The Collapse

[pan]

OK, I'm an idiot - how do you upload video?

Watch this

[hannah j]

http://www.stanford.edu/group/CCB/Pubs/books/nineveh/nineveh.htm

anyone read this ehrlich book?

"Paul Ehrlich: We started building a complex culture before we split into human beings and chimps, maybe seven million years ago.

That’s Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich.

Paul Ehrlich: At first, our culture evolved very slowly. We had had the same kind of stone tools for hundreds of thousands of years.

Ehrlich wrote the 1960’s classic, The Population Bomb – and more recently, a book called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment. It’s about how humans came to dominate our planet. Ehrlich said that as human culture itself evolved, so did our power to shape and reshape the planet.

Paul Ehrlich: Sometime — and it’s controversial — between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, there was a culture that’s sometimes called ‘the great leap foreward,’ or the cultural revolution, where suddenly, instead of just having stone tools, we began to get fine needles, and obviously sew good clothes, and do the cave art that’s so famous in Lascaux, and so on. So that changed our culture dramatically.

Fast-forward to about 10,000 years ago and humans start to practice agriculture.

Paul Ehrlich: That was the time where it became possible for one family to grow enough food to support several families. And so the agricultural revolution, maybe, was the single biggest step in that whole course. Otherwise, we’d just be like another big mammal operating on the planet. "

http://www.stanford.edu/group/CCB/Pubs/books/nineveh/nineveh.htm

[BO]

I wonder if man hadn't been so saddled with mythology and superstition if the idea of a 'population bomb' wouldn't have taken hold? If so, we might have saved ourselves for a bit longer. But alas, it's too late now.

Guess we should count ourselves lucky to have witnessed the peak of man's potential. We're on the downslope now.

Will the planet heal before the last of us is gone? Or will man go the way of the Dinah Shore?

[hannah j]

hey i met dinah shore! and i never thought of the similarity with dinosaur!!

if they made city parks into community gardens, using catchment water from nearby buildings, and compost from the gardeners. if all schools had gardens for their salads and soups, if we grew and used herbs (all sorts), if the trains were reinvented, if there was a ride board in all towns, with some sort of security devised, if there was a 100% tax write off for passive solar, wind power, insulation, etc, if there was a national spirit of complicity in the problem and the solution, if if if if like the green bells of cardiff......

[hannah j]

if clean water technology available to us where we don't need it as much, were available to villages with polluted water, if the techniques for permaculture were not regarded as fringy, and if we spent less time exporting out consumptive way of life, and rediscovered making stuff. but this has to be embraced by the occupants of the fake french mcmansions surrounding all our cities and large towns....

can you tell i am a piscean old hippie woman?

[BO]

Christmas Shopping in Detroit

[BO]

Hitler loses his McMansion
(with apologies to our german speaking folk)

[waldopaper]

Here is a current plug for Stonefruit's latest blog if ye haven't seen it lately, pointing out how a significant population of the world has had enough of this shit already. "It just may be that The People have finally had enough, May 1968 round two." Could be... could very well be. There's a world of discussion in that bucket.

In USAmerikkka, I see the main problem with the idiot-fuck religious freaks. Yes... this sad old world needs a dose of spirituality... but have you checked out what some, say the Mormons, actually (say they) believe?? This is whacko-batso noodle-fuck. I think many of us "secular humanists" have no concept of how dog-shit daffy half of our population actually IS. I have no idea if they really believe this candyland crappola... I have no idea what "believe" means.

Right now I am wearing a "miracle medal" given to me by a very nice seemingly intelligent lady at the katholik kollege (she has a PhD in Theology). Shit... it's like a "dream catcher" to me... wothehell... it can't HURT anything. And I actually think about "Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee" every freakin day. To me, it's the Mother Goddess concept and all that... BUT... is the Blessed Virgin up in Heaven passing along a good word for waldo to god's boy jeebuz so I won't get a flat tire? Scuse me for bein a freakin heritic, but I think that has a lot more to do with road conditions and the state of me bald tires than the Blessed Virgin.

Are we going to get the cajones enough to call "bullshit" on THIS happy fizzies party?

[BO]

The Madoff Economy
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 19, 2008

The revelation that Bernard Madoff — brilliant investor (or so almost everyone thought), philanthropist, pillar of the community — was a phony has shocked the world, and understandably so. The scale of his alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme is hard to comprehend.

Yet surely I’m not the only person to ask the obvious question: How different, really, is Mr. Madoff’s tale from the story of the investment industry as a whole?

The financial services industry has claimed an ever-growing share of the nation’s income over the past generation, making the people who run the industry incredibly rich. Yet, at this point, it looks as if much of the industry has been destroying value, not creating it. And it’s not just a matter of money: the vast riches achieved by those who managed other people’s money have had a corrupting effect on our society as a whole.

