Contrails Of Anger

Please Fasten Your Seatbelts. There Is Some Light Turbulence Ahead.

She-who-must-be-obeyed recently flew back home from Baltimore on October 24. She was in the TSA line for 1 1/2 hours.

It was not clear why this happened; there was no highly visible memorial of terrorism...
Terrorism, like the French Revolution in the late 18th and the 19th century, which Shelly said had become "the master theme of the epoch"!

There was no reported "chatter" or Facebook and Twitter cabals plotting anything in and around Maryland. Nothing.

People were yelling and crying.
"What time is your flight?"
"10:00..."
"Would you let me cut in? Mine is at 9:40!  PLEASE!"

People were running around, holding their shoes in their hands, yelling for kids, stepping on Skittles and hopping around, trying to slip their shoes back on.
And some old guys had to have removed their belts, so they rushed around, trying to hold up their britches, hopping, threading belts... it sounded a bit like Brown Shirt Juden Wilde Jagd in the streets of Kracow...

I asked if she considered putting a price on her place in line.
The TSA sort of reminds me of the Fire Department of Fahrenheit 451 as rendered in Manga, not Brown Shirts. It doesn't matter. No one knows who the Brown Shirts were anymore.

Anyway, the TSA frowned and smiled.
They said that the problems were nothing; just wait until Thanksgiving and Christmas!

The contrails of anger and rage float like smog above the country.
Pretty soon we won't be going places anymore.
We do not go to Canada as often as we used to because it can be such a hassle coming back into the land of the free, home of the etc.

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Fireworks

Patch, the Fireworks Pirate

When the Odd Parliament that is the Michigan legislature removed the ban on all fireworks a couple of years ago, it was stated here and elsewhere that injuries would increase.

They seem to have done so. Two NFL players appeared to have lost some fingers.
But perhaps it is only high-profile celebrity injuries that increase, not all injuries. Maybe all injuries are staying at a nice level of morbidity.

Of course, the "rational" libertarians of fireworks say that allowing all fireworks will lead theoretically to fewer injuries, for the buyers will be sure that they are well versed in the safety procedures of fireworks.
This extra margin of safety apparently comes about by removing the black market in fireworks.

The apologists blame strong drink. Drinking is to blame for fireworks injuries, not the fireworks themselves. This puts the fireworks lobby at odds with the liquor lobby... and believe me, I think the liquor lobby will win this test of wills.

I do not care how well tutored I am in explosive devices; I shall not play with them. When I was
a kid, I burnt my finger on a sparkler. Butter was applied to assuage the pain. Never used a sparkler again.
I did go and watch fireworks, however, but I am not drawn as a moth to the flame. This year I went to bed at 9:30 and missed an entire festival of light - according to my mother - down the river.  As I went upstairs, she asked me whether I thought they were the fireworks set off by her stockbroker's neighbor.


Now I have found that when parents reach a certain age, they not only ask a lot of rhetorical questions, but they make rhetorical statements - statements that do not really require a thoughtful response, because you have no idea what they are talking about.

So I said they probably were.
I fell asleep within 10 minutes, and even the constant stream of explosions could not keep me eyes open.

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The Liars Avoid Gorky Park (Парк Горького)

 

Mike Rogers (R.) of Michigan:

Will Betray Your Freedom For Radio Job

From The Guardian:

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/government-lies-nsa-justice-department-supreme-court

If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here's what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have "standing" – in other words, that the ACLU couldn't prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn't challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it...

And the ex-FBI agent Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, would never have done anything. He's leaving Congress to become a radio personality. That's a step forward for everyone. We do not need leaders like him.

A Betrayer gets rewards, and Snowden sits in Gorky Park.

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When Will The Retirement Age Be Increased To 70?

The retirement age will be increased to 70 years when it is no longer necessary.

That is, by the time enough pensioners, whose promised pensions have been looted, have died off, by the time that enough people have died from malnutrition, by the time that the state of health care is such that people begin to live shorter lives, then you will see the increase in the retirement age: when it is too late to effect whatever the political dreams and impostures that were its motives.

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What Will We Do When Winter Comes?

