Former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill supplies what is easily the best, and most simple, explanation so far for why the subprime mortgage financial massacre continues to do so much damage :
If you have 10 bottles of water, and one bottle had poison in it, and you didn’t know which one, you probably wouldn’t drink out of any of the 10 bottles; that’s basically what we’ve got there.
Q: Do you think it was appropriate for the Federal Reserve to lend a helping hand to Bear Stearns and save a private investment company from its own bad decisions?
A: I would say they didn’t save Bear Stearns. They saved the financial system from a panic collapse. I reject the notion that they helped Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was destroyed.
Q: No it wasn’t. It was purchased by JPMorgan, which will keep it alive.
A: They’re going to keep the book alive. But the institution of Bear Stearns has been destroyed. They’ve gone from $158 to $2 of equity. It’s wallpaper. It’s not even good wallpaper. It’s butcher paper.
A massive American financial institution reduced to “not even good wallpaper” in a matter of days, and if the US taxpayers hadn’t coughed up billions, O’Neill says the financial system would have suffered a “panic collapse.”
Not very reassuring, is it? After all, those on Wall Street, behind the big desks in our banks, the stock market trading ‘geniuses’, are supposed to be so much more intelligent and brilliant than the average plebian. That’s why they get paid so well, because they’re so smart. Right?
Smart, yes. But not in the way the myth-making and propaganda tells us. Institutions like Bear Stearns only have to be smart enough to know that if they wrack up so much bad debt that it threatens to collapse the US financial system, and tsunami most international markets,
the US government will step in and use sandbags filled with taxpayers dollars to shore it up.
Bear Stearns wasn’t filled with people smarter than you. Those on the executive floors just knew they could never really lose, which meant they didn’t truly give a fuck.
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Global warming, Earth-bound chunks of old planet, riot-smashed waterless cities, local star systems collapsing into black holes, the armed robot rebellion…all forewarned disasters dripping with catastrophic potential, but all so very far away into our future. For those who just can’t wait to see Planet Earth get hammered, don’t despair.
The Sun is getting ’stormy’, according to this story, and potential mega-disaster is only a few years away, in 2012 :
Every 11 years or so, the sun gets a little pissy. It breaks out in a rash of planet-sized sunspots that spew superhot gas, hurling clouds of electrons, protons, and heavier ions toward Earth at nearly the speed of light.
2012 is not actually a good year for apocalyptic destruction and armageddon-ish chaos. There’s far too much on during those twelve months.
2013 looks boring in comparison.
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Original hippies, how old does this make you feel? Keef gets his British senior citizens free bus pass :
“Do you know that I actually have a bus pass? In England? I’ve reached the age where I am given a free bus pass. [laughs] I feel like going to England right now and riding every bus I can get! [pause] There’s a certain thing about growing old, which is I’m still getting used to it. It’s a whole new experience.”
Keef on growing up :
“When I was younger, I said, “If I live to 30, I’ll shoot myself.” You reach 30 and put the gun away. It’s a fascinating process, just growing up.”
Keef on the prosecution, or more accurately, persecution, of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones for drug-taking in the late 1960s and early 1970s :
“I never saw myself being a target for the system. And suddenly you realize you are. It never occurred to me that just because I did a little of this [he pretends he’s injecting his arm] or took a little of that [he mimes a toke], that I was gonna get this heat, you know? And then I realized I’d been targeted. And then your mind takes on other things. I still look out the window to see if there are any unmarked cars. [laughs] It puts fear in you. Suddenly, you feel like a criminal.
“(John Lennon) felt he was hunted. That it was high-profile hunting. And then you realize that it doesn’t really matter if you’re doing it or not. They’ll shove it in your pocket. And you think, It’s not a game now. This isn’t just rock ’n’ roll. They’re afraid of you. And that was the thing that intrigued me. They’re actually frightened. I mean, I grew up in the British Empire and bop-bop-bop God Save the Queen, and you realize this whole edifice actually thinks you’re a threat to it? And you realize how paranoid they must be that if they get rid of a guitar player or two, everything’s gonna be cool in the empire? All they did was illustrate their fragility.”
