Cherniak on Marching up and down the square

Jason Cherniak has suggested today that all good Liberals should shut their festering gobs and March up and Down the Square like good little soldiers should.

See Video, marching up and down the square.




What's next the Liberal/Spanish Inquisition

Recommend this Post

Earthquake Alert!

I've thought a few times about the potential for earthquakes as major ice sheets begin to melt away. It seemed pretty straight forward that 200 meters of ice must have some impact and when it melts the resulting rebound of the crust should create generate fresh seismic activity

Well it appears as reported in the New Scientist that Andrea Hampel at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany decided to model the question and has found that ice throught it's additional weight suppresses normal plate movement allowing extra stress to build up in the system. As the ice sheets melt freer movement of the crust will result in more and stronger seismic activity taking place as several millennia of pent up pressure is released

Oh Joy! something else to mess with us, sigh!!!

If the land rebounds the plate including parts of the ocean floor must move up as well, has this displacement of water been calucated in ocean level projections?

Also in earthquake news scientists have identified the fault that caused a mediteranian tsunami in 365 AD. The fault near Crete has been anaylised and it appears it shifted up 10 metres in one quake. The resulting wave which would have been the equivalent of the 2004 tsunami caused great damage in Alexandria and the Nile Delta.

The chance of the same section of plate going off again is rated as only 1 in 5000 years, however other sections could go as often as 1 in 800 years. Let's see, 2008-365=1643, does this mean they are wrong or we are 843 years over due for a big one?Recommend this Post

Calling all Mediums, your country needs you!

The Green Assassin Brigade is so tired listening about the he said, she said, date changing, libel threatening rhetoric about Chuck Cadman that we are calling all Mediums, Shaman(Shamem?) and spiritualists in Canada to come together for a mass séance in order to finally get the truth, because in the end I’d trust a dead mans word or a con mans parlour tricks long before I’d trust the word of that Rat Bastard Harper and his back room full of Theocons and the Boys from Brazil.

A side bonus would be if Chuck gave his wife a spiritual bitch slapping for accepting the Conservative nomination.Recommend this Post

2008 US election results released early

TOO Damn Funny

Recommend this Post

Is Malthus right yet?

It's amazing how fast this story is becoming main stream, showing the stupidity and evil, unethical and unsustainable move to convert the worlds food surplus(and beyond surplus) into fuel for our cars.

Apparently the Finacial post just picked this story up too.

Just yesterday wheat hit $12 dollars a bushel breaking previous highs all while wheat and corn stockpiles hit 30 and 24 year lows. Food inflation is hitting all areas of the world as corn prices in Mexico has put the tortilla a basic staple 30% more expensive. Bread and flour is under pressure here in Canada and we can expect meat, dairy and eggs to sky rocket too as feed prices soar, suddenly that grass fed organic beef is becoming more price competitive.

The U.N. has said rising grain costs is going to impact the size and cost of it's humanitarian food aid



While economist argue supply will increase to meet demand, rising population, rising Asian affluence, rising energy costs and coming energy shortages all support the possibility that eventually Malthus will be right and we will hit a population wall. Now this wall could be pushed back if we gave up on bio fuel and all became vegans but it's pretty damn obvious that the selfishness of the rich will let millions starve and populations peak before they change their lifestyles. I'm just as guilty being a lacto-ovo,beefo-yeasto vegetarian, meaning I'll eat any vegtable as long as it's covered in a cheese sauce and served with served with prime rib and beer, or in an omelet

In many ways this is so much more important than the intrigues and disagreements between Evil Harper and Chicken Shit Dion, yet the growing media awareness is being ignored by the public and politicos more interested in maintaining the status quo, even at the expense of the worlds poor who with today's food inflation may starve even if there is enough food grown in the next few years.Recommend this Post

High speed Glacier blows through radar trap!

Studies on a mostly ignored area of Antarctica shows that the glacier movement is accelerating, the Pine Island Glacier which is a couple kilometres thick, 30 km wide and is moving to the sea at a rate of 3.5km/year. That's like an addition 210 square kilometres of ice hitting the ocean each year and this is just one of Antarctica's glaciers, the study shows acceleration in other areas too.

See full article at BBC

Now 210 sq km is really not that big compared to the ocean, but if this study showing acceleration on all glaciers is correct this could multiplied the impact by many times. This is also not a fixed rate but an accelerating rate, next year the ice could be traveling at 4km/year.

I really should get an accurate map and buy property that's only 1 or two metres above the ocean, some day I'll have beach front:) But of course by this time I would probably have been killed by famine or barbecued by rioters. Sucks to be me!Recommend this Post

Shades of Cassandra

Truly if there is one American who “gets” what is going on today it James Howard Kunstler , but does anyone else "get it!"

From Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

Behind all the blather and bullshit about the Federal Reserve's rescue gambits and the machinations of the ratings agencies, and the wiles of foreign sovereign wealth, and the incomprehensible mysteries of markets, and the various weather forecasts of a gathering "recession" is the simple fact that the USA is a way poorer nation than we imagined ourselves to be six months ago. The American economy has been running on the fumes of "creatively engineered" finance (i.e. new-and-improved swindling) for years, and now these swindles are unraveling. In their aftermath, they leave empty wallets, drained bank accounts, plundered retirements funds, boiled away capital reserves, worthless stocks, bankrupt companies, vandalized housing tracts, ruined families, and Wall Street executives who are still pulling down multimillion-dollar pay packages despite running their companies into the ground.

We're burning down the house and kidding ourselves that there is a remedy for it. All the rate cuts and loans to big banks and bank-like corporate organisms, and "monoline" bond insurers, and mortgage mills amount to little more than a final desperate shell game to conceal the radioactive pea of aggregate loss. The losses are everywhere, and when you add up seven billion here and eleven billion there they probably amount to something like a trillion dollars in sheer capital evaporation -- not counting the abstract "positions" that the capital was leveraged onto by the playerz and boyz who mistook algorithms for productive activity.

The shell game may run a few more weeks but personally I believe the timbers are burning. The losses are no longer "contained" or concealable. A consensus has now formed that we're in for a "recession." The idea is that, yes, this seems to be the low arc of the business cycle. Fewer Hamptons villas will be redecorated in the interim. We'll gird our loins and get through the bad weather and when the sun shines again, we'll be ready with new algorithms for new sport-with-capital.

Uh-uh. Think again. This is not so much financial bad weather as financial climate change. Something is happenin' Mr Jones, and you don't know what it is, do ya? There has been too much misbehavior and it can no longer be mitigated. We're not heading into a recession but a major depression, worse than the fabled trauma of the 1930s. That one occurred against the background of a society that had plenty of everything except money. Back then, we had plenty of mineral resources, lots of trained-and-regimented manpower, millions of productive family farms, factories that were practically new, and more than 90 percent left of the greatest petroleum reserve anywhere in the world. It took a world war to get all that stuff humming cooperatively again, and once it did, we devoted its productive capacity to building an empire of happy motoring leisure. (Tragic choice there.)

This new depression, which I call The Long Emergency, will play out against the background of a society that has pissed away its oil endowment, bulldozed its factories, arbitraged its productive labor, destroyed both family farms and the commercial infrastructure of main street, and trained its population to become overfed diabetic TV zombie "consumers" of other peoples' productivity, paid for by "money" they haven't earned.

There is a theory (see Nouriel Roubini's blog) that a reform process will now ensue in the financial realm, new regulation and oversight of the same old familiar activities. This too, I'm afraid, will prove to be wishful thinking. The financial system will not be reformed until it lies in smoking wreckage, and when that "re-form" happens the armature of the re-organizing society will barely resemble the one that the previous burnt-down-house was designed to dwell in. Among other things, it will not support capital enterprise at anything like the scale that we became accustomed to lately. Globalism will be over. The great nations of the world will be scrambling desperately for the world's remaining oil supplies. It will not be a friendly contest, and anyone who thinks that current trade relations and capital flows will continue despite that is liable to be disappointed. (Are you reading this Tom Friedman?)

Long before the mathematical projections of oil depletion play out, the oil markets themselves -- and all the complex operations that they comprise, such as drilling and exploration, and the movement of tankers around the planet -- will destabilize and seize up. We will no longer be any oil exporter's "favored customer." Many of the exporters will enjoy watching us suffer. Contrary to the political platitude-du-jour, the USA will never become "energy independent" in the way we currently imagine. Rather we'll become energy independent by being deprived of imported oil, and we'll be thrown back on our own dwindling supplies -- which means that we're not going to run our system of daily life the way it has been set up to run. When Americans can no longer run their cars on a whim, they will simply go apeshit and you can kiss normal politics goodbye.

The financial system that emerges from this cataclysm, and the economy it serves (which is supposed to be the master of its capital deployment "arm," not its servant) will likely be modest to a degree that will shock and embarrass everyone currently connected with what we have lately called finance. If it even trades in paper, that paper will have to stand for something based in reality, either a productive activity or a genuine asset. It may take decades for this society to even regain the confidence necessary to operate such an elementary system -- or it may not come back at all, at least as far as the horizon lies before us. That's how bad the mischief and the damage has been.

It's not hard to understand why the Bernankes, Paulsons, Lawrence Kudlows and other public representatives of capital keep pretending that everything is under control. On the other side of their pretenses lies disorder and hardship. One wonders, of course, what they really see in their private minds' eyes. Do they actually believe that the statistics issued by their serveling agencies amount to a plausible picture of reality? Are they so lost in their fantasies of "management" that they think they're controlling events?

My guess is that their credibility is spent. In the weeks ahead, nobody will know who or what to believe. We may even run out of questions to ask as we just all collectively stand there in a thrall of wonder and nausea, watching the nation's financial house burn down.

I read a lot of this kinda stuff and more and more the words ring true to me. The mainstream media however does its best to minimize any threat to the status quo and politicians talk hope and happy talk without ever touching the real threats. People like Kunstler are like modern day Cassandras destined to never be believed(until too late).Recommend this Post