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9/2/2006

Afghanistan Opium Production Skyrockets :.

Mission accomplished!

Afghanistan's world-leading opium cultivation rose a "staggering" 60 percent this year, the U.N. anti-drugs chief announced Saturday in urging the government to crack down on big traffickers and remove corrupt officials and police.

The record crop yielded 6,100 tons of opium, or enough to make 610 tons of heroin - outstripping the demand of the world's heroin users by a third, according to U.N. figures.


Related: Who Is Financing America's Current Account Deficit?



Workers Lose Traction Over Past Ten Years :.

You can't really blame the psychotic corporate culture for this. That would be like holding a scorpion in your hand and then blaming it for stinging you:

Between 1995 and 2005, productivity -- a measure of the quantity and quality of what workers produce per hour -- grew 33.4 percent. But hourly wages rose only 11 percent, with almost all of that increase coming during the late 1990s, according to EPI.



Forex: "Housing Market Collapse Fears" :.

The dollar's early afternoon recovery, in the wake of a solid US jobs report for August, came to an abrupt halt on mounting concerns that the US housing market is teetering on the verge of collapse.

The National Association of Realtors revealed that pending home sales slumped by 7 pct in July to their lowest level in three years. Its pending home sales index, based on contracts signed in July, fell to a seasonally adjusted 105.6 in July from a downwardly revised 113.5 in June.

Paul Ashworth, senior US economist at Capital Economics, said outright falls in house prices would appear to be unavoidable if this trend continues.

'Housing is in freefall and that is the key to the economic outlook,' he said.

'There are now clear downside risks to our longstanding forecast that GDP growth will slow to 2.0 pct next year,' he added.



Pentagon Takes Bids on Media Monitoring Contract :.

I offered to do stuff like this for $50 per week. Hmmm. With $20 million, .mil could get that service from me for 400,000 weeks... Oh. Woops. I might have to renegotiate that contract!

The U.S. command in Baghdad is seeking bidders for a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for monitoring the tone of Iraq news stories filed by U.S. and foreign media.

Proposals, due Sept. 6, ask companies to show how they'll "provide continuous monitoring and near-real time reporting of Iraqi, pan-Arabic, international, and U.S. media," according to the solicitation issued last week.

Contractors also will be evaluated on how they will provide analytical reports and customized briefings to the military, "including, but not limited to tone (positive, neutral, negative) and scope of media coverage."



Super Typhoon Knocks Out Weather Sensors :.

Typhoon Ioke knocked out Wake Island's weather sensors on Thursday as it lashed the isle with some of the central Pacific's fiercest winds in over a decade, the National Weather Service said.

Forecasters monitoring the 2.5-square-mile atoll's wind and temperature gauges from Hawaii said the instruments blew out as the storm approached with winds of up to 155 miles per hour and gusts of up to 190 mph.

...

Ioke is the first Category 5 hurricane to develop in the central Pacific since record keeping began in the early 1960s and is the most powerful storm to pass through the region since hurricanes Emilia and Gilma, both in July 1994.


8/31/2006

Global Warming: It's Not That Bad, It's Worse :.

Richard Alley's eyes glint as we sit in his office in the University of Pennsylvania discussing how fast global warming could cause sea levels to rise. The scientist sums up the state of knowledge: "We used to think that it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now we know it doesn't take 10,000 years; it takes 10 seconds."



Bush Closes Federal Libraries to Protect Ecoterrorist Corporations :.

The environmental activist lawyers can now sit around and read 1984 in their spare time:

Prosecution of polluters by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency "will be compromised" due to the loss of "timely, correct and accessible" information from the agency's closure of its network of technical libraries, according to an internal memo released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). EPA enforcement staff currently rely upon the libraries to obtain technical information to support pollution prosecutions and to track the business histories of regulated industries.

In a memo prepared last week by the enforcement arm of EPA, called the Office of Enforcement and Compliance (OECA), agency staff detailed concerns about the effects of EPA's plans to close many of its libraries, box up the collections and eliminate or sharply reduce library services.


8/30/2006

Vonnegut: The End :.

"It's over, my friend. The game is lost."

Research Credit: EG



Lockheed Martin Whistleblower Tells His Story on YouTube :.

This is incredible, and in the scheme of things, it's probably a walk-in-the-park:

An article in this morning's Washington Post reveals that for the first known time, a whistleblower working on a US Government contract has posted a video on YouTube making his case about a problem inside government. RAW STORY has located the video referred to in the Post article and made it available here.