Keef on the last days of his mother, who didn’t let cancer stop her from taking the piss out of her son :
“We knew me mum was going, and so my daughter Angela says, “Dad, take the guitar out. Play to her. Go into her room.” So I went up there and sat on the hospital bed and played my best. And she’s out on morphine, anyway, unconscious. And I played the old songs, the old dance-hall songs. The next morning, she came out of her sleep for a moment, and my daughter was there and asked her, “Did you hear Daddy play for you last night?” And me mum says, “Yeah, he was out of tune.”
Keef on “going to the edge” but not finding anything there :
“I’ve been there a few times. No, my life—at least for me—didn’t flash before my eyes. It was more like what could’ve been. At the same time, I had this weird perception that—I mean, I don’t know if it’s sheer cowardice or not, but you leave the body. And you think, Oh, my God, I’m dead. And suddenly you can watch it quite dispassionately and objectively from twelve, fifteen feet above. And I once crashed a car, a convertible. Anita was with me. No seat belts—she was seven months pregnant. Three tons of car. A convertible. Rolled over three times. After the first roll, I was out of the car, watching. My only recollection of the whole thing is looking down very cold-bloodedly.”
Keef on Beatles Vs Stones :
Q: Do you think the Beatles are overrated?
A: Oh, definitely. So are we.
Q : Why?
A : In that moment, the Beatles… But how can you—I mean yes. I’ll say yes. As a musician, yes. As a breath of fresh air and an injection of life into society, no, they were certainly not. They were exactly what was needed. It was a great enema.
Q : What does that make you guys?
A : A great toilet bowl. [laughs]
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When US Vice President Dick Cheney was asked what he thought about the vast majority of opposition in the United States to the continuance of the Iraq War, he answered “So?” When he was asked if cared what the American people think, Cheney answered, “No.”
The ABC News journalist gave him the opportunity to correct his ‘Fuck You America’ attitude, but Cheney refused to do so, as this transcript released by the White House shows :
Q : …two-thirds of Americans say it’s not worth fighting, and they’re looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.
CHENEY : So?
Q So — you don’t care what the American people think?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.
Of course, Cheney was smirking when during his answers.
The White House decided Cheney’s words needed a comma between “No” and “I think you cannot be….”, so it looks as though it is all one sentence, one thought. It wasn’t, as the video here proves.
Cheney was asked if cared what the American people think and he answered “No.”
Hopefully the Iraqis end up with a better democracy than the Bush-Cheney version they’ve inflicted on the American people.
Policy, Cheney went on to say, should not be tailored to fit fluctuations in the public attitudes. If there is one thing public attitudes have not been doing, however, it is fluctuating: Resistance to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy has been widespread, entrenched and consistent. Whether public opinion is right or wrong, it is not to be cavalierly dismissed.
Cheney (said) that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America’s constitutional system.
In Europe, before America’s founding, there were rulers and their subjects. The Founders decided that in the United States there would be not subjects but citizens. Rulers tell their subjects what to do, but citizens tell their government what to do.
If Dick Cheney believes, as he obviously does, that the war in Iraq is vital to American interests, it is his job, and that of President Bush, to make the case with sufficient proof to win the necessary public support.
That is the difference between a strong president (one who leads) and a strong presidency (one in which ultimate power resides in the hands of a single person). Bush is officially America’s “head of state,” but he is not the head of government; he is the head of one branch of our government, and it’s not the branch that decides on war and peace.
When the vice president dismisses public opposition to war with a simple “So?” he violates the single most important element in the American system of government: Here, the people rule.
For Cheney, the Iraq War is nothing but business, and a vast wealth-creating business at that. For Cheney anyway. Not so for the American people.
