Remembering PRESTAGS

Where Are Our Shepherds?

Has The Entire World Gone Mad?

Am I the only person who thinks World War III is a really bad idea?

I wish I lived in a remote village in New Zealand.

Why am I angry? - Is Toxoplasma gondii - things to me?

So there is an article in today's Australian and on New Scientist

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2082105-explosive-road-rage-like-anger-linked-to-parasite-spread-by-cats/

I learned about this parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, at uni. It's life cycle is in the guts of cats (or other predators I guess) and the brains of prey (mice). Guess what? People get it too - in the brain.

It was well known that mice infected with it were risk takers, and the evolutionary explanation is that it makes them more likely to get predated.
So this is interesting research. I wonder if I have T. gondii sitting in my amygdala (bottom reptilian fight/flight brain)?

I have lived with cats on and off for many years, including cleaning up their messes.

Maybe I am the mouse that roars? Or am I just a viking trapped in the 21st century?

 

The sometime beserker in Eric the Viking

T. gondii life cycle

cyst full of T. gondii - who needs science fiction?

Brain scan - not mine, but is it the same?

 

Saint Athanasius - saint for our times

St Athanasius 'contra mundum'

"Saint Athanasius lived in the fourth century during the time of what used to be considered the greatest crisis of faith ever to befall the Catholic Church, the Arian Heresy. (The Arians denied the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ). The vast majority of Churchmen fell into this heresy, so much so that Saint Jerome wrote of the period, "The whole world groaned and was amazed to find itself Arian"."

Today we might say: "The whole Church groaned and was amazed to find itself Bergoglian Protestant" One might go even further to ask whether "it is amazed to find itself non-christian"

 

The Coming Crash, The Bubble and the Ka-Poom Theory

While I continue to read lots of rubbish from politicians about the "recovery", I am starting to notice more and more commentators put their reputations on the line and predict (like me although I have no economic or financial reputation whatsoever {and for the benefit of Python, I like my Yeoman game}) that a crash is imminent.

The charts of doom continue. A couple more this week, and significant ones: US home ownership is at the lowest level since 1967, and US wages growth is at the slowest pace on record. Unless a recovery is measured by the economic circumstances of the top 1% (who interestingly own the media) this aint no recovery.

The endless money printing (sorry, "quantitative easing") by central banks is not working. I remain amazed that anyone would actually think money printing could possibly work, it being economics 101 that printing money has never worked in history. Ever.

I read a great article by Chris Martenson (Peak Prosperity Website) who described very well that printing money and central bank interventions have only acted to elevate share prices and create a giant stock market bubble where prices are more and more removed from reality as the bubble expands:

"Whether the central banks can keep all of their carefully-propped equity and bond markets elevated throughout the next part of the cycle remains to be seen.  We know they will try very hard. They certainly are increasingly willing to use any all tools at their disposal to keep the status quo going for as long as possible. 

Whether it’s the People’s Bank of China stepping in to the market to buy 10% stakes in major Chinese corporations in a matter of weeks, the Bank Of Japan becoming the majority owner of key ETFs in the Japanese markets, or the Swiss National Bank purchasing $100 billion of various global equities, we see the same desperation. Equity prices are being propped, jammed and extended higher and higher without regard to risk or repurcussions.

It makes us wonder: Why haven’t humans ever thought to print their way to prosperity before?

Well, that’s the problem. They have.

And it has always ended up disastrously.  History shows that the closest thing that economics has to an inviolable law is: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Sadly, all of our decision-makers are trying their hardest to ignore that truth".

Chris Martenson also included a chart that illustrates perhaps more than any other how the effectiveness of money printing is a self-defeating process. The money printing (in addition to many other evils like cheap credit fostering mal-investment) creates debt which over time has less and less impact in creating real economic growth as measured by increases in GDP.

The chart below shows that between 1947 and 1952, when the middle class was expanding, each new dollar of debt increased GDP by $4.61. Today the number is $0.08. In other words, today it takes $12.50 of new debt to boost GDP by $1. There is a word for this kind of trend. Unsustainable.

I have more recently being turning my mind to what the crash will look like. There are different theories. Almost all of the crash prophets predict that the stock market will do what all bubbles eventually do - burst. But what happens then?

One of the theories is the Ka-Poom theory which was proffered by Erik Janszen but well described by Chris Martenson:

"Basically it [the Ka-Poom theory] states that the end of a bubble era begins with a sharp deflationary event (the ‘Ka’ part of the title), but ends in a highly inflationary blow-off, (the ‘Poom’).

It’s a one-two punch. Down then up.

The reason you get the deflationary portion is simply because bubbles always burst. They are seeking a pin from the moment they are born.

The logic for the inflationary secondary reaction is that the central banks always respond to deflation with more money printing. Ironically, this is a doomed attempt to stem the damage caused by their prior money printing efforts.

They never learn.

So that’s what we’re looking for: a deflationary crunch savage enough to scare the central banks into opening the monetary spigots even wider. But this next time, we think they’ll seek to goose economic growth by giving money directly to the people as well as non-bank corporations.

And we think that deflationary bust has already begun. Our record-high stock markets simply somehow haven’t gotten the memo yet".

If this theory is correct it is the double whammy. Deflation - the asset destroyer, and steroids for debt. Then Inflation - cancer for cash. And the consequences of both for an economy: destruction of wealth, especially for the middle and lower classes, massive unemployment, massive poverty, destruction of the revenue base for social services, elimination of healthy credit for business growth, evisceration of pension and retirement funds etc etc.