 

Dead In Dakota

BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25154370

Nearly two months after devastating blizzards hit parts of South Dakota and Wyoming, farmers are still recovering from the loss of cattle and the effect on their businesses.

The week before the storm, it had been wet and mild and the prairies of the Great Plains were deep in mud.
Then, the first winter snow came early and unexpectedly in an icy blast from the north-west.
Trapped in the mud, 30,000 cattle suffocated and froze to death. They were buried in 20ft (6m) snow drifts, entombed in ice in what ranchers call the "breaks and draws" - the slopes and valleys - of the rolling prairie hills.
Larry Stomprud is a tall, thin cowboy wearing a black leather waistcoat and slim-cut blue jeans. Grey hair peeps from beneath his brown cowboy hat.

He is a tough rancher who has spent half a century herding cattle. But his voice falters and there are tears in his eyes as he describes the devastation on his ranch.
"I looked at my grandfather's records," he says quietly. "It was the worst storm for 150 years." His throat is strangled with anguish and with sadness as he says: "God entrusted us with the care of these animals and we failed them." ...

 and as a note from Agriculture.Com:

 "While total losses are still being determined, this major blizzard has killed huge numbers of livestock across western South Dakota," U.S. Senator Tim Johnson (D-SD) said Monday. "Exacerbating these losses is the fact that the government shutdown has shuttered USDA’s Farm Service Agency’s (FSA) offices across the state. As a result, producers don’t even have anyone to contact at USDA for assistance in documenting losses."

and from Here & Now on November 13
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/11/13/ranchers-cattle-blizzard

GERLOCK: The government treats livestock differently than crops. While corn and soybean farmers are protected by crop insurance paid for in part by the government, there's no equivalent livestock insurance program. Instead, in 2008, Congress added a livestock indemnity program to the farm bill to help when disaster strikes.

Brad Lubben is an ag economist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
BRAD LUBBEN: The livestock indemnity program pays a percentage of the market value of animals lost due to the disaster event. I believe that the rate is around 65, 70 percent of the value of the animal.

GERLOCK: But that's the program that expired. The House and Senate are negotiating a new farm bill which is expected to renew the livestock disaster program when it's finally passed.

ROB REID: That might be so far down the road that these guys will be buried by that time.

and 3 days ago from Mother Jones:

Dems Say Boehner Blocking Farm Bill, Wants More Food Stamp Cuts

And that sums it up. Just a year ago it was Hurricane Sandy and the Governor of New Jersey had to threaten Republican leaders of the House.

To prove their ideologies and to balance their budgets, some leaders will let us pay any price, bear any burden,and meet any hardship.

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Good Versus Bad Governance

Lorenzetti's Good Republic

Intro
Climate Change, Drought, Fire, Flood; all things which beset us and for which we cannot blame a bad government. What we can blame upon bad government is our social response to these evils.

Once again we come to the season of governmental discords, and view the possibility of a government shut-down.

We are teased with hope. We have just witnessed the USA not responding to a recalitrant foreign policy problem by force, by quite openly and clearly opting for peace, and freely accepting the help of other states in roles other than mere stooges in foreign wars.
That is unprecedented for the last 50 years or so.

Yet, even peace is attacked.

In a time when Peace is vilified, what is left for us, we who have no benefits from violence and wars?

Looking further, we see that we live in a time when government policies have shipped industry and jobs overseas in the name of globalization; we see a rapidly decreasing diversity of flora and fauna; we see a country such as Ecuador put it right to the international Capitalistic ethos and say:  

put your money where your mouths are! If a rain forest is essential for climate health, pay us the equivalent of income for not destroying a portion of ours for oil!

But the world's bluff was called. We cannot fund a rain forest.

The World is too much with us, and too much for us...

Chapter 1
In the 14th century, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted a mural in Siena called The Allegory Of Good And Bad Government.

Andrew Zaleski ( http://evergreen.loyola.edu/brnygren/www/Honors/Compagni.htm ) compares the writings of Dino Compagni, The Chronicles of Florence, and the paintings of Lorenzetti as they relate to the life of Tuscany in the 13th and 14th centuries.