The Washington Post story tells the case of Michael De Kort, an engineer for Lockheed Martin, who worked on a US Coast Guard contract to replace the patrol boats used by the service. The contract is worth billions of dollars. In the video, De Kort, a 41-year old, fails to give his name, but commented in an interview after being contacted by the Post.


In Related News: Lockheed Martin Wins Multi Billion Dollar NASA Moon Contract



Scary Real Estate Bubble Chart of the Day :.

I sincerely hope that you guys have made arrangements and prepared for what is now unfolding. While Cryptogon, and thousands of other sites, have been sounding alarms about this for months and years, it doesn't make it any less frightening now that the crash is underway.

Best of luck to all:
Research Credit: Housing Panic Blog



Dust Bowl: Blistering Drought Ravages Farmland on Plains :.

Water. Water. Water. Water.

With parts of South Dakota at its epicenter, a severe drought has slowly sizzled a large swath of the Plains States, leaving farmers and ranchers with conditions that they compare to those of the Dust Bowl of the 1930's.

The drought has led to rare and desperate measures. Shrunken sunflower plants, normally valuable for seeds and oil, are being used as a makeshift feed for livestock. Despite soaring fuel costs, some cattle owners are hauling herds hundreds of miles to healthier feedlots. And many ranchers are pouring water into "dugouts" - natural watering holes - because so many of them (up to 90 percent in South Dakota, by one reliable estimate) have gone dry.

Gov. Michael Rounds of South Dakota, who has requested that 51 of the state's 66 counties be designated a federal agricultural disaster area, recently sought unusual help from his constituents: he issued a proclamation declaring a week to pray for rain.

"It's a grim situation," said Herman Schumacher, the owner of a livestock market in Herreid, S.D., a small town near the North Dakota line where 37,000 head of cattle were sold from May through July, compared with 7,000 in the corresponding three months last year. "There's absolutely no grass in the pastures, and the water holes are all dried up. So a lot of people have no choice but to sell off their herds and get out of the business."


8/29/2006

Special for Cryptogon Readers: The Global Sun Oven :.

Matt Savinar, over at Life After the Oil Crash, is running a special for Cryptogon readers for the next few days.

The Global Sun Oven looks like an excellent appliance. And forget about waiting for an emergency to use that thing. Becky and I are paying NZ$.22 per kilowatt hour here in New Zealand... Turning on the oven is a big deal for us, never mind taking a hot shower.

Yes, I know about ______<---- fill in the blank with alternative energy technology of your choice. We would need to get day jobs to come up with the money necessary to buy any of that stuff at the moment. This useful and durable appliance is much more reasonably priced.

Check out the Global Sun Oven, and if you buy one, let me know how you like cooking with it.


8/28/2006

UCLA to Increase Security After Threats to Animal Researchers :.

A small number of activists (and poor, unemployed, disgruntled, etc.) are realizing that they have been wasting their time with their signs and letters-to-the-editor etc. and are moving to more traditional insurgency tactics. That is, they are becoming insurgents. This isn't my definition. The following is from U.S. Army Field Manual FM 100-20, Military Operations in Low Intensity Conflict / The Nature of Insurgency:
An insurgency is an organized, armed political struggle whose goal may be the seizure of power through revolutionary takeover and replacement of the existing government. In some cases, however, an insurgency's goals may be more limited. For example, the insurgency may intend to break away from government control and establish an autonomous state within traditional ethnic or religious territorial bounds. The insurgency may also only intend to extract limited political concessions unattainable through less violent means.
I've covered this before. Violent tactics against the American Corporate State are doomed to fail because the ACS enjoys a position of total dominace when it comes to perception management in these matters.

All students of insurgency must understand that overthrowing an existing regime by force is impossible unless the masses are behind the thing, at least in principal. In the U.S., would-be insurgents are simply pissing in the wind. The more miserable average Americans get, the more they cling to the state, their crappy jobs, their empty consumer lifestyle and their addictions.

Get them to support a revolution?

Which Americans? The tens of millions of who watch American Idol? Maybe the ones who do price comparisons on aerosol cheezepHood? The 61% who believe the Bible is literally true?

The point that any would-be insurgent must keep in mind is that Americans, in general, have fully internalized the axiom: Do as Dick Cheney says, not as Dick Cheney does. The corporate state doesn't even need to teach them to be this way. Most of the time, they spring from the womb in this state.