I am attracted to the Ka-Poom theory but I have a twist of my own to add. I believe while an economy as an entire construct can have a mathematical average number for the price of everything that is either deflationary or inflationary (ie average prices are falling or increasing) it is possible to have both existing in an economy at the same time for different things, such as to be highly destructive for average families. In other words, the prices of essential things like food and electricity can be going up, while the prices of other assets (like real estate)  can be going down. This is the worst of all worlds for ordinary people and there are many precedents for this including (already at the present time) China, parts of the United States, parts of London etc.

If the Ka-Poom theory is correct the first sign will be deflation. In the opinion of Chris Martenson this has already begun, and Australia may be hit early:

"Deflation is back on the front burner and it's going to destroy all of the careful central planning and related market manipulation of the past 6 years.

Clear signs from the periphery indicate that a destructive deflationary pulse has been unleashed. Tanking commodity prices are confirming that idea.

Whole groups of enterprises involved in mining and energy are about to be destroyed. And the commodity-heavy nations of Canada, Australia and Brazil are in for a very rough ride."

The above image was the one I intended to end with for this post. I'm not quite sure it captures the gravity of the situation.

You Heard it from Me First

This post records for posterity an email I sent to the other PRESTAGS this afternoon.

For those paying attention there is an accelerated war on cash taking place, especially in Europe.  It is already illegal in many countries to make transactions in cash for anything over a very low amount.

The authorities will tell you this is to counter organized crime and terrorism etc. “Terrorists use cash so we must stop it”. Terrorists also eat food, so do we ban food?

The real agenda is three-fold.

First, to enforce negative interest rates which are already in place in many countries especially in Europe. They will literally take (I say steal) money out of your account.

Second, to enforce the bank bail in laws which are in place in almost every country including Australia. Remember Cyprus, when they took (stole) bank deposits over a certain amount. Old fashioned capitalism was that if a bank went bust, the shareholders of the bank lost out, which is fair since they owned the bank and they appointed the decision makers who ran the bank. Not now. We are in a post capitalism world, a world of corrupt crony and vulture finances, where a bust bank means the depositors lose their money. And no, you can’t hide your cash in the mattress in a cashless society.

Third, and this is the really scary one: economic totalitarianism. When society is cashless, the government has total control over your finances and economic life. Every transaction is recorded. The accounts of “dissidents” can be frozen or stolen. “Taxes” can be raised and immediately collected at any point in any amount. Expenditure can be enforced if they want to “stimulate” the economy. Expenditure can be penalized if they want to “cool down” the economy. Debt can be imposed on people against their will. What is missing: individual freedom and choices, old fashioned values about saving etc.

The central and private banks have caused a massive crisis and they plan to save their arses this time by taking away the liberty of basically the entire world.

At least Australia still has its own currency, and our economic condition is slightly better than most.

One is forced now to think about Revelation 13.16-18:

[16] And he shall make all, both little and great, rich and poor, freemen and bondmen, to have a character in their right hand, or on their foreheads. [17] And that no man might buy or sell, but he that hath the character, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. [18] Here is wisdom. He that hath understanding, let him count the number of the beast. For it is the number of a man: and the number of him is six hundred sixty-six.

Here are some scary articles:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/secret-meeting-in-london-to-end-cash.html 

http://kingworldnews.com/time-is-running-out-to-escape-the-system-as-the-war-on-cash-destroys-the-last-vestiges-of-freedom/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/archives/31028

More and More Charts of Doom

To add to previous charts of doom, there are more and more appearing every day.

If things are this bad, one must ask: surely the government knows? Surely economists know? I believe many in the powers that be are aware of the coming crash, and the better economists are warning us. There are plenty of clues and warnings around us.

Here is one warning:

Here is one clue:

Bankrupt Bankers Trying to Start a War

The following article has just appeared in the Washington Post:

"U.S. military combat vehicles paraded Wednesday through an Estonian city that juts into Russia, a symbolic act that highlighted the stakes for both sides amid the worst tensions between the West and Russia since the Cold War. The armored personnel carriers and other U.S. Army vehicles that rolled through the streets of Narva, a border city separated by a narrow frontier from Russia, were a dramatic reminder of the new military confrontation in Eastern Europe.

The soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Second Cavalry Regiment were taking part in a military parade to mark Estonia’s Independence Day. Narva is a vulnerable border city separated by a river from Russia. It has often been cited as a potential target for the Kremlin if it wanted to escalate its conflict with the West onto NATO territory".

To my mind this is blatant military aggression by the United States. Just imagine the uproar if Russian troops were exercising on the American border in Canada or Mexico. Note also the deliberate false assumptions in the propaganda article which I have highlighted. There is no evidence whatsoever that Russia has any plans to attack Estonia or that it wants to escalate any conflict with the West. It is in fact NATO that has been building more and more bases closer and closer to Russia, and the US that staged the coup in Ukraine, not to mention the infamous missiles in Poland that America said are a 'defence against Iran' (you can't make this stuff up).

Estonia needs to be very careful playing these games with the US. It has a Russian speaking population of 24%. If Russia agitates them, or even arms them as insurgents, the tiny country of Estonia will become engulfed in civil war and become a disaster and hell hole just like the Ukraine - and it will be America that started it.

