ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

49% of all soldiers evacuated from WWII were sent back for mental problems.

I think this issue of controlling the mass psyche is exactly why we have the current superdelegate problem that we face. We might have our popularly elected candidate overthrown by those ‘in the know’ because they don’t trust us to make the right decision because we haven’t picked the candidate they think should win. Might not happen, because there are like 800 something superdelegates out there. If Obama wins the state votes but Hillary wins the ticket bid, well, then I’ll say “Way to take the demo out of Democratic and Democracy.”

I wish Obama would watch these documentaries. Or someone who wants to start a campaign for Al Gore. They just have to point to the Republicans, point to the state of things in our nation, and say “Do you really want 100 more years of the same, as promised by McCain? You got 4 more years of the same the last time you voted for president. Is that really the decision you want to tell your children you made for them while they are working as debt slaves to pay off Iraq and Afghanistan and maybe even Iran, since it seems the Republicans want to invade Iran too? Are you going to let their psychology of fear scare you into making yet another bad, irrational decision?”

Sure, it’s the exact same tactic, but the average American voter is still too drunk and stoned to know the difference.

Gallup polls were created by Theodore Roosevelt as a way to figure out whether or not he was doing well with his socialist works that were restoring American from the thrashing it had taken at the hands of laissez-faire capitalism in the 20s. Joseph Goebbels admired Roosevelt’s socialist works that were restoring America. Right now, the Fed is socializing the risk taken by Wall Street. Which is enriching the few at the expense of the many, in the guise of helping the many by keeping the financial system from collapsing. It’s not gonna work, because there’s not enough money in the world to meet the expectations people have been sold.

And by that, I mean you must watch this four part BBC documentary. (BORING!)

Well, possibly, until after the first 20 minutes. The story starts with Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the psyche. It goes on to his nephews use of his discovery first for American propaganda to enter WWI as a ‘good thing,’ and then goes on to his (Edward Bernays, aforementioned nephew of Freud) start of PR (public relations) as a word to replace propaganda, a word the German’s sullied. He is responsible for getting women to smoke, by staging a PR stunt and linking cigarettes to the phrase “torches of freedom” (an allusion to the Statue of Liberty). He kicked off the idea of the ‘American Consumer’ instead of the ‘American Citizen.’ He started the consumer revolution that went on to become a bubble, he started the idea that the common man should buy stock in companies, using money borrowed from banks he also represented… leading up to, you guessed in, the bursting of the bubble and the Great Depression that ensued. Any of this sounding familiar at all to our own lives? Frighteningly so? Good, then you are awake and paying attention, and not as stupid and people may have been telling you that you are.

The BBC’s  ‘Century of Self’ (link to wiki)
Part one.
Part two.
Part three.
Part four.

All available for free on teh Goog’s video.

The revolution will not be televised. It will not be advertised. It will, however, be googled.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does loop like a bad dance remix.

Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration has proved serially incapable of building anything, even — in the long run — their own machine. And, from the Enron moment to the Bear Stearns one, whenever it looked like the Titanic might have hit an iceberg, it was a lock that those passengers assigned to the limited places in the lifeboats wouldn’t be from steerage (or be weighed down with subprime mortgages).

So rebuilding. No. Saving people who aren’t already friends. No. Doing a heck of a job in a crisis. No. Now, our latest and greatest crisis is upon us, the sort that, in a matter of weeks, has sent media commentators and pundits from reluctant discussions of whether we might be heading into a recession straight to references to the “d” word, “1929,” and the Great Depression. And they’re not alone. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll indicates that a startling 59% of Americans already believe we’re heading for a long-term depression, not a recession (and 79% are worried about the possibility). Leave the definitional details to the experts. Most Americans have undoubtedly assessed the Bush administration’s proven incapacity in perilous times and drawn the logical conclusions.

Ten months is a long, long time when only their hands are near the pilot’s wheel of the ship of state and water’s already seeping through the hull. It’s an eon for an administration capable of sinking New Orleans in a matter of days, and Iraq in little more than months. Or, thought of another way, it’s plenty of time if your expertise happens to lie in deconstruction. After all, barring a miracle, you’re talking about the little administration that couldn’t, no matter how hard Ben Bernanke may try.