Additionally, my guess is that the insurgents would have more to fear from a mob of troglodyte Americans than Cheney's ninja suited minions. Threats to The Machine are interpreted by troglodytes as threats to their iPods, pills, pornography, video games, etc. They will support anything the government does to protect these core values. In other words: Any insurgency will be opposed by not only the corporate state, who's military, intelligence and PSYOP capabilities are almost unimaginable, AND the troglodyte masses who rely on the corporate state for their existence and their drugs:

UCLA will increase security for animal researchers because of a harassment campaign that included the attempted firebombing of a professor's home, the acting chancellor said.

"These activities have risen to the level of domestic terrorism, and that's what we should call them," Norman Abrams told the Los Angeles Times in Saturday's editions.

The school will increase security and try to reduce the time it takes police to respond to threats at the homes of researchers, Abrams said. It also will warn researchers of possible threats.



Crop Cops Take to the Sky :.

Former military intelligence satellite imagery analysts are mapping every farm in the United States:
Farmers may seem like trustworthy people, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is taking no chances. It's spending tens of millions of dollars to create an enormous computerized map of every farmer's field in America.

...

Craig Molander, Senior Vice President of Surdex....spent much of his life looking down at the Earth from far overhead, but the pictures used to be classified top secret. Before he went to work at Surdex, he worked in military intelligence.

...

And Scott Willbrant, a coordinator of the USDA's mapping effort for the state of Kansas, says the new digital atlas will be useful to a lot of other people, too. "This will be one of the most sought-after datasets ever," he says.

...

"It's unlimited what other industry; other agencies can do with it. They probably have more use for it than we do, actually," Willbrant says.

For now, though, the USDA is keeping much of their computerized atlas confidential.
Hmmm.

What other uses?

Did you ever hear the one about the USDA's Mandatory Property and Animal Surveillance Program? Try to raise a cow, goat or chicken for yourself after this horrific prison system is in place and you'll know all about it.

Research Credit: JF



Second Great Depression by Warren Brussee :.

I just hope the ashes aren't radioactive:

The Second Great Depression is a frightening book. It shows how massive consumer debt will trigger the next depression, starting about the year 2007. Most of the logic used to support this premise is based on the government's own published data. The exuberance resulting from the overheated stock market of the 90s caused consumers to stop saving and go into debt. Then, the dramatic drop in mortgage rates enabled people to refinance their homes and go even further into debt. People are no longer living on what they can afford; instead they are living the lifestyle they think they deserve, costs be damned! With interest rates increasing, savings rates near zero, and debt at its maximum; many people will be pushed over their debt limit, having homes foreclosed by the banks or going into bankruptcy. Others will heed the warnings and reduce spending, causing a dramatic slowing of the economy. Other problems related to the economy, such as balance of payments and deficits, are discussed. But it is consumer debt that will trigger the depression. Even during a depression, people will need to save for their future. To survive this depression, savings should be in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, and the stock market should be reentered only after it drops 73% from its 2004 level. Included charts show required savings for retirement. These charts give different options as to the number of years before retirement, expected pension, and the amount of existing savings. In this depression, the United States will be brought to its knees. But not unlike the mythical bird Phoenix that dies in flames and is then reborn out of its own ashes, the United States will also be reborn. However, it will be a poorer and less arrogant country that emerges from its own ashes.


8/27/2006

U.S. Real Estate: "Full-Blown Crash" :.

* yawn *

The downturn in the US housing market will force businesses to slash 73,000 jobs a month in the new year and could be more damaging to the world economy than the dotcom crash, economists have warned.

After official figures last week showed that the number of new homes sold in July was 22 per cent lower than a year earlier, while prices were almost flat, fears are mounting that the 'orderly' housing slowdown predicted by the Federal Reserve will become a full-blown crash.



Mexico: Antigovernment Protesters Seize 12 Private Radio Stations :.

Protesters including striking school teachers in southern Mexico seized 12 private radio stations today after unidentified assailants shot up a government-owned station already under the demonstrators’ control.

At least 50 protesters of the antigovernment group, Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO), simultaneously took over each of the stations in the city of Oaxaca, 325 miles (520 kilometers) southeast of Mexico City, the Associated Press reported. The protesters, a mixture of strikers, trade unionists and leftists, were armed with pipes, wooden planks, and clubs.




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