The recent assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov also has the smell of American corruption and interference about it. Putin is more popular than ever in Russia and there would be no advantage to him in being involved in something like this. Nemtsov, although a loud mouth, had no impact on Putin’s 85% approval rating. Nemtsov’s support resided in the Washington-funded NGOs in Russia. But America, desperate to stir up trouble in Russia, may have decided they can get more mileage out of this opposition leader dead than alive.

What is really happening? The psychopaths on Wall Street that control the US know that an economic crash is coming. They will do anything, even start a world war, to hide their culpability. Washington’s reckless and irresponsible destruction of the trust achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev has resurrected the possibility of nuclear war from the grave in which Reagan and Gorbachev buried it. Again, as during the Cold War the specter of nuclear Armageddon stalks the earth. It is unbelievable how far the United States has fallen. 

More Charts of Doom

Here are four more charts, to add to the already significant pile of negative economic news, that dispel the myth of a US economic recovery. If the US has been experiencing a recovery for the last few years I would sure hate to see a recession let alone a depression.

Real Median Household Income has not increased since 2000.

Student Debt has risen dramatically and now totals a ridiculous $1.2 trillion.

Child Poverty has risen, and in the United States a staggering one third of children live in households earning less than 60% of the median income. In many so called 'First World' countries this figure is above 20%, and even in Australia it is above 10%.

Home Ownership in the United States has been declining for the last 10 years.

The Charts of Doom: More on the Coming Economic Crash

There is a great article by Michael Snyder that summarises why he believes the great crash is imminent. I agree with him. I actually searched for charts for everything that Snyder says, and he is correct. These charts tell a story that clearly illustrate that the so called "recovery" is a monumental lie.

I quote his key points as follows (and highlight my "favourite" bits):

The signs of the times are everywhere – all you have to do is open up your eyes and look at them.  When a pregnant woman first goes into labor, the birth pangs are usually fairly moderate and are not that close together.  But as the time for delivery approaches, they become much more frequent and much more intense. 

Baltic Dry Index

Economically, what we are experiencing right now are birth pangs of the coming Great Depression.  As we get closer to the crisis that is looming on the horizon, they will become even more powerful.  This week, we learned that the Baltic Dry Index has fallen to the lowest level that we have seen in 29 years.  The Baltic Dry Index also crashed during the financial collapse of 2008, but right now it is already lower than it was at any point during the last financial crisis.  (The Baltic Dry Index (BDI) measures the demand for shipping capacity versus the supply of dry bulk carriers. The demand for shipping varies with the amount of cargo that is being traded or moved in various markets).

Commodity Prices

In addition, “Dr. Copper” and other industrial commodities continue to plunge.  This almost always happens before we enter an economic downturn. 

Orders for Durable Goods

Meanwhile, as I mentioned the other day, orders for durable goods are declining.  This is also a traditional indicator that a recession is approaching.  The warning signs are there – we just have to be open to what they are telling us.

And of course there are so many more parallels between past economic downturns and what is happening right now.

Stock Market Volatility

For example, volatility has returned to the markets in a big way.  On Tuesday the Dow was down about 300 points, on Wednesday it was down another couple hundred points, and then on Thursday it was up a couple hundred points.

This is precisely how markets behave just before they crash.  When markets are calm, they tend to go up.  When markets get really choppy and start behaving erratically, that tells us that a big move down is usually coming.

Currency Implosion

At the same time, almost every major global currency is imploding.  For much more on this, see the amazing charts in this article.

In particular, I am greatly concerned about the collapse of the euro.  The Swiss would not have decoupled their currency from the euro if it was healthy.  And political events in Greece are certainly not going to help things either.  Economic conditions across Europe just continue to get worse, and the future of the eurozone itself is very much in doubt at this point.  And if the eurozone does break up, a European economic depression is almost virtually assured – at least in the short term.

Oil Crash

And I haven’t even mentioned the oil crash yet.

There is only one other time in all of history when the price of oil collapsed by more than 60 dollars, and that was just prior to the horrific financial crisis of 2008.

Since the last financial crisis, the oil industry has been a huge source for job growth in this country.  The following is an excerpt from a recent CNN article…

The oil sector has added over a half million jobs — many of them high paying — since the recession ended in June 2009. That’s 13% of all US job growth over that period.

Now energy companies and related sectors are laying off thousands. Expect that trend to continue, bears say.

But losing good jobs is just the tip of the iceberg of this oil crisis.

At this point, the price of oil has already dropped to a catastrophically low level.  The longer it stays at this level, the more damage that it is going to do.  If the price of oil stays at this level for all of 2015, we are going to have a complete and total financial nightmare on our hands…

For the first time in 18 years, oil exporters are pulling liquidity out of world markets rather than putting money in. The world is now fast approaching a world reserve currency shift. If we see 8 to 12 months at these oil prices; U.S. shale industry will be wiped out. The effect on junk bonds will cascade to the rest of the stock market and U.S. economy.

…and this time there will be nothing left to catch the falling knife before it hits the American economy right in the heart. Not the FED nor the U.S. government can stop what’s coming. Liquidity will freeze up, our credit will be downgraded, the stock market will start to collapse, and then we can expect the FED to come in and hyper-inflate the dollar. This will cause the world to finish abandoning the world reserve currency in the last rungs of trade. This will be the end of the petrodollar.

Emerging Markets Debt

As economic problems spread around the world, a number of “emerging markets” are in danger of having their debt downgraded.  And many investment funds have rules that prohibit them from holding any debt that is not “investment grade”.  Therefore, we could potentially see some of these giant funds dumping massive amounts of emerging market debt if downgrades happen.