So, even if you, like me, know next to nothing about economics, you already know enough to be afraid, very afraid.

Get ready for more quoting. I’m actually going for a two-source post tonight.

• There are $500 Trillion in derivatives that no one can possibly understand the financial risks on.
• A huge portion of those derivatives are with JP Morgan (JPM).

I‘ve heard a lot about derivatives lately. I decided to look them up on Wiki. It scares the shit out of me. I saw a chart a while back that said that JPM has like $171 trillion in derivatives. Does that sound like a safe home for the too-big-to-fail Bear Stearns, whose failure would have, apparently, sunk our economy so the federal government had to bail them out with ‘taxpayer dollars’ by which I actually mean ‘taxpayer debt?’  Our whole economy and future is run on this ‘money’ that only looks like money on paper, but when people actually try to take control of it to hold or spend, actually starts to just look like numbers on a piece of paper that won’t buy you a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s even if you have two extra dollars. Someone is eventually going to want some of those $500 trillion in derivatives, and with out $10 trillion in debt and $13 trillion a year paycheck, well, um, that’s not starting to look very good.

So maybe it should be more like Economic Superdisaster-Catastrophe. The trillion or so dollars worth of mortgage write-offs (of which we’ve seen a few hundred billion claimed) and the three trillion or so in war expenses (of which we’ve seen a few hundred billion claimed) is starting to look like it might just be the tip of an iceberg. I hope I’m wrong, and just being super-pessimistic. I don’t want to experience my grandpa’s tales of the Great Depression first-hand.

Americans owe a staggering $1.1 trillion on home equity loans — and banks are increasingly worried they may not get some of that money back.

That’s almost $4 for every man, woman, child and illegal immigrant in the country. No, wait, my mistake, that’s almost $4,000 for every man, woman, child and illegal immigrant in the country. No, wait, my mistake, $40,000 etc etc. Holy crap that’s a lot of money. That’s more than I have in assets. And that’s a per-person basis, not an actual per-homeowner basis.  And this is home-equity, not reverse-mortgage. So that means that most of this is on the equity you’ve put into the home you’re buying, not the home you own. I smell disaster.

Lenders holding first mortgages get first dibs on borrowers’ cash or on the homes should people fall behind on their payments. Banks that made home equity loans are second in line. This arrangement sometimes pits one lender against another.

Two lenders enter, one lender leaves. And, I mean, this is just the amount owed in home equity loans. This doesn’t count the actual mortgages and credit card or auto-loan debt that people hold. American’s owe 1/10th of the national debt on homes they’re struggling to afford.

Damn the creditbergs and full-speed ahead I say! What could possibly go wrong with this situation.

In December, 5.7 percent of home equity lines of credit were delinquent or in default, up from 4.5 percent in 2006, according to Moody’s Economy.com.

The real news must be great if they’ve got stale 3 month old statistics to support their story.

The soured home equity debts can linger on credit records and make it harder for people to borrow in the future.

That actually sounds like a good thing, considering how they’ve fucked themselves this time around. Of course the secondary and tertiary lienholders are all feeling the squeeze in this economic disaster they’ve helped perpetuate, and are now clamping down to keep the homeowners from selling their houses at current prices, but then people will just walk away like they’re being advised to, like businesses do in failed ventures, and then the 2nd and 3rds will get jack and squat, or maybe just even jack.

More than a third of all subprime loans made in 2006 had associated second-lien debt, up from 17 percent in 2000, according to Credit Suisse.

Smart.

“This is turning out to be a real impediment to solving this problem,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, “at least, solving it quickly.”

Translation: Oh crap, we’re boned.

In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth. Jane Buckingham, the founder of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, said the “social media generation” was comfortable being in constant communication with others, so recommendations from friends or text messages from a campaign — information that is shared, but not sought — were perceived as natural.

If someone’s political campaign text messages me, I will fucking explode.

Had that been the rule in place last month, consumers would not have been told if their supermarkets sold meat from a Southern California slaughterhouse that triggered the biggest beef recall in U.S. history.

