Limbaugh: “Communication Spills”

I’m watching Limbaugh’s  C.P.A.C. speech on CNN.

Quite frankly, this is one of the most bizarre spectacles I”ve ever seen.

This shallow, bellicose self contradictory weirdness is almost too much to comprehend.

Fodder for progressive  bloggers for years to come.

“Communication spills”  indeed.

Toxins and Pathogens

Gloria Galloway’s Globe and Mail article “Government moves to restrict access to toxins and pathogens”  is not the most reassuring view I’ve ever read on such a subject.

The words of Theresa Tam, director-general of the Public Health Agency of Canada, in no way inspire confidence, though I am pleased to learn that someone is thinking of all this.

Consider theses words from Galloway’s post:

Laboratories – local community labs that diagnose disease, as well as university and government research labs – are required to follow bio-safety guidelines before they can import pathogens, explained Theresa Tam, director-general of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

But, said Dr. Tam, “there is a gap in that laboratories that do not import pathogens currently fall outside the existing regulations.”

Most technicians follow a regime that has become accepted practice when dealing with human pathogens. The really bad bugs such as anthrax, for instance, are stored only at the Health Canada Level 4 laboratory in Winnipeg.

“We certainly believe that laboratories, many of them, voluntarily comply with existing laboratory bio-safety guidelines and that, in general, laboratories are safe in Canada,” said Dr. Tam.

But there is a clear need, she said, for people working with the highest-risk pathogens to obtain a security clearance. The new legislation, which was originally introduced last year but died when the fall election was called, would do that.

Under the new law, no one who is not licensed by the government would be permitted to possess, produce, store, transfer or dispose of a human pathogen or toxin.

In addition, the disease-causing materials would be divided into categories, according to the level of risk they present, and technicians would be required to handle them accordingly. (Bold Added)

 Wow. The government seems fairly certain that “many” laboratories are voluntarily following the guidelines and that, “in general, laboratories are safe in Canada.”

My obvious questions to those charged with creating and enforcing such rules are:

What have you all been doing up til now? 

When did you decide that this might be a good idea?

The overall impression that I received from the article is that no one actually knows what the hell they’re doing or what is going on in these labs.

Incredible.

Stiglitz on CNN

Joseph Stiglitz appears to believe that the American taxpayer has been defrauded by the banks that recieved billions in bailouts.

He suggests that the 700 billion dollars could have been better used to set up a new credit system – leveraged at 10 to one - that would have provided  7 Trillion dollars in available credit.

This makes obvious sense.

Too late now, I guess.

I hope Obama is listening to Stiglitz.

Why are Aliens Cooperating with the Government?

CNN is covering the mysterious fireball in the sky over Texas. As part of their coverage, they had a U.F.O. “expert” - whose name I missed –  offering his opinion.  Among other things, he asserted that  governments have been “manipulating people” for a long, long, time (I agree) and that Space Aliens have most certainly visited the earth on many occasions. (I sort of disagree on that last one)

Clearly, this man believes that various governments, including the U.S. government, have been covering up and stonewalling about an Alien presence on earth.

My questions is : What do the Aliens think of this?

Why are the Aliens cooperating with the U.S. government?

I think this has to be the larger issue here.

If they made it all this way, one imagines that they must be considerably more technically advanced than we are. If they wanted to announce their arrival, it would probably not be beyond their abilities.

So why the stealth and the silence?

It seems that  the governments in question and our Space Aliens both have a vested interest in keeping the masses ignorant of their terresterial existence.

So I say to you, worry not about financial collapse, securitized mortgages or environmental catastrophe, but rather, ask yourself :

Why are the Aliens cooperating with the Government?

Forty Years is “Historically”?

Even knowing next to nothing of the dark world of finance, this part of Tim Geithner’s address jumped out at me:

Third, working jointly with the Federal Reserve, we are prepared to commit up to a trillion dollars to support a Consumer and Business Lending Initiative. This initiative will kickstart the secondary lending markets, to bring down borrowing costs, and to help get credit flowing again.