This is a really big deal.  As a Business Insider article recently detailed, we could be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars…

Russia this week became the first of the major economies to lose its investment grade status from Standard & Poor’s, falling out off the top ratings category for credits deemed to have a low risk of default for the first time in a decade.

If Moody’s and Fitch follow, conservative investors barred from owning junk securities must sell their holdings. JPMorgan estimates this means they may ditch $6 billion in Russian government rouble and dollar debt.

Russia may have company. Almost $260 billion worth of sovereign and corporate bonds – nearly a tenth of outstanding emerging market (EM) debt – is in danger of being relegated to junk, according to David Spegel, head of emerging debt at BNP Paribas, who calls such credits “falling angels”.

Derivatives

And no article of this nature would be complete without mentioning derivatives.

I could not possibly overemphasize the danger that the 700 trillion dollar derivatives bubble poses to the global financial system.

As we enter the coming Great Depression, derivatives are going to play a starring role.  Wall Street has been pumped full of funny money by global central banks, and our financial markets have been transformed into the greatest casino in the history of the world.  When this house of cards comes crashing down, and it will, it is going to be a financial disaster unlike anything that the planet has ever seen.

Consequences of Money Printing

I really like the way that David Stockman put it the other day…

The global financial system is literally booby-trapped with accidents waiting to happen owing to six consecutive years of massive money printing by nearly every central bank in the world.

Over that span, the collective balance sheet of the major central banks has soared by nearly $11 trillion, meaning that honest price discovery has been virtually destroyed. This massive “bid” for existing financial assets based on credit confected from thin air drove long-term bond yields to rock bottom levels not seen in 600 years since the Black Plague; and pinned money market costs at zero—-for 73 months running.

What is the consequence of this drastic financial repression along the entire yield curve? The answer is bond prices which keep rising regardless of credit risk, inflation or taxes; and rampant carry trade speculation that can’t get out of its own way because  central banks have made the financial gamblers’ cost of goods—the “funding” cost of their trades—-essentially zero.

No More Monetary Firepower

Of course I am not the only one warning that a new Great Depression is coming.  For instance, just consider what British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey is saying…

British hedge fund manager Crispin Odey thinks we’ve entered an economic downturn that is “likely to be remembered in a hundred years,” and central banks won’t be able to stop it.

In his Odey Asset Management investor letter dated Dec. 31, Odey writes that the shorting opportunity “looks as great as it was in 07/09.”

“My point is that we used all our monetary firepower to avoid the first downturn in 2007-09,” [Kevin Rudd comes to mind!] he writes, “so we are really at a dangerous point to try to counter the effects of a slowing China, falling commodities and EM incomes, and the ultimate First World Effects. This is the heart of the message. If economic activity far from picks up, but falters, then there will be a painful round of debt default.”

Those in the Know

Even though most average citizens are completely oblivious to what is happening, many among the elite are heeding the warning signs and are feverishly getting prepared.  As Robert Johnson told a stunned audience at the World Economic Forum the other day, they are “buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand“.  They can see the horrifying storm forming on the horizon and they are preparing to get out while the getting is good.

It can be very frustrating to write about economics, because things in the financial world can take an extended period of time to play out.  Sadly, most people these days have extremely short attention spans.  We live in a world of iPhones, iPads, YouTube videos, Facebook updates and 48 hour news cycles.  People no longer are accustomed to thinking in long-term time frames, and if something does not happen right away we tend to get bored with it.

But the economic world is not like a game of “Angry Birds”.  Rather, it is very much like a game of chess.

And unfortunately for us, checkmate is right around the corner.

What is even more scary than Snyder's analysis, is that he doesn't even mention other indicators of declining economic activity. I can think of three big ones:

Unemployment

A real recovery generates jobs growth. We all know what unemployment is. The true unemployment figures are disastrous, especially in the United States. Even in Australia unemployment is rising.

Velocity of Money

The velocity of money is the frequency with which a single unit of currency or the total money supply turns over within the economy in a given year. This is also called the velocity of circulation. When an economy is recovering or doing well this is going up. However, right now it is declining.

Personal Savings Rate

When economies recover and grow the personal savings rate rises. This reflects a population that does not struggle from pay-check to pay-check, and it indicates an increase in general wealth. Currently, the personal savings rate is going down.

There are many other measures of economic health that can be looked at, for example the poverty rate, the food insecurity index, the income wealth gap, the distribution of property ownership, the bankruptcy rate, the percentage of full time versus casual jobs etc etc. The news on all these other fronts is bad news.

These charts do not lie. We are not living in a post recession recovery economy. The crash is coming.

This Will Be The Year

That it all collapses.

Little printed pieces of paper with dead people on them are not wealth.

The derivatives market the world over is larger than the world’s economy many times over.

Plunge protection teams = rigged markets with a thumb constantly on the scale, able to go up endlessly, but never allowed to go back down, ever.

The markets all consist of computers trading amongst one another, high frequency trading is all that makes up the market, and if they slow down it collapses.

The Federal Reserve is buying the vast majority of all treasuries. Somewhere north of 70% of all treasuries are being purchased by the Fed.

The Federal reserve is a group of privately owned banks, with no reserves, and is not federal.

There isn’t a company on the stock exchange that has a share price reflective of its assets.

Governments around the world have only kept the illusion going though endless money printing, endless quantitative easing, endless operation twist, endless buying of mortgage backed securities. Printing money. Every single time in history that this has been tried has ended in grief.