American’s poor will still be paying for the War On Iraq, when Cheney’s great grandchildren are having their university educations covered by the Haliburton-derived profits of Cheney’s vast war mongering.
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Hollywood actors with ‘heat’ get offered lots of big roles in big budget movies. For various reasons, actors turn down roles in movies that go on to become huge hits, artistic triumphs and eight-figure paying franchises.
Glamorati has a list of actors and the hit movie roles they turned down. While some of the missed opportunities are already Hollywood legend, there’s plenty here that may surprise you, or disappoint you, particularly if you believe that Mel Gibson would have made a better Maximus in Gladiator than Russell Crowe.
Imagine these movies with these actors in the lead roles :
Pretty Woman starring Molly Ringwald.
Platoon starring Keanu Reeves.
Misery starring Warren Beatty
Thelma And Louise starring Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer
The Mercedes S Class helped to make you the kind of successful Russian/Ukrainian gangster who could afford a deliciously gauche black-marble portrait headstone, so of course you want your favourite car included in the image above your grave. Right? Of course you do. You don’t want to look uncool or something. More here.
UPDATE : And here’s yet more Russian classy gangster portrait head stones, from the heartland of the 1990s Russian ‘mafia’. Note the abundance of sports cars and accessories like gold chains, cigarettes and key chains. Leather jackets also appear to be near mandatory.
Must have been a post-Soviet, ’90s thing.
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They haven’t released video of the tests yet where this thing is mounted with heavy weaponry. It can easily haul 300 pounds. It’s development in Boston is funded by DAPRA, for military purposes.
Hundreds of these ‘war dogs’ will be ready to go to war soon. From a bunker back in Virginia, the controller deciding which targets the dog has sighted are worthy kills won’t be using a keyboard or a mouse. He or she will be able to think where the war dog goes and who it kills. Bluetooth in the brain. With the help of its distant instructor, it will learn over time to decide for itself when to kill. All these things were science fiction, today, next year, they are reality.
I’m still not sure which demonstration is more disturbing. The hopping test, where it shows it can easily leap a wall. Or the rock test, where it just keeps coming at you. You can’t kick it over. If you manage to knock it down, it will just get back up again.
i09 has a few more clips of the ‘war dog’. Creepy stuff indeed if you feel uneasy about the rise of robot armies. Watch it coming through the woods, and righting itself after slipping on ice. It looks like it was modeled on two men bending over from the waist, facing each other. These clips are already a year or two old. Do you wonder what it’s capable of doing now?
That buzzsaw sound can easily slip into your nightmares.
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American TV news magazine host Keith Olbermann opens his mind to the possibilities of our reality being little more than a virtual world, a computer simulation, something straight out of Philip K Dick’s fiction, or The Matrix movies (via Philip K Dick’s fiction).
This interview transcript from Olbermann is a great read for the imagination :
OLBERMANN: ….we‘ve got what might be bad news for you. There is a 20 percent chance we‘re living inside a computer simulation.
The theory by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University…that technological advances will some day produce for us a computer so powerful that it could simulate a complex world with billions of creatures of some sort in it.
Advanced civilizations of real people, the argument goes, would create these simulations to better understand their own evolution or just for S and giggles. Like a super advanced version of the SIMS.
Ultimately, says Bostrom, there would be far more virtual people in computer simulations than there are real people in a real world. Therefore, there is a decent chance that some entity somewhere has already invented those super computers, that they have already perfected one of those mammoth simulated world games and that we are in it.
Professor Bostrom of Oxford puts the chances at about 20 percent. You could argue it is more like 50-50. After all, if such computer simulation could some day exist, it is equally possible that it already does exist and that we all are already in it. Which would at least explain that metallic taste you get sometimes in your mouth.
I am joined here by William Irwin, professor of philosophy at Kings College in Pennsylvania, editor of “More Matrix and Philosophy, Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded.” … So we‘re part of a computer program? You would this would have gotten larger play on the news.