This meat is dangerous - so dangerous we have to not sell it anymore - but if you already bought it, that’s cool. At least, that’s what the food industry wants the government to tell you. I’m sick of people being able to buy their way out of not living up to their mistakes.

“This is an untenable position that runs counter to the party’s intent in establishing superdelegates in 1984,” the letter from the wealthy Clinton backers said.

“Superdelegates, like all delegates, have an obligation to make an informed, individual decision about whom to support and who would be the party’s strongest nominee,” said the letter signed by some of Clinton’s biggest fund raisers.

Actually, I do believe the regular delegates are supposed to vote the way the popular vote was split in their state, hence the ‘pledged delegates’ count we’re keeping. Superdelegates, however, were created for just this instance - where a popular candidate was desired by the people but not the power elite. They were created in response to McGovern and Carter, to keep a populist from being nominated for the Democratic ticket again, and instead keep the candidate that the money and power brokers of the ‘Democratic’ party in the running.

Some Democrats they’re turning out to be.  I’m still writing in Al Gore for President this November.

The problem is the layers of abstraction and obfuscation and secrecy between our government ‘of the people’ and the actual people.

The Honeywell Micro Air Vehicle or “Honeywell MAV” is seen during a flight test in this undated photograph taken at an undisclosed location. The MAV weighs 16 pounds when empty (dry) and 18 1/2 pounds when fully loaded with fuel (wet). It is 14 inches in diameter and 22 inches from the feet to the top of the MAV structure. Miami police could soon be the first in the United States to use cutting-edge, spy-in-the-sky technology to beef up their fight against crime.

Well, who didn’t see this coming? Thankfully, it should be fairly easy to disable with an EMP type weapon (which it’s not geared to detect, only visual and infra-red light wavelengths). The race against a police state was started over 200 years ago when our country was founded. That’s what the second amendment was all about. Bear arms will totally keep the police off of you.

In that instant, Specialist King became one of 4,000 service members and Defense Department civilians to die in the Iraq war — a milestone that was reached late Sunday, five years since the war began in March 2003.

4000 x death benefits = $$$

Not to mention the 30 or 40 thousand wounded or maimed that our beloved .gov doesn’t keep track of, plus the thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops that will suffer PTSD or other mental illness as a result of this. I’m thinking that $3 trillion price-tag for this conflict will be a luck number. Lucky, I mean, if that’s the extent of it.

Sequoia Voting Systems has threatened possible legal action if a Princeton University professor independently analyzes the company’s electronic voting machines for a New Jersey county.

Union County leaders requested a review after paper records showing the number of voters that cast ballots in each party didn’t match the machine’s printouts.

The company said this week that it will “vigorously protect and defend its intellectual property and enforcement of established licensing agreements.” Sequoia released two statements explaining its stance on independent reviews of its e-voting machines after Princeton University professor Ed Felton received an e-mail warning him of legal action if he followed through with a request by New Jersey officials to examine Sequoia’s e-voting machines.

The company said that it allows top-to-bottom reviews of e-voting machines within the framework of its license rights and according to arrangements between Sequoia and governmental agencies legally authorized to conduct reviews.

“Sequoia welcomes all such responsibly executed review activities,” the company explained in a statement. “Sequoia does not support any and all unauthorized activities that violate or circumvent our product licensing agreements. Licensing agreements are standard practice in the technology industry, including the elections industry and have been for decades.”

I hope everyone with the slightest shred of intelligence realizes that Sequoia is scamming the voting public. There’s a reason e-voting was kicked the fuck out of  California, and that’s because it was completely unreliable AND you could hack it with a blackberry cellphone while sitting in your car outside of the polling station.  Good thing New Jersey had a paper trail, otherwise they would have been scammed, either intentionally, or more likely just because the voting systems are so ’sensitive’ (i.e. shitty pieces of software that wouldn’t stand up under a non-managed review) that they just failed through sheer incompetence on the part o Sequoia. Why else would they have clauses in their contract saying that you may not test their machines in any unapproved method? I can damned well assure you any hacker is going to be testing their machine in an unapproved method.