In our financial system, 40 percent of consumer lending has historically been available because people buy loans, put them together and sell them. Because this vital source of lending has frozen up, no financial recovery plan will be successful unless it helps restart securitization markets for sound loans made to consumers and businesses – large and small.

This lending program will be built on the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility, announced last November, with capital from the Treasury and financing from the Federal Reserve.(Bold Added)

When he says “historically” I guess he really means the approximately forty years that this sort of vehicle has been around.

Which is also around the time this whole Voodoo Economics insanity began.

That simply does not sound historic to me but rather seems more like a shifty, dishonest attempt to re-enforce a questionable meme that furthers an ideological agenda somewhere in the depths of his Financier’s soul.

So no sign of backing away from this style of financing from the Obama administration. Clearly, Obama and Geithner believe that Mortgage Backed Securities do not have to be the un-regulated, spin the wheel deal that has caused so much damage.

Again I say, I know little of this and indeed I apologize for voicing an opinion with such little knowledge, but having done the best I could to learn a bit about this so I could have some hope of following the news and understanding people like Paul Krugman, I just have to say that the entire concept of Securitization, unless regulated to the bone, looks as though it was designed with the express purpose of committing fraud.

I mean really, from this musicians point of view – even knowing that the majority of Securitized investments are relatively sound – this all looks like nothing more than an invitation to criminal behaviour.

Exactly as it has been used.

I guess I need to keep learning so someday I too can understand how to create money out of nothing.

Perhaps Obama sees that the move away from Lunatic Capitalism has to be done slowly.

One can hope.

Galaxy NGC 4921, The Coma Cluster

Galaxy NGC 4921, The Coma Cluster

This Hubble picture is an amalgamation of  ”50 separate exposures through a yellow filter, totaling about 17 hours of exposure time, plus 30 exposures through a near-infrared filter taken over 10 hours.”

The galaxy, NGC 4921, is unusual because of its light, wispy swirls. These aren’t as distinguished and bright as the spiral arms in most spiral galaxies, which are powered by the active creation of new stars. This weak-limbed galaxy belongs to a class called “anemic spirals,” named for their wimpy arms and weak star formation.

The Coma Cluster, also known as Abell 1656, lies about 320 million light-years away from Earth in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices, the hair of Queen Berenice. More than 1,000 galaxies comprise the cluster. In the image, the ghostly NGC 4921 lies in a field of thousands of galaxies of all shapes, sizes and colors, many of which are much more remote than the cluster and stretch back toward the early universe.

 

Amazing.

Via Wired.

A Few Links in the Chain

I’m going to track some of the the websites I visit today. As usual, I start out the morning at the Globe and Mail site.

Lawrence Martin on Ignatieff’s shadaow cabinet.

The kitchen cabinet members, a veteran group to contrast the leader’s newness, include Bob Rae, Ralph Goodale, David McGuinty, Ujjal Dosanjh, Marlene Jennings, Denis Coderre, Albina Guarnieri and Roger Cuzner.

An article on “Starving Artists” and incomes

The findings of the 43-page study, prepared by Hill Strategies Research of Hamilton for Canadian Heritage, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, are derived from the 2006 census. It identified 140,000 Canadians as artists – defined as those who spent most of their working time in nine occupational categories, including actors, dancers, authors/writers, visual artists and producers/directors/choreographers.

The study reports that artists over all are working for near-poverty-level wages, with an average annual earnings in calendar year 2005 of just $22,731, compared with $36,301 for all Canadian workers – a 37-per-cent wage chasm.

Then a little further afield:

Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish is a regular stop for me. Today I feel the need to highlight the words of someone named Amy Wellborn on the Catholic Church, though to me this quote is about pretty much all religion that I have ever encountered or heard of.

“Secrecy, hero-worship, deification of individuals, reflexive dismissal of critics as wrong-headed or even of the devil, an untoward interest in money and appearance, manipulation of members, demeaning attitudes toward non-members, deceptive means … trouble.’

 Now over to Global Research where  Michel Chossudovsky has writen an interesting post on the October/08 $75 Billion  handout to Canadian banks that appears to have been almost completely  un-noticed by the Canadian people and the Canadian press.