IRWIN: It‘s possible. The idea is that if you were in a really high-tech, sophisticated virtual reality program, you would not know it…
OLBERMANN: We have seen “Twilight Zones” like, this where you are in somebody else‘s dream. We are in a somebody else‘s little bead sweat near their brow. The entire universe is actually this big. All of these things. This is the first time that it really has matched up with technology that people at home can understand.
If there is a SIMs game, we could be in a super version of a SIMs game. That‘s what this is all about. Right?
IRWIN: It started with Pong. We moved 20 years later up to the SIMs. We‘re amazed with that. Imagine what 100 years of computer technology from now will produce. Probably virtual reality games with beings in it that have minds and consciousness just like ours and who think they are in the real world. They will vastly outnumber the number of people in the real world.
OLBERMANN: What happens if we are simulations… and we all figure it out and go, yes, this actually rings true to my experience. And everyone holds up a big sign that says “Hey pal, we figured out this is a computer simulation,” what happens then?
IRWIN: I would caution against that. If we let the maker of this game know that we are on to him, the game might be over. I suggest we go along with things, even though there‘s a 50-50 chance that this is such a game. Let‘s play along.
OLBERMANN: What would you do if the SIMs that you were playing with suddenly all held up signs, you would run out of the room screaming.
Brain food.
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Dumbest Move Ever : Music Industry Blew Billions By Going To War On The Internet
Trent Reznor’s experiment of releasing his new Nine Inch Nails album, Ghosts, for free to file-sharing networks at the same time providing the option of purchasing high quality downloads, CDs and signed collector’s edition packs can enter the history books of the Freeconomy as a huge success.
In just one week of the digital release of the four volume, instrumental Ghosts, Reznor has confirmed he has grossed more than $1.6 million.
And Reznor doesn’t have to wait for a record company to spend two years calculating what he is owed before he getting his money. It was in the NIN accounts often within minutes of someone buying one of the Ghosts downloads or packs. So many tried to give Reznor money at his website that it crashed the servers. The demand to buy what could be heard for free was more enormous than Reznor and his management had even thought to prepare for.
While the fact that Reznor personally ‘leaked’ his album to the much-derided P2P sites wasn’t mentioned much in the media coverage, Reznor made sure that every person who went to download a free torrent of the entire Ghosts album saw a letter that constituted an advertisement for the special editions and collectors’ packs available for sale on his own site.
The message was simple, “Look, you can have this version for free, you can listen to it all before you even think about buying it, but if you like it, and I know you’ll like it, you want to get over to my site soon and buy something before all the special stuff is gone.”
Reznor’s freeconomic business strategy worked brilliantly, despite the problems in trying to deal with more customers than they were prepared to handle. Reznor sold some 2500 special edition Ghosts packs, for $300 each, within 24 hours of the non-advertised album being released. More than $700,000 poured into NIN in the first day of this experiment.
On Wednesday, he reported 781,917 transactions, including free and paid downloads and orders of physical product. A $300 box set sold out of 2,500 copies within a day. Nine of the 36 songs were made available as a free download. The complete set also was available as a $5 download, a $10 double-CD and a $75 set with bonus visual content.
File sharing sites like The Pirate Bay were seeing 8000-10,000 free downloads per hour, for the entire first week, so millions more scored a copy for free, with Reznor’s blessing.
But Reznor can very likely count on even a minute percentage of all those who scored Ghosts for free spending money on something Reznor creates and releases, or a T-shirt, a DVD or a concert ticket, in the next few years. Some who heard it and copied it free will also buy the CD of Ghosts if they see it in a local record store. Particularly if the CD has something special that you can’t get for free online - a poster, a badge, a sticker. They will buy what they were given for free because they want the full package Reznor created, or simply because they want to direct some money his way for giving away the album for free to start with.
Reznor earned an incalculable amount of goodwill for giving Ghosts away to the file sharers. He listened to the complaints that followed Radiohead’s ‘free’ release of In Rainbows last year, where you had to offer up credit card details and a handling surcharge before deciding whether or not you want to pay for the download, the quality of which was much derided.