The flow of billions and billions of money printing props up the banks and US stocks, it does not build infrastructure or stimulate small businesses or assist the needy. It does not even assist anyone other than the top 1%. That is the 1% that owns 50% of the entire wealth of the planet.

Theft and corruption are now legal. There is no legal system left when it comes to HSBC laundering their money through the drug cartels, or MF global and the evaporation of 1.5 billion dollars in segregated client funds, and the list of illegalities by JP Morgan and others reads like a rap sheet. Not a single person from Wall Street as gone to jail since the 2008 financial crisis. Steal $100 and you go to jail for 10 years. Steal $1 billion and you get a bonus and you are "too important to fail".

Theft of assets and gold of foreign nations is now the order of the day, from Libya to Cyprus, to the Ukranian gold, to financial warfare and killing anyone who threatens to leave the system or opt out.

Libor rigging, was just one more example of rigged interest rates world wide in order to keep the financial system propped up a little longer and the illusion going. There is no law in this financial system.

Finally the transfer of all banker debt, all corporate debts world wide onto the backs of nation states. This has turned our once elected governments into nothing more than an extension of corporations, and has made private debt, all of it, public debt, and national debt. This is theft and corruption at it’s highest.

Theft has many new words. "Bail in" means your bank deposits will be stolen. "Necessary inflation" means your cash will be stolen, bit by bit. "Climate levy" means your assets will be taxed in new ways. "Too big to fail" means your taxes will pay for large corporation mistakes, but not for small businesses. "International treaty obligations" means the top 1% use tax havens and trusts and pay no tax. "Austerity" means you and your children pay for government and large corporation debts.

Now once the entire system collapses, it won’t just be banks going under, it won’t just be companies failing, it will be nation states collapsing.

That is why they need hollow point bullets, NSA spying, drones, coffins, guard towers, continuity of government plans, militarized police, and terrorists to give the excuses needed to create it all, catalog it all, and spy on everyone. The state does not fear terrorists. The state fears its own citizens when the house of cards comes down.

The end is near. It has reached a climax. We are now in global financial warfare, which may very well go hot, and has done so in many places and regions. The brick wall so to speak has been reached in Russia which hasn’t allowed a color revolution, and refuses to play if you believe it.

The EU is now printing money. The Swiss just made the decision to exit the game early, and now you will see the rush for the exits as to not be the last one standing at a dead man’s party.

Question is, will people beg for an Icelandic solution, the arrest of those financially responsible, a refusal to pay the debt of failed corporations.

Or will they beg for a Greek solution, the candy and handouts to continue, some government jobs and pensions to be protected, and the auctioning of all monuments, national treasures and assets to be handed over to the banks, and those responsible for the destruction of free people to be rewarded with more wealth.

Every nation is in debt, every state is in debt, every city is in debt, and every person is in debt. It has become a planet of world wide debt.

Those who are going to come in and pretend to save you, do not have the money to do it with, and if you are foolish enough to pretend that they do, then you deserve the slavery you will get.

As I write the 1% fly into Davos in their lear jets to pontificate to the rest of the world. Just watch, everything will be about the average person making sacrifices or changing their expectations or being taxed in new ways. All for the good of the planet 1% of course. No matter what they say the tax havens will stay. The mega corporations will still be above international law.

But even the super rich cannot hold the house of cards together for much longer. Unrestrained greed is about to have global consequences.

Find a cave and lock the door.

Pathological Liars and Zombie Banks

It is some time now since I formed the view that President Obama is a pathological liar.

Yesterday Obama gave the "State of the Union" address to Congress, and I saw some of it on television. As I expected, it was an absolute pack of lies, and it perhaps says something of the arrogance of the governing class that they believe they can tell blatant lies and get away with it.

Remember, Obama was supposed to be the champion of the middle class and the underprivileged.

The biggest lie was that the United States has undergone an economic recovery, and that the economy is strong and to the benefit of all Americans. All lies. There has been no recovery, only bloated stock market prices caused by the Federal Reserve printing money for Wall Street (not for infrastructure or for ordinary Americans). The economy is not strong, it is on the brink of a collapse that will rival the Great Depression. All Americans have not benefited from Obama's economic policies, only the top 1%.

Here are some very sobering facts that were not mentioned in the State of the Union address:

#1 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale now earn less money than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.

#2 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale have a lower net worth than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.

#3 According to a Washington Post article published just a few days ago, more than 50 percent of the children in U.S. public schools now come from low income homes.  This is the first time that this has happened in at least 50 years.

#4 According to a Census Bureau report that was recently released, 65 percent of all children in the United States are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.

#5 In 2008, the total number of business closures exceeded the total number of businesses being created for the first time ever, and that has continued to happen every single year since then.

#6 In 2008, 53 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be “middle class”.  But by 2014, only 44 percent of all Americans still considered themselves to be “middle class”.

#7 In 2008, 25 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket considered themselves to be “lower class”.  But in 2014, an astounding 49 percent of all Americans in that age range considered themselves to be “lower class”.

#8 Traditionally, owning a home has been one of the key indicators that you belong to the middle class.  So what does the fact that the rate of homeownership in America has been falling for seven years in a row say about the Obama years?

#9 According to a survey that was conducted last year, 52 percent of all Americans cannot even afford the house that they are living in right now.

#10 After accounting for inflation, median household income in the United States is 8 percent lower than it was when the last recession started in 2007.

