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POPSDreams Die Hard
Within the context of conventional party politics - the kind that has been baseline "normal" in the USA for a long time - we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for "hope" - if not hope itself - the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They're flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government's name. They're willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against "the malefactors of great wealth." They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return t
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POPSIs the Economy Recovering? The Curious Case of 1920 vs. 1929
The basic questions we need to ask here are: 1. Why do economies recover? 2. Are we recovering? Q. Why do economies recover? A. They recover because bad investments made during the bubble are liquidated, valuable capital is no longer being wasted on them, new capital is formed from savings, and profitable enterprises attract new capital to expand. Low real interest rates caused by increased savings encourage borrowing, manufacturers use the capital to make new machines, producers of consumer goods buy them, cash goes through the system, consumers see things are getting better, more consumer goods are produced, and consumers buy them. It has to happen this way or the recovery will fail. The difficult part of a recovery is ugly. Bankrupt firms need to fail so that valuable capital resources are not wasted on their continuing activities. This means that unemployment rises (10.2% now) and business bankruptcies are high. Trillions of dollars of asset values are wiped out.
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POPSVan Jones' Handout "Cash 4 Clunkers" Fail It seems clear that Jones has undergone, with powerful sponsors and benefactors, an extreme makeover To add to the mystery, it turns out that "Van" Jones is not even his real name. Aaron Klein of World Net Daily then wrote a story on Jones, citing Loudon's work. I have been engaged for months in a series of Freedom of Information Act requests with the Obama Administration for information about Jones and how he was hired. Beck, to his credit, is trying to peel away the protective cover. He needs our support to remain on the air and pursue this story. The trail will most certainly lead beyond Jones himself. Who Wrote His Book? His book, The Green Collar Economy, includes only the name of "Van Jones" as the author on the cover. But it appears that the book was largely written by Ariane Conrad, an activist and writer whose name appears on the inside, as in, by "Van Jones, with Ariane Conrad.
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POPSPelosi's Swastika Carrying Plants Are Sprouting Don't believe me. Ask this guy who made a living posing as an ashamed Republican. The media couldn't stop falling for his shtick... Update: First, I was wrong, the sign in question is in the batch of 133, it's easy to overlook, but visible here. Second, our lefty friends want to claim that this is somehow proof that I had it all wrong. I didn't have anything wrong. At the time of Pelosi's statement that picture was unknown to everyone, me, the Huffington Post, everyone at Daily Kos, and even to Pelosi herself. It was only revealed after I proved that Pelosi's information wasn't coming from it's natural sources, the netroots and all its denisons. The sign itself (lame as it may be) generated zero notice, and wasn't noted in press accounts or netroot accounts. More importantly the photo in question wasn't from a townhall meeting, it was from a street demonstration - there was no townhall meeting that day. In that regard it rates a FAIL as proof that Pelosi was right.
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POPSWhy Amy Fears Obamacare Perspective: The "Amy" in the title is a patient with cystic fibrosis--which, in case you didn't know it, is a white folks' disease. CF patients die young--but they live longer in the "heartless" capitalist USA than they do in any other country in the world, bar none. The difference: Socialized medicine elsewhere; private doctors and clinics here. She has every reason to fear that socialized medicine will shorten her life. She's 27 now. Right now, if things are left alone, she's got ten years to live. Under socialized medicine she'll have less than that--as many as three years less. Or worse. Some things, you do need new drugs to help manage. CF is one of them. Does anyone suppose that Amy is going to get those new drugs? They either won't be developed or they will be deliberately withheld. "Not cost-effective." "We have lots of other patients to take care of." Yes, patients in protected groups, which don't include whites.
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POPSIn Africa- The cellphone is the single most transformative technology for development" "Democratic Republic of Congo, with a population of 60 million, there are just 10,000 fixed-line telephones, but more than one million mobile subscribers. In Chad, the fifth-least-developed country in Africa, usage jumped from 10,000 to 200,000 in three years. At the end of 2007 there were more than 280 million mobile phone subscribers in Africa, representing a penetration rate of 30.4%." "now they can call around and know what the prices are. They can call their relatives in town, for example, and ask how much is a bunch of bananas, so they get an idea of what the price is for their produce"
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POPSViolent Crime on the Rise in Egypt I am saddened, but not surprised. The problem is compounded, says Gomaa, by the apparent belief of those in power that economic growth alone can solve Egypt's woes. "What they fail to realise is that you can no longer rely on the tolerance of the public to guarantee domestic security. If the economic and social conditions of the majority continue to deteriorate more violent crimes will be inevitable and Egypt could eventually become a dangerous place to live."
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POPSEconomy Freezes Amid A Media Meltdown Every broadcast, it seems, warned about something involving the economy — jobs, growth, housing, outsourcing, retail sales. You name it, the media covered it. And their reporting was often wrong. Take gas prices, a topic near and dear to our wallets these days. This spring, that gasoline could get close to $4. But for years the networks have warned that gas prices would go that high and more. At least 20 times from 2005 to 2007, the networks cautioned about prices hitting $5, and another six times for $6 or higher. Sometimes journalists gave up promoting cataclysm and decided to cheerlead for it. In a Feb. 20, 2008, column, the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein attacked Wall Street, saying "the best thing that could happen to our economy is for a dozen high-profile hedge funds to collapse; for investment banking to enter a long, deep freeze; for a major bank to fail."
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POPSAn unsanitised history of washing Most ancient civilisations matter-of-factly acknowledged that, in the right circumstances, a gamey, earthy body odour can be a powerful aphrodisiac. Napoleon and Josephine were fastidious for their time in that they both took a long, hot, daily bath. But Napoleon wrote to Josephine from a campaign: “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don't wash.”
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POPSAloha ... Find some joy and happiness This is my positive clip for the week. Hawaii is a very beautiful place to visit. I only wish I could absorb more of the "good vibes" emanating from this special place. I visited once, vow to go back and strive to walk in aloha on a daily basis. Here is an artist whom I play without fail at least once a month.
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POPSCoffee's good for you (this week) I couldn't help it. I drink coffee practically daily so to read something that says it might actually be good for me was a real kick. On the serious side though, if caffeine in any way really had an effect on Parkinson's disease I didn't notice it in my grandfather and he drank coffee at least 3 - 4 cups a day without fail.
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POPSWar With Iran is On Its Way From One Source or Another As George W. Bush continues to deny that he has plans to go to war with Iran, Israel seems to be gearing itself in that direction. Since last summer when the U.S. instigated Israel's over zealous attack on Lebanon's civilian population and took over the control of when the fighting should stop, the two countries appear to be in cahoots to spread the war in Iraq into Iran and who knows where else.
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POPSPhilly Daily News: prepare to nuke Mecca Talk-radio host Michael Smerconish, taking his cue from paperback-fiction writer Nelson DeMille, suggests in the Philadelphia Daily News that what we need is some kind of "fail-safe"-style automatic nuclear retaliation in place in the event of a serious terrorist attack. He contends it would work just like MAD (remember Mutual Assured Destruction)? He gives this system the appropriately pulp-fiction codename of "Wild Fire." "It is a gun to the head of Islamic countries," he enthuses. Personally, I don't think this is a particularly helpful way to think about foreign policy towards the Islamic world, but hey, diff'rent strokes, right?
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