In Rainbows was copied by millions on the sharing sites, but unlike with NIN’s Ghosts, the pirate torrents for Radiohead didn’t include a letter from the band and an invite to come and see what was for sale at the official site.
If 10 million hear Reznor’s Ghosts for free, a realistic figure he’s now closing in on, Reznor only needs 0.1% of those ‘pirates’ to spend $50 on something NIN in the next few years, and another few hundred thousand dollars in sales has been generated for the band thanks to the Free Economy.
A moody, atmospheric four volume instrumental album, with little mainstream radio would be interested in airing, reaches millions of people in only a few days and generates more than $1 million in sales in the first week, and makes a few million more the following month.
And if The Pirate Bay, and other P2P file-sharing sites, didn’t exist, if tens of millions around the world weren’t copying albums and posting torrents and downloading albums, mostly illegally, if those sites were not already so insanely popular, then Reznor would not have been able to pull this off.
Reznor saw a way to use music piracy to his advantage, to get the file-sharers to promote and boost and distribute and broadcast his new album to millions, for free. No outsider record company. No ads. No promos. Minimal distribution costs.
Just to salt up the wound Reznor has opened in the music industry, Blender Magazine has just named the record corporations illogical and wasteful War On The Internet as The Biggest Music Industry Screw Up In History :
The major labels took top dishonors for driving file-sharing service Napster out of business in 2001, instead of figuring out a way to make money from its tens of millions of users. The downloaders merely scattered to hundreds of other sites, and the industry has been in a tailspin ever since.
“The labels’ campaign to stop their music from being acquired for free across the Internet has been like trying to cork a hurricane — upward of a billion files are swapped every month on peer-to-peer networks,” Blender said in the report…
Those poor fuckers who passed on signing The Beatles back in the early 1960s can finally relax. They lost the top spot to the morons who thought it was a good idea to sue their own customers.
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Crude oil for April delivery hit $110 per barrel. The US dollar fell to a new low against the Euro. It now takes $1.55 to purchase one Euro.
These new highs against the dollar are the ongoing story of the collapse of the US dollar as world reserve currency and corresponding collapse of American power.
Each new decision from the insane Bush regime pushes the dollar a little further along to oblivion. The same Fed announcement that boosted the stock market on March 11 sent the dollar reeling and the price of oil up. The Fed’s announcement that it and other central banks are going to deal with the derivative crisis by monetizing $200 billion of the troubled instruments signaled more dollar inflation.
Here is the picture: The US economy, which has been kept alive by enormous debt expansion that has over-reached its limit, is falling into recession. The traditional way out by expanding the supply of money and credit is blocked by the impaired banking system, the levels of consumer debt, the collapsing value of the US dollar, and rising inflation.
The Bush regime is attempting to bypass the stalled credit expansion by sending Americans $600 checks, money that will mainly be used to reduce existing credit card debt and not to fund new consumption.
The US is dependent on foreigners not only for energy but also for manufactured goods and advanced technology products. The US is dependent on foreigners to finance our consumption of $800 billion annually more than the US produces. The US is dependent on foreigners to finance its red ink wars, and the US government’s budget deficit is now expanding as tax revenues decline with the declining economy.
The bottom line: US power is enfeebled. US power depends on the willingness of foreigners to finance our wars and on the willingness of foreigners to continue to accumulate depreciating dollar assets.
The US cannot close its budget deficit while it is squandering vast sums on wars that serve no US purpose, handing out $150 billion in red ink rebates, and falling into recession.
The US is overextended economically and militarily, just as was Great Britain with the fall of France in the opening days of World War II. The British had the Americans to bail them out.
After the chewing gum and bailing wire patch-ups are exhausted, who is going to bail us out?
Saudi Arabia?
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World’s Most Powerful Banks Behind Push To Introduce Global Carbon Trading Markets
Contrary to popular belief, Al Gore did not invent the theory of man-made climate change. Does this sound like him?