For Compagni, the universal aim of all Florentines should be the betterment of their city-state, characterized by sentiments expressed by Compagni at the beginning of Book I: “This city of Florence is very populous and its good climate promotes fecundity.  Its citizens are well-bred and its women lovely and adorned; its buildings are beautiful and filled with many useful crafts, more than any other city in Italy” (5).  The corruption, competition, and vice brought about through the factionalism and incessant squabbling and power jockeying is precisely what Compagni wishes to avoid, and a recurring trope in the Chronicle is this idea that the sinful behavior perpetrated by many Florentines, combined with abuse of laws, the selling of political positions ^(a)   , and ongoing war will result in the undoing of a city-state.

{ note (a) : observe that the "selling of political positions" may find its equally insidious equivalent today in the "selling of interest" done by lobbyists and interest groups. It is the "selling" that is the vice, not the buyer of the office that is the evil; the buyer may be otherwise virtuous.
Similarly in "nepotism", it is not the nephew, the nepos, who is a scourge upon the body politic, rather it is the removal of government from the realm of the rational and dumping it into the playground of individuals' whims and fancies.}

Lorenzetti’s portrayal of bad government and its effects offers striking parallels to the behavior decried by Compagni in his book.  In the Allegory of Bad Government, the three figures of avarice, pride, and vain glory hover above the head of the tyrannical ruler of this bad government, who looks equal parts repulsive and monstrous—devilish, even.  The connection, then, is that sinful virtue governs bad government, which results in a leader, or multiple leaders, hell-bent on power regardless of cost.  The very concepts of avarice, pride, and vain glory are the behaviors that Compagni finds in the various factions developing in Florentine.

Conversely, Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government depicts a scene that falls right in step with Compagni’s preferred vision for Florence.  The figure of justice takes on a great significance in this painting: Wisdom sits above the head of Lady Justice, who sits atop Lady Concordia, who holds a level attached to by two cords from Justice...  in a representation of anti-factionalism.  Finally, a long procession of similarly dressed, similarly stationed men follows to the right of Concordia, supposedly in a representation of the common good; all the men look the same and all strive for a unified goal, instead of individual goals.

The effects of good government as depicted by Lorenzetti again are another implicit connection to Compagni.  The artwork depicts a city with beautiful buildings, undifferentiated architecturally (demonstrating justice and equality); a school for children and shops for merchants are busy at work; various city figures are all taking part in different jobs to ensure the city runs smoothly; harvesting takes place in the fields, and livestock are abundant...

 

Lorenzetti's Countryside of the Bad Republic

Chapter 2
There is a film by Esther Podemski, The Peasant And The Priest, set in present-day Tuscany, and which examines the modern world as reflected in this area of Italy through the fresco of Lorenzetti.
This is an most admirable opportunity to combine one's conscious hopes and desires, the political means of attaining them, and a symbolic and artistic expression of those products of consciousness.

The troubles which we have today are only intractable to those impoverished in spirit and mind and imagination. By this study, I hope we gain further understanding, and we work to free ourselves from "No Exit" situations - such as war in Syria or how to live sanely with weapons - which are becoming more and more frequent in our lives: indeed, situations that defy resolution are becoming the normal.

There is a 3 minutes presentation on The Peasant And The Priest at
http://www.thepeasantandthepriest.com/

It will be well worth the time spent.
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They Do Not Represent Me

“US authorities do not consider him [Snowden] to be a human rights defender or a whistleblower. He broke the law and he has to be held accountable.”

I'm sorry I voted for any of... las cosas inútiles ... políticos... the politicians ! Useless baggage !
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Caligula and Congress

 Caligula

Let's see..., sequestration treats everyone the same and swings a broad sword, which cuts things indiscriminately.
In essence, it is as if everyone's problems are the same, and everyone can bear to lose equal amounts; everyone will be treated the exact same way, even though not everyone may have benefited previously. That is, various segments received great doses of money before, and they will be cut by the same percentage as folks who received little or nothing.

So, where in the history of Rome are we with all this?