The recipients of the bank bailout are also the creditors of the federal government. The chartered banks are the brokers of the federal public debt. They sell treasury bills and government bonds on behalf of the government. They also hold a portion of the public debt..  

In a bitter irony, the banks lend money to the federal government to finance the bailout, and with the money raised through the sale of government bonds and T-Bills, the government finances, via the CHMC, the bank bailout. It is a circular process. The banks are the recipients of the bailout as well as the creditors of the State. The federal government is in a sense financing its own indebtedness.

While the Canadian bailout procedures differ from those of the US Treasury under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), they essentially serve the same purpose. Both programs contribute to bank centralization and the concentration of financial wealth. 

Under TARP, some 700 billion dollars bailout money was allocated to major Wall Street banks. Canada’s population is slightly less than 11 percent of that of the US. The numbers are consistent. The 75 billion dollar Canadian bailout is slightly less (numerically US dollar for Can dollar) than 11 percent of the US 700 billion bailout under TARP.  

Of course the press knew about it – they just decided it was no big deal.

 I’ll update this  as the day progresses.

Update 1: Well, I’m bored with this idea already. Time to turn attention to music editing and writing.

Carry On.

Mortification Marketing

 

A billboard seen on Yonge Street, Toronto, Feb/09

 I love this new advertising strategy. It’s like Well, yeah, ok, we in the financial services world have been been driven by an insanely monstrous and unquenchable greed , but really you can trust us, we’re on your side and we’re as pissed off as you are at what we’ve done.

I believe I will call it Mortification Marketing.

Brilliant.

Conrad’s Jail Cell Wisdom

I must admit to being completely puzzled by at least two lines in Conrad Black’s January 31/09 column for The National Post. I understand Black is a well respected historian, but his inclusion of these two glaring lines causes me to wonder how honest, accurate or indeed, even how intelligent Black actually is.

Look, people tell me he is a brilliant business man and academic, yet this is the same guy who just (wrongly) assumed that the cameras were not working as he defied a court order and smuggled various boxes from his Toronto office. 

This is the the same guy who is sitting in an American jail for the next several years.

In a world where very little is as it appears to be, and the rich seem to be able to buy (when not incarcerated) an alternate truth if the one they have is not to their liking,  I simply have no proof that Conrad Black is not his own media creation.

Or a know nothing windbag with a ghost writer.

Anyway, on first reading the following line seemed to just leap right off the page:

Iraq, most obviously, was shortly laid low, and Bush must be credited for turning that vital country from a nasty enemy of the West into an ally.(Bold added) 

Does Black really believe that Iraq, as it stands now and in the foreseeable future, can actually be considered as an ally of the west?

 If Black does believe this, then he may also believe that American Senators can walk through the streets and markets of Baghdad in perfect safety.

Maybe someday Iraq and the west can be considered as allies, but if that day eventually comes, the credit will only go to G. W. Bush if ideologically blinded class warriors like Black continue their fact defying historical revisionism.

The United States has waffled on Iran for many decades. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower went to great lengths to restore the Shah in 1953, after he had been sent packing by the nationalist rabble-rouser Mohammed Mossadegh. This was perhaps the last identifiable national success of the CIA.Mossadegh sometimes appeared publicly in his pajamas and became so overwrought in some of his flamboyant public addresses that he broke down in tears. It was easy for the Americans and British to portray him as a lunatic, though he looks pretty good by current Iranian standards. (Bold Added)

I shudder to imagine what else a man like Black would consider as a CIA “success”. Clearly the context indicates that Black is onside with the concept of  a cowboy CIA riding the world’s range and deciding and shaping – with God knows whose approval or oversight - the realities,  histories and political outcomes of other countries.

So what if it’s nothing more than a crap shoot, eh Conrad?

 As long as it’s rich, well educated and thoroughly entitled white guys calling the shots, what could possibly go wrong?

To paraphrase another Black quote from the NP column - I think Conrad Black arrived at where he is  merely by surviving birth.