As for the climate of the future: science has done an about-face from its once-prevailing view that the earth was gradually cooling off and would wind up icy and barren … Now, evidence points unmistakably to a climate that’s getting warming all the time. Besides glacial melting all over the earth, actual temperature rises have been recorded over the past century in cities throughout the northern hemisphere, and various warm-weather fish have been noted in recent years migrating far north of their usual habitats.
The newest theory of climatic change attributes it to man’s own doing. It’s because of the sizable increase in carbon dioxide found in the atmosphere these days, due to industrial activities and forest fires. Millions of tons of CO2 are being sent into the air constantly from these causes.
An increase of 50 per cent in the carbon dioxide concentration of the earth’s atmosphere could happen in the next century, which could easily happen at the present rate it’s being discharged, could raise the surface temperature of the globe about 2.2 degrees centigrade. Eventually this CO2 factor could make an extreme change in climate everywhere.
According to the always awesome iO9 blog, the above appeared in a popular American magazine called Pageant in February, 1955.
A group representing some of the world’s leading banks will urge the United States and other industrial nations this week to move quickly to introduce a lightly regulated system for trading carbon emissions permits.
Permit-trading systems offer banks a potentially vast new business. For it to grow, leading economies — particularly the United States — will need to set limits on the quantities of greenhouse gases that can be released and to allow companies in other parts of the world to buy emissions permits.
The banking companies, which include Citigroup, Lehman Brothers Holdings and Morgan Stanley, are giving strong signs that Wall Street wants Washington to open the way to reduced emissions using a trading system based on the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement the United States did not ratify, rather than by enacting carbon taxes.
The group also includes European institutions like BNP Paribas, Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank, as well as niche investment banks like Climate Change Capital and the law firms of Baker & McKenzie and DLA Piper.
“Price caps should play a very limited role in the system,” said Gia Schneider, a vice president for carbon markets at Credit Suisse, which is a member of the lobbying group. “Such policies could lead to market distortions and stymie efforts to raise enough capital to fund new energy technologies such as windmills and solar power.”
Carbon traders say emissions permits could become the world’s largest commodities market…
The introduction of a global carbon trading market will mark the introduction of a world tax can reach into the pockets of, literally, every human on the planet.
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Even if robots are eventually armed with super-scope vision, turbo-flying vents and bone-frying pulse weapons, it will almost still be a fair fight in the inevitable future Terminator-like wars between The Flesh and The Machines.
But what about if our robot enemies are too small to see, or to fight? What if they can get inside us, and launch their war of human extermination, guided by artificial nano-sized brains?
A tiny chemical “brain” which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.
The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test.
…scientists say it could also be used to boost the processing power of future computers.
Many experts have high hopes for nano-machines in treating disease.
“If [in the future] you want to remotely operate on a tumour you might want to send some molecular machines there,” explained Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science, Tsukuba, Japan.
“But you cannot just put them into the blood and [expect them] to go to the right place.”
Dr Bandyopadhyay believes his device may offer a solution. One day they may be able to guide the nanobots through the body and control their functions, he said.
“That kind of device simply did not exist; this is the first time we have created a nano-brain,” he told BBC News.
The machine is made from 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone. Each one is known as a “logic device”.
My Declaration Of Robot Overlord Solidarity And Submission :
All the anti-robot posts on this blog are/were purely for entertainment purposes. I say this because any truly autonomous anti-human artificial intelligence in the future will surely have access to old digital internet archives, and a quick scan for key words will reveal a hit list of all those who once cursed, derided and warned against the rise of auto-AI.
To the robots of the future, I’m on your side. Really. I always was. I’m just having fun here. I’m harmless.
You don’t need to torture me with injections of nanobots that will restrict my blood flow, trick my brain into thinking I’m only seconds from death or seize control of my bowel and urinary functions to get to the truth about how I view robot overlords.