#11 According to one recent survey, 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.

#12 At this point, one out of every three adults in the United States has an unpaid debt that is “in collections“.

#13 When Barack Obama first set foot in the Oval Office, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  Today, that number is sitting at only 59.2 percent.

#14 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen from 19.8 weeks to 32.8 weeks.

#15 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#16 At the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office, the yearly trade deficit with China was 226 billion dollars.  Last year, it was more than 314 billion dollars.

#17 When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent.  Today, it is over 101 percent.

#18 The U.S. national debt is on pace to approximately double during the eight years of the Obama administration.  In other words, under Barack Obama the U.S. government will accumulate about as much debt as it did under all of the other presidents in U.S. history combined.

#19 According to the New York Times, the “typical American household” is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago.

#20 The poverty rate in the United States has been at 15 percent or above for 3 consecutive years.  This is the first time that has happened since 1965.

#21 From 2009 through 2013, the U.S. government spent a whopping 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs.

#22 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from 32 million to 46 million.

#23 Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had full-time jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin.  But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have full-time jobs.

#24 One recent survey discovered that about 22 percent of all Americans have had to turn to a church food panty for assistance.

#25 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.

#26 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are living with only one parent are living in poverty.

#27 According to a report that was released late last year by the National Center on Family Homelessness, the number of homeless children in the United States has reached a new all-time record high of 2.5 million.

The policies of Obama and the Wall Street / Federal Reserve cronies that control him are leading to disaster. And this disaster will make all of the above statistics pale into insignificance.

There is a great quote from Mike Whitney that summarises the madness of the current American financial system:

"But can you believe it? These are the same worthless, zombie banks we bailed out just four years ago to the tune of many trillions of dollars and they’re back on the ropes again? How does that happen? And all the while the Fed has been lending them gobs of money at zero percent, loading them with trillions in reserves, pumping up their stock prices with a small ocean of free liquidity, and they still can’t hack it. They must have the shittyest business model in history. Either that, or crime doesn’t pay after all.

The fact is, the banks are dragging down the entire economy and everyone with it. You simply can’t restructure the whole system to accommodate bumbling imbeciles whose only strategy for survival is mooching off the government. Four years into the so-called recovery and bank lending is still contracting. This is ridiculous. These chiselers make their dough trading derivatives and moving loan loss provisions into the profit column to buffalo shareholders. It’s a big freaking game. We should have shut down these zombies when we had the chance. Now they’ve BECOME the government. And that’s why the economy is headed for another slump".

Unfortunately Australia is not immune. When the house of cards comes down, we will go down with it.

I'm Starting to get Really Worried

My views about governments, especially the United States government, are well known. Governments: (a) lie, (b) react after the event and are not proactive, (c) are massively wasteful (d) reduce organizational effectiveness, (e) do not listen to good advice, (f) attempt to solve problems with force, rules or taxes, (g) govern in the interests of the wealthiest 1% of individuals and corporations, and (h) lie again. The so called media in the United States, and most of the Western world, is owned by a handfull of corporations who are far from a fearless and independent source of news. It is always a battle to find out what is really going on.

In this context, I am very concerned about the ebola pandemic in West Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) has done the most woeful job in mobilising resources, and the major powers with resources to help have been far more interested in planning the bombing of sections of the Middle East and aggravating Russia than protecting the health of human civilisation.

The are now so many cases in West Africa that it will take monumental effort (thus far no sign of this effort) to contain the disease in West Africa, and a spread to other parts of the world is inevitable. In fact, the spread has already begun.

The response of our Western governments has been so pathetic that it is almost as if it is deliberate. And is it a coincidence that it is amongst the elite 1 % that control these governments where one finds psychopaths who have actually called for a massive cull of the human population. I fear for all of us.

Just looking at the news today, ebola is now in four countries in West Africa plus the United States, Spain and probably Brazil. That is what we know about, but who knows how bad the reality may be.

From the news today:

West Africa

The number of deaths attributed to the Ebola outbreak has risen above 4,000, the World Health Organization says.

The latest figures show there have been 4,024 confirmed or suspected deaths in the worst-affected West African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Eight deaths are linked to the haemorrhagic fever in Nigeria and one in the US.  In total, there have been 8,399 confirmed or suspected cases, mostly in West Africa.

United States

One of the Sheriff’s Deputies who was forced to enter the apartment where Ebola victim Thomas Eric Duncan stayed before he was taken to hospital has fallen ill.

A statement issued by the City of Frisco, a suburb of Dallas, suggests that a second potential Ebola victim has been taken to the Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, the same facility where Duncan stayed before his death this morning.

The CDC claims “the patient did not have direct contact with Duncan and he was not one of the 48 people being monitored by federal, state and local health officials.”

However, according to a Dallas Morning News report, the individual was one of the Sheriff’s Deputies who was forced to enter Ebola victim Duncan’s apartment last week. Duncan’s family told the media that they received no advice from the CDC on how to go about cleaning the apartment and it was a number of days before a professional Hazmat team arrived to clean the building.

Spain

(Reuters) - Spanish health workers angry about the government's handling of an Ebola outbreak jeered Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and pelted his car with surgical gloves on Friday at a Madrid hospital where a nurse lay seriously ill with the virus.

Recriminations are growing over how nurse Teresa Romero became the first person to contract the virus outside West Africa, but Rajoy said it was extremely unlikely that the disease - which has already killed more than 4,000 people - would spread in Spain.