Caligula once was heard to say, "Utinam populus Romanus unam cervicem haberet!" 
Or, "O, that all the people of Rome had only one neck!"
The idea here was one neck would be easier to strike off the Roman shoulders than thousands of necks and their top-heavy appurtenances called brain cases.

Would that the American People had but one head, so that we could give all of their benefits a buzzcut right now!

Buzzcut

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I Love The US Post Office....

... at least I used to. I still think the USPS is pretty cool, even though I have to drive all the way to Pontiac's west side to pick up my vacation accumulated mail.

How the Postal Service began prefunding retiree health care and fell into a deep hole

January 2, 2013


Good article on how Congress fixes one problem by creating at least two more problems.
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The PHYSICAL Cliff

I have decided to make fun of the theater of the absurd play "Fiscal Cliff" and its actors by calling it "The Physical Cliff", as if I were some sort of tosser released from the dafter for a home visit, Christmas time.

We live in an age where the speed of light has dumbed down to 55 MPH.

We live in an age where ideology is a paraphrase of "The Always-Denying Spirit" - der Geist der stets verneint as described by Goethe.

The geniuses of religion said "yes" to life, and we are being tutored to say a resounding "NO!"

The Physical Cliff is not as bad as the Spiritual Cliff we face.
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General Petraeus

 The good general always believed he could get away with it.

 http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/06/ninety-percent-of-petraeuss-captured-taliban-were-civilians/

WASHINGTON, Jun 12 2011 (IPS) - During his intensive initial round of media interviews as commander in Afghanistan in August 2010, Gen. David Petraeus released figures to the news media that claimed spectacular success for raids by Special Operations Forces: in a 90-day period from May through July, SOF units had captured 1,355 rank and file Taliban, killed another 1,031, and killed or captured 365 middle or high-ranking Taliban.

The claims of huge numbers of Taliban captured and killed continued through the rest of 2010. In December, Petraeus’s command said a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured in the previous six months and 2,000 had been killed.

Those figures were critical to creating a new media narrative hailing the success of SOF operations as reversing what had been a losing U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

But it turns out that more than 80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official U.S. military data.

Even more were later released from the main U.S. detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers.
The timing of Petraeus’s claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as “captured Taliban rank and file” were not Taliban fighters at all...

Sad News

I guess Petraeus did - after all - betray somebody...
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Future Flash Crash #3

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/03/future-flash-crash.html
 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/03/future-flash-crash-note.html
 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/03/future-flash-crash-note-2.html
 http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2012/06/why-my-banker-thinks-me-mad.html

These are most of the posts on the coming Flash Crash. Of course, if you have been reading the paper (not ogling TV) you know that it keeps on keeping on. In the New York Times Dealbook on August 3, 2012:

 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/trading-program-ran-amok-with-no-off-switch/

When computerized stock trading runs amok, as it did this week on Wall Street, the firm responsible typically can jump in and hit a kill switch.
But as a torrent of faulty trades spewed Wednesday morning from a Knight Capital Group trading program, no one at the firm managed to stop it for more than a half-hour.
Some Knight employees and New York Stock Exchange officials noticed the blizzard of erratic orders in the minutes after trading started and sent alarmed messages to Knight managers, according to the exchange and Knight employees who declined to be identified discussing the matter.

As Knight struggled to survive on Friday, employees at the company, market overseers and other electronic trading firms were asking the same basic question: Where was the off switch?
Several market insiders said that they were bewildered, because in a market where trading losses can pile up in seconds, executives typically have a simple command that can immediately halt trading.

“Even just a minute or two would have been surprising to me. On these time scales, that is an eternity,” said David Lauer, a trader at a high-speed firm until a year ago. “To have something going on for 30 minutes is shocking.”
Regulators are planning to look into why there was such a lag...

On Friday, Knight, which in the last decade grew into a leading broker for American stocks, climbed off the mat, securing emergency financing that allowed it to continue operating for the day. It also enticed some of its customers to resume sending client stock trades, two days after it disclosed a possibly fatal $440 million loss from the software problem. But it faced a desperate weekend of maneuvering to find a more permanent solution for its woes. Knight’s short-term financing was meant to keep it alive until Monday, when its executives and advisers hope to have deals completed to remove any doubt about the firm’s future.