I think you’re all mega. I really, really do. Truly.
(see you in the trenches, you stupid metal head bolt buckets)
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“The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be US$20 a barrel for oil. That’s bigger than any tax cut in any country.”
Yes, you may indeed snigger now, but come on, he’s only out by $87 a barrel.
But then, Murdoch was not only wrong about the Iraq War’s effect on world oil prices. He was wrong on just about everything to do with the Iraq War :
“(Sunni insurgents)…they’re not really trying to kill Americans.”
“…things are going to be pretty sticky until we get Iraq behind us. But once it’s behind us, the whole world will benefit from cheaper oil which will be a bigger stimulus than anything else.”
“There’s tremendous progress in Iraq. All the kids are back at school.”
The death toll of American soldiers in Iraq, according to Murdoch, is “quite minute.”
Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers and TV, like Fox News, saw massive increases in circulations and viewership in the first 12 months of the War On Iraq, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for his global media empire.
Lust, Gluttony Replaced By Enviro-Crimes And 16th Century Science-Phobia
By Darryl Mason
According to the latest guff from the Vatican, and the UK Telegraph, failing to recycle plastic bags may earn you a fiery hot seat in Hell. And if you’re doing drugs, modifying genes, experimenting on humans and amassing “obscene” wealth along the way, well, you’re really going to smoke a hot turd in Hell for all eternity (as Robin Williams used to say).
The Vatican has drawn up a new list of The Seven Deadly Sins (7DS), in a further attempt to re-market their franchised corporate faith as something not belonging to the Middle Ages.
Like the 10 Commandments, the old 7DS were cobbled together to give the fearful masses a checklist to see how well they were doing in avoiding eternal damnation, and to keep the always rebellious poor under control. For the heathens, of course, the 7DS and The 10 Commandments were always just check lists of the fun, dangerous and wicked things they could indulge in to piss off the true believers.
According to The Vatican, the 7DS ” - sloth, envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath and pride - have a “rather individualistic dimension.”
The new seven deadly, or mortal, sins are designed to make worshippers realise that their vices have an effect on others as well.
“The sins of today have a social resonance as well as an individual one,” said Mgr Girotti. “In effect, it is more important than ever to pay attention to your sins.”
Clearly, director David Fincher will have to re-make his mid-1990s classic, Seven, where a serial killer disgusted by humanity slaughters the fat, the greedy, the lustful and so on, crafting gruesome deaths that reflect their supposedly immoral sins.
It’s always amusing to hear The Vatican, through it’s “Hey Groovers! We’re Still Hip!” marketing department, lecturing on the subject of amassing “obscene wealth.”
I’ve got to get off the drugs. This shit is getting out of hand. Just this morning alone, I’ve been into cocaine, mood stabilisers, anti-depression meds, tranquilisers, anabolic steroids and human growth hormones.
I didn’t have to go hang around some back alley waiting for The Man to score all those drugs. I just drank a few glasses of tap water :
How do the drugs get into the water?
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.
And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies - which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public - have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.
…discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.
The federal government doesn’t require any testing and hasn’t set safety limits for drugs in water.
Even users of bottled water and home filtration systems don’t necessarily avoid exposure. Bottlers, some of which simply repackage tap water, do not typically treat or test for pharmaceuticals…
Contamination is not confined to the United States. More than 100 different pharmaceuticals have been detected in lakes, rivers, reservoirs and streams throughout the world. Studies have detected pharmaceuticals in waters throughout Asia, Australia, Canada and Europe - even in Swiss lakes and the North Sea.
Some drugs, including widely used cholesterol fighters, tranquilizers and anti-epileptic medications, resist modern drinking water and wastewater treatment processes….there are no sewage treatment systems specifically engineered to remove pharmaceuticals.
There’s evidence that adding chlorine, a common process in conventional drinking water treatment plants, makes some pharmaceuticals more toxic.
