Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1369956 Comments:2390
Sony To Axe 10,000 Employees Monday, 09 April 2012 02:18 Brandon Smith
This is just the beginning folks. With Sony's recent announcement of downsizing right on top of Yahoo's cuts, and the recent U.S. jobs report which was far below mainstream expectations, we are now seeing the initial stages of the next economic drop. The effects of the fiat money train have subsided, and the reality of the dismal global economy is taking hold once again. Watch for an accelerated and very visible downturn in the coming months...
Meanwhile, deleveraging of household balance sheets since the high debt levels of 2007 has been mild. The result is yet another way to see how deeply consumer demand is restrained: theres not enough work to both pay down debt, and restart consumption.
Until the US confronts the reality of health care costs, and the outstanding debt levels of households, there should be little expectation that sectors like housing will see much of any recovery. While its true that reduced consumption more generally, compared to the excesses of the past few decades, is a long-overdue change that the US economy sorely needs, it is also true that any desired shift to a more productive economy in which output rises faster than consumption will not likely occur on the back of part-time work. It sounds so boring to say: the US economy needs a return of high-paying, full-time jobs. If this does not occur soon, the associated political unease will continue to fester and a new conversation about health-care policy, one that is less partisan(?), will have to ensue.
The above shows the unemployment rate for the five "PIIGS" countries. The data (from Eurostat) begin in 2005 and run through Feb 2012 except for Greece which only goes to Dec 2011.
None of these countries have put their troubles behind them. You can argue that Ireland appears to have at least stabilized its unemployment rate. The rest all appear to be worsening - Greece, Spain, and Portugal are all deteriorating at fairly dramatic rates. These countries are in the grip of an event on the scale of the Great Depression.
These countries are in the grip of an event on the scale of the Great Depression.
We have some time left before the ultimate fate is visible to all. Ten minutes after the collision, the Titanic's passengers had 2 hours and 30 minutes before the "unsinkable" ship sank. How much time we have left is unknown, but the bow of the ship will be visibly settling into the icy water within a year or two--and perhaps much sooner.
- a dangerous meme will go forth across the internet, and this meme will say: Millennials, renounce your college loans and set yourselves free! And then something truly marvelous will happen. They will at once disempower the swindling generation of their fathers, teachers, loan officers, and overlords and quite possibly bring on, at long last, the epochal collision of pervasive American control fraud with the hard hand of reality.
I think this will happen, and I would venture even to set the meme loose here and now and watch it go viral. The college loan racket has been an even more cynical enterprise than the mortgage racket was because so many people who ought to have known better, people of supposed intelligence such as college deans, cabinet secretaries, and think-tank Yodas, all colluded to support the false promise that the gigantic cargo cult of higher ed would keep churning out fresh careers forever - when the truth was that the entire groaning vessel of hopes and dreams was already under water and sinking into the eternal darkness.
Almost every country in the Middle East is awash in oil, and we have to side with the one that has nothing but joos. Goddamn, that was good thinkin'. Esso posted on 2012-01-13 7:37:56 ET
The first sign of AgitProp is when you' re first told of the 'problem' is when you're told it's been destroyed or never existed in the first place:
" The petroleum age is just beginning
BY DAVID DEMING | Published: April 7, 2012 Oklahoman Comment on this article 35
Peak Oil is the theory that the production history of petroleum follows a symmetrical bell-shaped curve. Once the curve peaks, decline is inevitable. The theory is commonly invoked to justify the development of alternative energy sources that are allegedly renewable and sustainable. NewsOK Related Articles
* Oklahoma City benefits from inspiring leadership 04/07/2012 When he turned 25, a friend of mine printed T-shirts with his picture and the phrase A quarter-century of being awesome. There is indeed something...
It's time to consign Peak Oil theory to the dust bin of history.
peak energy in the news: Can overconfidence be overcome in advance? Richard Vodra, ASPO-USA
What seems to be missing from the coming New York Times energy conference is a sense of skepticism about the underlying assumptions for energy sufficiency in the decades to come. The agenda, speakers, and likely attendees remind one of what a shipboard symposium might have been like on the future of trans-Atlantic shipping held in the salon of the Titanic exactly one hundred years earlier. Maybe its inevitable that the hard questions wont be entertained until the disaster occurs and we realize there arent enough lifeboats.
Sometimes I think you work for big oil and you are just trying to scare up prices.
There is no alternative for oil.
There is zero way I can scare up prices faster than 'Israel wants to attack Iran'.
Just no way...;}
"It is a game that children usually love and that can last quite some time if the garden is big and the bunny has been a little mean in hiding the eggs in difficult places.
A curious facet of the Easter Egg hunt is that it looks a little like mineral prospecting. With minerals, just as for eggs, you need to search for hidden treasures and, once you have discovered the easy minerals (or eggs), finding the well hidden ones may take a lot of work. So much that some eggs usually remain undiscovered; just as some minerals will never be extracted.
Now, if searching for minerals is similar to searching for Easter Eggs, perhaps we could learn something very general if we try a little exercise in model building. We can use system dynamics to make a model that turns out to be able to describe both the Easter Eggs search and the common "Hubbert" behavior of minerals production. The exercise can also tell us something on how system dynamics can be used to make "mind sized" models (to use an expression coined by Seymour Papert). So, let's try.....
I bet she hates the Dukes of Hazard. Say it aint so ming.
He mocks Jesus while claiming to be a Christian so I don't put much stock in what he says about other stuff. I do prefer Challengers though.
Almost every country in the Middle East is awash in oil, and we have to side with the one that has nothing but joos. Goddamn, that was good thinkin'. Esso posted on 2012-01-13 7:37:56 ET
He mocks Jesus while claiming to be a Christian so I don't put much stock in what he says about other stuff. I do prefer Challengers though.