Let’s start with those paychecks. Last year, the average salary of employees in “securities, commodity contracts, and investments” was more than four times the average salary in the rest of the economy. Earning a million dollars was nothing special, and even incomes of $20 million or more were fairly common. The incomes of the richest Americans have exploded over the past generation, even as wages of ordinary workers have stagnated; high pay on Wall Street was a major cause of that divergence.

But surely those financial superstars must have been earning their millions, right? No, not necessarily. The pay system on Wall Street lavishly rewards the appearance of profit, even if that appearance later turns out to have been an illusion.

Consider the hypothetical example of a money manager who leverages up his clients’ money with lots of debt, then invests the bulked-up total in high-yielding but risky assets, such as dubious mortgage-backed securities. For a while — say, as long as a housing bubble continues to inflate — he (it’s almost always a he) will make big profits and receive big bonuses. Then, when the bubble bursts and his investments turn into toxic waste, his investors will lose big — but he’ll keep those bonuses.

O.K., maybe my example wasn’t hypothetical after all.

So, how different is what Wall Street in general did from the Madoff affair? Well, Mr. Madoff allegedly skipped a few steps, simply stealing his clients’ money rather than collecting big fees while exposing investors to risks they didn’t understand. And while Mr. Madoff was apparently a self-conscious fraud, many people on Wall Street believed their own hype. Still, the end result was the same (except for the house arrest): the money managers got rich; the investors saw their money disappear.

We’re talking about a lot of money here. In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.

But the costs of America’s Ponzi era surely went beyond the direct waste of dollars and cents.

At the crudest level, Wall Street’s ill-gotten gains corrupted and continue to corrupt politics, in a nicely bipartisan way. From Bush administration officials like Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who looked the other way as evidence of financial fraud mounted, to Democrats who still haven’t closed the outrageous tax loophole that benefits executives at hedge funds and private equity firms (hello, Senator Schumer), politicians have walked when money talked.

Meanwhile, how much has our nation’s future been damaged by the magnetic pull of quick personal wealth, which for years has drawn many of our best and brightest young people into investment banking, at the expense of science, public service and just about everything else?

Most of all, the vast riches being earned — or maybe that should be “earned” — in our bloated financial industry undermined our sense of reality and degraded our judgment.

Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that “the financial system as a whole has become more resilient” — thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing.

After all, that’s why so many people trusted Mr. Madoff.

Now, as we survey the wreckage and try to understand how things can have gone so wrong, so fast, the answer is actually quite simple: What we’re looking at now are the consequences of a world gone Madoff.

[pan]

The Madoff Double-Bluff
[....]
So there is no way that Madoff could have been pulling a scam. It would have stood out as clear as day to professional financial analysts, whose only job in life is to examine the management of companies and their reports and accounts, to make sure that all is in order. Its their job, its what they do. They are the world experts in spotting anomalies. The idea that all these professionals in all these companies were all duped is absolute nonsense. It is highly improbable that one such evaluation process could have been fooled, but all of them, never. A Ponzi scheme is easy to spot when you have the audited accounts and the full range of investment assets and investment metodologies employed.

Also, this scam avoided the attention of all the funds employees; accountants, traders, auditors and the US regulators, all of whom are also financial professionals.

This again is absolute nonsense. A ny company that I have ever worked for would have known internally that such business was being done, because they are all involved. For instance, a trader goes on buying equities from the worlds stock exchanges that go down in price for 5 continuous years, but the company just keeps giving him more money to top up the trading, continues paying his salary and even annual bonus. Absolute rubbish. But assuming this actually did happen, the market risk team would have been watching these losses, as would have the accountants. It is not possible to hide things like this internally for very long, months at the most; 20+ years, NEVER.

So why plead guilty? The answer is simple. Look on the net and you will see that because this case is being labelled a fraud, it would appear that investors are going to be able to claim their investment back under the US government's financial fraud protection scheme. A judge has already given his approval in principle for compensation, w ithout any evidence having been presented and financial fraud being demonstrated in a court of law. And it would appear that there will never be such a demonstration in a court of law. Why? It would appear that all the funds financial records are mostly "missing" (rather like Dov Zakheim's US$1.4tn) and those few records that do survive are in a terrible mess.

However, since the guy has pleaded guilty we do not need to demonstrate the fraud, because he says he is guilty.

And look further on the net and you will see that these "victims" have also been told by the US tax authorities that they will probably also be entitled to claim back some taxes on these defrauded sums.
[....]

[waldopaper]

Wull... golll-leee. "Who could have known?"

Now tell me... does this (linked) thread freak you out as much as it freaks me out? And further... do you think it means what I think it means?

"Police Officers told me that what they were doing was an experiment and better methods for killing larger segments of populations during National and other disasters were being devised, as the sniper method was not the most efficient."

...neither was the Einsatzgruppen ("efficient").

[pan]

Damn right it freaks me out....and now I have Helter Skelter stuck in my brain. white folks trying to provoke a race war

Maybe the Black Panthers need to re-energize the militant side of the movement.

[pan]

Ponzi scheme at Citibank

Time to reintroduce putting criminals in stocks in a public square - A little public caning would go a long way.