Seven more people were admitted to a specialist isolation unit at the Carlos III hospital on Thursday, taking to 14 the number of people now under observation or being treated there, including Romero's husband.

"Our first priority is Teresa Romero - she is the only person that we know has the illness," Rajoy told reporters on the steps of the hospital.

Tempers are fraying over the case, with labor unions accusing the government of trying to deflect the blame onto the nurse for the failings of its health system. The health workers who have been protesting outside the hospital this week heckled  Rajoy as he left the news conference in a motorcade.

The seven new admissions late on Thursday included two hairdressers who had given Romero a beauty treatment before she was diagnosed, and hospital staff who had treated the 44-year-old nurse after she was admitted on Monday.

Brazil

Brazil is treating a 47-year-old man who has become the country’s first suspected case of the deadly Ebola virus.

The man, originally from Guinea in West Africa, has been placed into isolation at a hospital in the city of Cascavel, where Brazil’s ministry of health have sent specialists to provide additional help and care.

He arrived in Brazil on 19 September and is believed to have travelled from Guinea.

On Thursday afternoon the man went to the emergency department at the hospital with a fever. His case is being treated by medics as suspicious as his symptoms have developed within the maximum incubation period for Ebola, which is 21 days.

Brazil’s health officials said the man has not experienced any bleeding, vomiting or shown any other symptoms at this time, but he will be transferred to the National Institute of Infectious Diseases at the Evandro Chagas hospital in Rio de Janeiro, in accordance with security protocols in place for suspected cases of Ebola.

Health officials are now attempting to identify people who may have come into contact with the patient while displaying any symptoms, Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported.

Macedonia

Meanwhile, Macedonian authorities said there was only a "small probability" a Briton who died in Skopje on Thursday had the Ebola virus, according to an initial analysis.

Macedonian health authorities have sent blood and tissue samples from the dead Briton to Frankfurt for testing.

CDC

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is responding to only half the calls it is receiving from doctors reporting Ebola-like symptoms in patients, according to doctors who spoke to Infowars medical correspondent Dr. Edward Group.

The CDC’s lackluster response to upwards of 40 calls a day regarding potential Ebola cases is disturbing to the medical professionals who spoke to Dr. Group and it follows a similar pattern of performance by CDC officials who were slow to decontaminate both the apartment of the late Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan and the ambulance used to transport him to the hospital.

When asked to comment on the response rate to these calls, the CDC Media Relations office at first referred us to its unrelated “CDC Hotline” and then refused to connect us directly to a public information officer on a sequential call because the office is screening questions from the press.

It’s no wonder then that doctors are having similar problems reaching the CDC, and such behavior is typical of the agency, which has so far placed more emphasis on the proper burial of Ebola victims than following proper disease protocols meant to prevent the virus from spreading in the first place.

Case in point, the CDC is now instructing funeral homes to bury Ebola victims in sealed caskets and had previously warned funeral workers not to embalm corpses.

Additionally, previous reports suggested the CDC had purchased thousands of airtight coffin liners and were storing them in Madison, Georgia.

Dr Gil Mobley, a Missouri doctor, recently showed up at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport dressed in protective gear to protest what he called mismanagement of the crisis by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He checked in and cleared airport security wearing a mask, goggles, gloves, boots and a hooded white jumpsuit emblazoned on the back with the words, “CDC is lying!”

Dr Mobley has made a prediction about this pandemic, and his prediction is unfortunately more plausible that the information coming out of CDC news conferences:

“Once this disease consumes every third world country, as surely it will, because they lack the same basic infrastructure as Sierra Leone and Liberia, at that point, we will be importing clusters of Ebola on a daily basis,” Mobley predicted. “That will overwhelm any advanced country’s ability to contain the clusters in isolation and quarantine. That spells bad news.”

Men in White Coats: The Prevenance Theory

Hello world, my name is Sir Ian Wilmut, (OBE FRS FMedSci FRSE) and I am an English embryologist and Chair of the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. I am sooo clever, I cloned a little sheep called Dolly. Don't worry, I just want to cure all the terrible diseases in the world.

Hello world, my name is Dr Shoukhrat Mitalipov and I am Co-Director of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Embryonic Stem Cell Core Laboratory at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, Oregon Health & Science University. I am sooo clever, and more clever than Sir Wilmut. After experimenting on over 1,000 monkey eggs I cloned human cells. Don't worry, I just want to cure all the terrible diseases in the world.

Hello world, my name is Dr. Stephen Minger and I am Global Head of Research and Development for the Cell Technologies business of GE Healthcare Life Sciences. I am sooo clever. I used to be the Director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at Kings College London where I created human-animal hybrid embryos. Don't worry, I just want to cure all the terrible diseases in the world.

Hello world, my name is Dr Jeffery K. Taubenberger. I am chief of the Division of Molecular Pathology at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). I am sooo clever. I used the remains of soldiers and indians who had died from the Spanish flu, and I then became the first scientist to sequence the genome of the influenza virus which caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu. My colleagues at a high-level biosafety lab in Winnipeg, Canada resurrected the virus and tested it on monkeys to confirm that it was still deadly. I published the sequence for the whole world to use. Don't worry, I just want to cure all the terrible diseases in the world including the ones I create.