;}
"Inordinate power in finance begets great wealth inequality. Deals are consummated behind closed doors, and the sole motive is profit. If some benefits should trickle down to the "little people" who live far down the line, that was only a happy accident. The workings of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" are increasingly harder to discern. Big Finance set free from reasonable constraints on its behavior is among the most undemocratic of human institutions. In addition to great power and wealth, it is exclusivity which defines the banking world. To paraphrase George Carlin, it's a big club and we're not in it."
That jesus would be/is totally freaked out is the sine quo non hypocrisy of this entire cluster fu ck.
The rate of energy emission is equal to the product of the total decay ... resultant rise in the temperature of the calorimeter measurement well. ... portion of the neutrons will escape the calorimeter without depositing their kinetic energy. The ... A heat-flow calorimeter consists of a sample chamber insulated from a constant ...
By measuring the neutron emission rate they know exactly what the temp is and what is happening with the corium.
[quote]In fact, Mr Kimura called the main office of TEPCO in October and he told them that they should measure, interference evaluation as a guideline, the neutron emission rate near the reactor core.
The govt is aiming to bring the reactor temperature down within this year (2011).
But Mr Kimura said that unless TEPCO measures the neutron emission rate, reassurance offered by the government is nothing but the word [...]
HOST #2: I got goosebumps from the warning he made about the danger of tsunami and nuclear power station. I think he had an extremely accurate foresight and predicted the danger of the accident. I am so shocked.[/quote]
("Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units," wrote Marine historian Col. Robert Heinl, Jr., in 1971. "In one such division... fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.")
Still, credit must be given. Increasingly poorly remembered, Vietnam is now one for the ages. After so many years, Afghanistan has finally emerged as a quagmire beholden to no other war. What an achievement! Our moment, Afghanistan included, has proven so extreme, so disastrous, that its finally put the unquiet ghost of Vietnam in its grave.
And heres the miracle: it has all happened without anyone in Washington grasping the essence of that now-ancient defeat, or understanding a thing.
The "lessons of Vietnam," fruitlessly discussed for five decades, taught Washington so little that it remains trapped in a hopeless war on the Eurasian mainland, continues to pursue a military-first policy globally that might even surprise American leaders of the Vietnam era, has turned the planet into a "free fire zone," and considers military power its major asset, a first not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate place to burn its national treasure.
After Vietnam, the U.S. at least took a few years to lick its wounds.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bushs Wars Became Obamas as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com.
If demand is down so sharply then why doesn't the price follow its trend?
Federal Reserve market animation. I used to say manipulation, but this 'turkey' died Thanksgiving 2011. And it's only a zombie now.
Note that Every time the commodities take a dive, they immediately get ramped back up.
With Deflation, the Central Banks are irrelevant. All they can do is talk, and devalue the currency.
And with the massive $1.7 Quadrillion in debt derivatives they can't even devalue anymore....at some point the zombie will just plunge to zero or lock up....anytime now.
If demand is down so sharply then why doesn't the price follow its trend?
If only speculators were required to take physical possession of their purchased commodity.
Almost every country in the Middle East is awash in oil, and we have to side with the one that has nothing but joos. Goddamn, that was good thinkin'. Esso posted on 2012-01-13 7:37:56 ET
The battles fought there (Virginia) after Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac were a close first approximation to the useless slaughter of the western front in the First World War, with one crucial difference: they werent useless, from Grants and the Unions perspective, because they formed one part of a broader strategy.
Grant is said to have described that strategy in the homely language he preferred: Im going to hold the cat down, and Sherman is going to skin him. That was exactly what happened, too. Grants job was to pin down Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, respectively the Confederacys best general and its toughest army, so that neither one could be spared to the more vulnerable western front.
Meanwhile Grants opposite number, Gen. William T. Sherman, marched an army from Tennessee through Georgia to the sea, and then north through the Carolinas toward Virginia; his job was to shatter the Confederacys economic and agricultural systems, cripple its ability to feed and supply its armies, and make it impossible for the South to keep fighting.
That was why Shermans bummers stripped the country bare, leaving behind memories that are still bitter today, and it also explains a detail that rarely gets mentioned in any but the most technical histories of the Civil War: in the course of a months-long campaign that took him through the heartland of the Confederacy, Sherman fought only two significant battles.
Grant got the glory, and earned it fairly, but Sherman may have been the 19th centurys most innovative military thinker.
When he came face to face with a Confederate army, whenever the strategic situation allowed, he evaded it, slipped past it, got behind it, and threatened its lines of communication and supply, forcing it to retreat in disarray.
Long before anyone else, he grasped that its not necessary to fight a pitched battle to win a war, and that a force that can move fast, get behind its enemy, and target the vulnerable territory behind the lines can cripple the ability of the other side to wage war at all.
Most of a century later, that approach to war came to be called blitzkrieg;
...Finally, to guarantee all these things, the British government would have been forced to accept an occupying force in Britain, and permanent military bases would be signed over to the new imperial power in Britain and its remaining colonies. That, by and large, is what happened to defeated nations in the wars of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Now compare that list to the relations between Great Britain and the United States from 1945 to the present. Thats the thing that cant be mentioned to this day in polite company: the British empire ended in the early 1940s when the United States conquered and occupied Britain.
It was a bloodless conquest, like the German conquest of Denmark or Luxembourg, and since the alternative was submitting to Nazi Germany, the British by and large made the best of it.
Still, none of Queen Victorias prime ministers would have tolerated for a moment the thought of foreign troops being garrisoned on British soil, which is where thousands of US military personnel are garrisoned as I write these words.
Thats only one of the lasting legacies of the Gasoline War.