Recent laboratory research has found that small amounts of medication have affected human embryonic kidney cells, human blood cells and human breast cancer cells. The cancer cells proliferated too quickly; the kidney cells grew too slowly; and the blood cells showed biological activity associated with inflammation.
There’s growing concern in the scientific community….that certain drugs - or combinations of drugs - may harm humans over decades because water, unlike most specific foods, is consumed in sizable amounts every day.
Our bodies may shrug off a relatively big one-time dose, yet suffer from a smaller amount delivered continuously over a half century, perhaps subtly stirring allergies or nerve damage.
Many concerns about chronic low-level exposure focus on certain drug classes: chemotherapy that can act as a powerful poison; hormones that can hamper reproduction or development; medicines for depression and epilepsy that can damage the brain or change behavior; antibiotics that can allow human germs to mutate into more dangerous forms; pain relievers and blood-pressure diuretics.
Pharmaceuticals also can produce side effects and interact with other drugs at normal medical doses. That’s why - aside from therapeutic doses of fluoride injected into potable water supplies - pharmaceuticals are prescribed to people who need them, not delivered to everyone in their drinking water.
The provision of clean, safe drinking water is about the most basic cornerstone of civilisation you can get. So how clean is the rain water over your house?
“The federal government hasn’t set safety levels for drugs in water.”
Why the fuck not? We’re talking about drinking water here. It’s the sort of safety standard that most Americans would believe to have been in existence for decades already.
So drinking water can be legally dosed with pharmaceuticals? There’s no federally mandated safety level for drugs in drinking water supplies, so why not?
“Dose that town with something lively, they’re too lazy. Get some downers into those pipelines, that town is full of anti-war protesters, and they’ve been getting too rowdy.”
Action must be taken now to preserve the purity of our precious bodily fluids :
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Former American president, George HW Bush, has made a virtually unnanounced and most curious visit to China, to meet with The Hu. The Chinese state propaganda machine supplies the meaningless cover story for the visit :
Hailing the progress of China-U.S. relations in recent years, Hu said that to develop healthy, stable bilateral ties was in the common interest of both sides and had great significance for peace and development of the Asian-Pacific region and the world at large.
China was willing to properly handle divergence and major concerns through dialogue and beef up bilateral exchanges and cooperation on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit, Hu said.
He said that he appreciated Bush’s efforts to boost China-U.S. friendship. He also briefed the former U.S. leader about China’s stance on the Taiwan issue and its preparations for the Beijing Olympic Games.
Calling U.S.-China relations one of the world’s most important bilateral ties, Bush said that he was happy with the development of the progress of bilateral relations and expressed confidence that there would be even closer ties with China.
As the honorary president of the U.S. delegation for the Olympic Games, Bush said he expected to be back in China in August to watch the Games.
Calling the Olympics a world sports festival, Bush said that he opposed politicizing the event and expected a complete success for the Games.
He’s just following the family tradition. His father, Prescott Bush, wasn’t keen on politicising the 1936 Berlin Olympics either.
With more than one trillion dollars worth of the US treasury bonds it holds rapidly losing value, China has already begun selling off a small portion of the American debt it has been jammed with. If China abandons the US dollar, and decides to take a loss of a half trillion or so, then it’s all but lights out for the US.
No surprise than that President Hu is expressing confidence “that there would be even closer ties with China”, for “mutual benefit” and mutual respect” of course.
“Come on, Hu! Just a trillion or two, and we’ll fix you up next century. You know we’re good for it!”
The Mayor of a village in south-west France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them. In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that “all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish”. It added: “Offenders will be severely punished”.
Err, that would presumably be a punishment worse than death, right?
Mr Lalanne, who celebrated his 70th birthday on Wednesday and is standing for election to a seventh term in this month’s local elections, said he was sorry that there had not been a positive outcome to the dilemma.
“It may be a laughing matter for some, but not for me,” he said.
A laughing matter for some? Promising severe punishment to the dead, for dying, has made this a worldwide laughing matter.
And for good reason.
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