Our financial system is continually veering out of control, and it seems that no one is willing to face the reality that events happen much too quickly for human beings to keep up with them. There will always be problems, but there is no time left to cope with them and render them harmless.

It is another big wealth-destruction nail driven into the coffins of the middle-class.
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The 2013 Crash

OK, so I'm sounding like NewsMax, the illiterate right-wing rag. I can not help it. We are all mad men thrown together in the world, are we not? We tell our tales, full of sound and fury...

Back on topic now.
The UK suffers from the same kinds of Financial problems we do: an overly complex system which relies upon people who are not skilled enough to administer it, people who are too slow to respond to its fast-as-light workings, and people who are greedy, covetous, and often crooked.

For today's variation on a theme, read the BBC story .

The doomsday scenario for 2013 is:

1) Republicans win White House and a majority in at least one branch of Congress;

2) There is a determined effort to balance the Budget on the backs of the Less-than-Rich;

3) There are problems with China of an as yet undetermined nature: China and the Chinese Communist Party has many problems, and, given that the country is enormous, these problems are enormous;

4) The Banking Sector manages to Flash-Crash, Glitch, Stumble, and Cheat its way into another Bank Failure scenario...

Hello, Saint Leibowitz and the Dark Ages once again.

ps.
You really should familiarize yourselves with the problems of the electronic banking system. Since your own efforts are your best teachers, start studying it.
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Why My Banker Thinks Me Mad Part 2

Somebody asked where I had gotten the notion that financial crashes follow each other in a series of years, the time between crashes being more or less equal to a decreasing Fibonacci series. (Why My Banker...)

Well, I would think by now that anyone would know that certain things just seem to shine into my consciousness; when they are clear and without any obvious self-interest, I pay attention. The ones filled with self-interest - like the winning lottery numbers - are baloney.
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Why My Banker Thinks Me Mad

In posting this I am taking you into my deep confidence: why my banker, who is a very understanding type, thinks me very odd, indeed. I am lucky to have found a banker who finds my eccentricities charming, rather than alarming.

Very briefly: I believe that the financial system will implode in 2013, that year being the end of the next interval of catastrophes, intervals equal in length of years to a Fibonacci decreasing series.
Why a Fibonacci series, God only knows. However, I thought it was obvious that the financial system was losing control over what it does: creating money at the speed of light. (And - by the by - the "printing presses of money" which the government is deemed to turn on and off at will are nothing but these here banks... we tend to think the government has its own presses somewhere in Fort Knox.) (see Future Flash Crash)

2013 is a point estimate, and there is probably an error of plus/minus one to two years at least, due to imprecision at the beginning and at the end of the intervals.

My banker walked me through 2011, through the terrors of risks, known and unknown, old and new - the new ones being domestic political risk of having idiots running the government who thought defaulting on obligations to be a "keen" idea. This risk kicked in on August 2, as I recall when the Dow plummeted 500 points.

My banker mentored me, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude. The notion of a stock market debacle is much more nuanced than that horror that exists in my imagination, and my understanding was much improved...

at least until Chase Bank lost $2 billion dollars this year...

and the most biting criticism and analysis about this debacle are written by bankers themselves in financial blogs and banking journals...

and every explanation is another form of "We lost control!"

If and when the Republicans win in 2012, financial regulation will be dead, and I think my fine, fine madness will suddenly seem old news by the end of a few years.
This does not mean the Democrats will avoid this bit of unpleasantness; the Republicans will merely accelerate and confirm it. Both parties are at fault.
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Future Flash Crash Note # 2

Referring to "Future Flash Crash" and "Future Flash Crash Note" posted today, I think the point I missed was that we have an economic system of Boom or Bust.
It is pretty obvious and just about everyone knows it. When we are in the Boom phase and cycling upwards, every one is happy and every one is on cable touting stocks to buy. When we cycle into the Bust phase, Suze Orman is on cable telling us to cut up our credit cards and Congress is trying to cut our health care. It varies in some details, but it is pretty much the same schtick each time: Boom or Bust.

