produced as the Earth slowly cools and iron in the iron-rich fluid alloy solidifies onto the inner core giving off latent heat and the light constituent of the alloy. These buoyancy forces cause fluid to rise and the Coriolis forces, due to the Earth's rotation, cause the fluid flows to be helical. Presumably this fluid motion twists and shears magnetic field, generating new magnetic field to replace that which diffuses away.

The sun has a very active magnetic field. One wonders about the intense core of the sun, that stubborn part that, when a star blows up or flares out, which remains behind, non-gaseous, spinning at a mad rate, producing little or no light but having a gravitational pool that makes escape from the surface nearly impossible. The act of dying, the final explosion, propels gas outwards but no rocket traveler dares approach the surface of even the smallest dead star!

The dense core of the earth bumping and shoving on the fluid mantle which is shielded by vast oceans of H2O: part of the whole concept of a "living earth" as a hyper-entity which has a sense of growing and changing that is amazing. Even an "intelligent designer" would be hard put to imagine something as variable, odd, bizarre and interesting as our home world. Gads.

I wish we took better care of this place. And when Santa is forced to relocate to the South Pole, he will have to use penguins or kangaroos to pull his sledge, won't he? Rudolf the red nosed penguin. La la la.

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