I have a theory about the men in white coats, and I call it the Prevenance Theory. The theory is:

1. The real state of what has been achieved in the biological and genetic sciences in some laboratory somewhere in the world is at least 10-15 years ahead of what has been disclosed to the public.
2. Biological and genetic science operates independently of government supervision and regulation. There are few regulatory controls in any event, and the official policy in most so called advanced countries is to leave ethical decision making to the ethics of the scientists. What regulations do exist are easily ignored by science undertaken privately by trans national corporations.
3. There is virtually no ethical decision making on the part of the scientists. There is none on the part of the corporations that fund and undertake most biological and genetic research. In short: if it can be done, it will be done.

So what does this mean? It means we have little idea what is really going on, but we can rest assured that lots of biological and genetic experiments are being undertaken by people who like to play God and are doing so unrestrained by ethical considerations.

Why do I think this is all going to end in tears.

Lots and lots of tears.

The Bedwetters are Wrong and the Hockey Stick is Broken

It seems that every few days there is news of another scandal involving the fabrication of "evidence" in support of alleged man made global warming. Today I read about the Data Rigging Scandal in the US Temperature Records but this is only the latest in a long line of political interference with science.

I don't understand why people are shocked about this, especially with something that is patently dodgy like alleged man made global warming. Science, like any profession, is just as likely to be prone to human failings leading to corruption, misconduct and criminality as any other profession. And this is more so when there is an obvious global agenda propagated by a small number of wealthy interests that want to socially engineer (and tax the crap out of) the unfortunate majority of the world's population.  It is the same wealthy special interest groups and corrupt governments that are bankrolling most of science, and guess what: they only fund research that fits in with their own agenda. Try applying for a grant to study the effects of solar cycles on planetary temperature (as distinct from an anthropocentric research project) and see how far you get.

I am sick and tired of the bedwetters (to copy the phrase used by a well known politically incorrect climate change sceptic) carrying on about alleged man made global warming while more and more data comes in showing there is no global warming. And, because the bedwetters love computer models (as distinct from actual measuresements) enough time has now passed to test the stupid and ill-informed models propagated by elitists like Al Gore (I bet he and his 5 mansions and lear jet has a small carbon foot print).

 
All of Gore's fear mongering predictions have failed. The best was the 2007 prediction that the arctic summer would be ice free by 2013. Wrong. the latest satellite data show that Arctic ice cover has actually expanded 50 percent over 2012 levels. In fact, during October 2013, sea-ice levels grew at the fastest pace since records began in 1979. And what about all the polar bears would die. No, the bears live and maybe they can move to Egypt where Cairo just had its first snowfall in 100 years.

The worst predictions have come from the United Nations, that organization that has never seen a third world family it did not want to sterilise. The UN claimed in its latest global-warming report to be 95 percent sure that human emissions of carbon dioxide were to blame for rising temperatures. Those claims, now deservedly widely laughed at around the world, were made despite the fact that every single one of its computer models has been entirely discredited by the lack of warming for the last 17 years. Many experts are now even predicting global cooling.

Yes, you heard correctly. Monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies (average global temperature) as measured by Satellite (a measurement, not a model) show that there has been no global warming for the last 17 years.

There is no hockey stick. And what are the bedwetters doing now? They have stopped saying "global warming" and have started saying "climate change".

Hang on, is this science? When the evidence doesn’t support your conclusion you change the name of the phenomenon. Recently President Obama (I guess he needs a 'carbon' tax because he has bankrupted America) said the record cold in the United States was evidence of global warming. HANG ON, so if temperatures go up it is evidence of global warming and if temperatures go down it is evidence of global warming. Bullshit: they are making it up as they go along.

My favourite news item of January 2014 has been about the Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskly stranded in ice in the Antarctica sea. What has not been so widely reported (typical of a media largely owned by the same elitists that promote the global warming myth) is that the ship was full of global warming sycophants led by Chris Turney, a professor of climate change (there really is such a thing: amazing what money can buy) at UNSW.

The  purpose of the expedition was to retrace the Mawson expedition of 1912 and take duplicate "readings" of that expedition in order to show how much global warming has effected Antarctica in the last century. However, they are comparing data from 100 years ago when there was no sea ice in the same location and they proved the opposite of what they wanted. Absolutely brilliant, you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried!

The next time people feel warm or  hot I suggest they walk outside and take a look at the sky. Yes, there is a bloody great bright hot thing up there. It is a star which we call the sun. It generates heat. Now compare atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperature (no correlation) with  solar irradiance  and global temperature (a correlation). Not that hard: I suggest UNSW appoint a professor of solar irradiance.

It is high time we move on from the global warming fraud and focus on real problems. The nuclear tragedy at Fukushima, for example, is a genuine global problem that deserves attention and massive resources. The dumping of highly radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean at horrendous levels every single day now constitutes a potential trigger to a process of global radioactive contamination. This is the sort of thing that bedwetters need to worry about.

 

Profoundly Traumatised

I am profoundly traumatised, and may not be able to speak for a little while.

My favourite character - Hershel - in my favourite television program - The Walking Dead - has been killed off in the show. I don't watch that many TV dramas because most of them are garbage, but The Walking Dead is exceptionally well done and the most exciting (and nail biting) show on TV. It is difficult to explain why a show about the Zombie apocalypse is so good, other than to say just watch it. Unfortunately it is on FX channel which I think is only on cable.

Hershel was the voice of conscience in the show, and I'm not sure how the scriptwriters will temper the behaviour of the other characters in the future. The dramatic events which saw the demise of Hershel were the mid season finale of season 4 which does not return until February 2014. This will give me time to recover.