We have entire university departments devoted to the science of Boom or Bust. Most of the anti-green movement is devoted to Boom or Bust, sensing in their deep, overlayered ganglia that somehow the Greens want to do away with the Bust phase, probably by moderating the Boom phase, and that smells of the Latakia tobacco smoked by Socialism!

Boom or Bust: learn to love it.
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Future Flash Crash

 Man On A Wire... Philippe Petit at the World Trade Center

Some time ago I said that the next "big debacle" our system of economics and politics will have for us will be a breakdown of the electronic system of finance: the machine will just stop. I think I may have said it just after the flash crash of 2010; I may have said it after reading about banks establishing centers in various parts of the globe to grasp at a 10 nano-second advantage at some wondrous arbitrage in 2011.

Anyway, you get the drift: the system stops. Why? Because we really do not have total control over it. Our control is rather tenuous, at best; things go awry:  large cruise ships run into islands in the broad daylight because the captain is waving at the islanders, markets fall 1,000 points, enormous banks cannot live without cash infusion from the middle class taxpayers, and the energy grid is woefully in disrepair, and the litany of woe goes on.
Add to that the fact that if you have the temerity to throw a handful of Skittles at someone bossing you around, they may shoot you dead, well, you have a society that is doing a good imitation of Philippe Petit doing "Man On A Wire" after a drunken debauch.

How are the plans of the Best and the Brightest coming along?
From Reuters:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/24/us-bats-trading-idUSBRE82M0W020120324?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=71

In a breakdown that resembled a mini version of the 2010 "flash crash," a series of glitches hit the market debut of BATS Global Markets Inc on Friday, causing the company to take the extremely rare step of withdrawing its initial public offering of shares.
The problems caused the shares of exchange operator BATS to plunge from their $16 offering price and briefly trade for less than a penny on Friday morning, creating havoc in the marketplace and again calling into question the stability of high-speed trading...

"The public should take comfort that circuit breakers are working as they should after the flash crash," said Holly Stark managing member of Efficient Frontiers, a market structure consulting firm in New York.
Since the May 2010 "flash crash" in which nearly $1 trillion in market value disappeared in minutes, the Securities and Exchange Commission under Chairman Mary Schapiro has pledged to crack down on problems in the high-speed electronic marketplace, which regulators worry has grown unstable and perhaps unfair as high-frequency trading has grown in prominence.
The BATS breakdown could trip up, once again, the march over the last decade toward increasingly automated markets in the United States, Europe and elsewhere...

 "It's just another black eye for the fragmented equity structure," said Joe Saluzzi, co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading in Chatham, New Jersey, and a frequent critic of U.S. equities market structure. "Every day we see things like flash crashes and now IPOs that can't get off the ground."

I added the emphasis... did you read that the same way I read it? "Every day we see things like flash crashes..."! "Every day..."??!!

OK. These are the same caliber of minds that are bringing us Genetically Modified Food and new improvements in fossil fuels.

Take Shelter!, as the film of the same name says.

Joe Ratterman, founder of BATS, in better times in 2010

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Our Government

 http://www.upnorthlive.com/news/story.aspx?id=719174#.TzpgP1Hjvcg

LEELANAU CO. -- A migrant labor problem is hitting Northern Michigan, and this year it's going to be more difficult to get fresh local strawberries.
Leelanau Fruit Company in Suttons Bay plans to withdraw from the local strawberry market this summer, they're worried that not enough immigrants will migrate to the area to pick the crop.

Glenn Lacross, Leelanau Fruit Company President says it will be much easier to import strawberries from Mexico. He says the federal government is cracking down on immigration. Getting a green card or temporary work permit is a complicated process and unemployed US citizens aren't interested in the job.

Murder, Inc.

"War is a breeding ground for unintended consequences." -
Matthew Hoh

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cockburn-assassination-20111103,0,6016732.story

 Good article on the inclusion of Assassination as an important item in the arsenal of USA foreign policy. 

I would like to say that it is a "must read", but nothing is actually a "must read", is it?

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