Bustin out

"You think I'm still the kid on the school bus?"

House Republicans voted against raising the debt ceiling today. Whoopee.
They want to cut spending, other than the wars of course. Oh yeah, and that whole Medicare thing, since that sort of affects much of their base constituentcy. And taxing corporations is naturally too far fetched.
Hmmm. Where are we gonna get some more money....

Polls show the public does not support a further increase in borrowing authority even as the Treasury Department scrambles to avoid a default that could push the country back into recession and rattle markets across the globe.

The Treasury Department has been tapping alternate funding sources, such as federal employee pensions, to cover its obligations since the debt limit was reached on May 16, but has warned it will run out of options if Congress does not act by August 2.
-Reuters

Our pensions.
And that won't even get us through the summer.
Wow.
It'll probably buy a couple of lucky bankstas some swanky greek islands though.

Increasing lawlessness

As the rich continue to get richer at the expense of the rest of us, it is obvious that more and more people are indeed leaving their respect for law and order behind.
We've been hearing about thieves stealing copper wiring and other hardware from streetlights and other municipal infrastructure. Well, even that is beginning to escalate.
Last week, we learned about a truck driver who disappeared with $400,000 worth of Russian King Crab somewhere along the West Coast.
Over the past few months, flash mobs have been overwhelming retail outlets and public spaces all across the country.

In a number of cities, gatherings have grown unruly and led to vandalism or assaults — and worse. Police have described some as "mob thefts" in which people assemble outside retail and convenience stores, loot them and vanish before police arrive.
Police and social media gurus say these flash mobs usually are organized on Twitter, Facebook and through text messages, as are peaceful flash mobs. Police say some of the thefts, in particular, appear to have been coordinated in advance but that violence and vandalism at other gatherings may have been random.
Still, the real-time immediacy and apparent randomness of the incidents can combine to outwit conventional policing methods, according to law enforcement authorities.
"Traditionally, if folks are assembling or holding a protest, there are permits or processes in place for law enforcement to prepare and be on site in case things happen. But with flash mobs, there's no advance warning. Law enforcement might not have staff on hand," says Nancy Kolb of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
-NPR

Well, what can you expect when the government won't even tell us what laws they are enforcing? When leaders don't follow the law, they shouldn't be surprised when citizens don't either.

Pre-crime detection

Oh, racial profiling, you've come such a long way baby.
Apparently, Homeland Security has been field testing pre-crime detection somwhere in the northeastern United States. They aren't testing it in an airport, where they allege they'll be using it in the near future, but at "a large venue that is a suitable substitute."

Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST), a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) programme designed to spot people who are intending to commit a terrorist act, has in the past few months completed its first round of field tests at an undisclosed location in the northeast, Nature has learned.

Like a lie detector, FAST measures a variety of physiological indicators, ranging from heart rate to the steadiness of a person's gaze, to judge a subject's state of mind. But there are major differences from the polygraph. FAST relies on non-contact sensors, so it can measure indicators as someone walks through a corridor at an airport, and it does not depend on active questioning of the subject.
-Nature

It also doesn't depend on someone actually committing a crime either. Brilliant.
If you look, act, or even feel shady, anxious, or excited, NO FLIGHT FOR YOU!
I'd more easily go for a system that involved three clairvoyant sisters.

Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, a think-tank based in Washington DC that promotes the use of science in policy-making, is pessimistic about the FAST tests. He thinks that they will produce a large proportion of false positives, frequently tagging innocent people as potential terrorists and making the system unworkable in a busy airport. "I believe that the premise of this approach — that there is an identifiable physiological signature uniquely associated with malicious intent — is mistaken. To my knowledge, it has not been demonstrated," he says. "Without it, the whole thing seems like a charade."
-Nature

They're claiming a 70% success rate, which is pretty good actually, but not good enough. One innocent is one too many. Also, some people are naturally cold-blooded sociopaths who will probably go undetected. Others will learn the weaknesses in the system and figure out how to exploit them.
And then it will all just be another useless waste of the taxpayers' money.

Former CALPERS investment sells for 8 cents on the dollar

A 10,200-acre site in the Arizona desert has sold for $32.5 million this week, five years after a group with investors including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System paid $400 million for the land.
Arcus Property Solutions LLC, a private-equity fund with about $100 million under management, paid cash for the property in Goodyear (about 60 miles southwest of Phoenix), which is now called Amaranth Land LLC. It had been planned for a 42,000-home community by the Calpers-financed group when it was purchased in 2006.
Yes, that's right. Public employees had their pensions wasted on a million dollar real estate scam during the peak of the housing bubble, and now someone has just swooped in on the carcass of that fraudvestment for about 8 cents on the dollar.
Not surprisingly, the group of investors who benefitted off of that scam was led by....wait for it.....you guesssed it....the Goldman Sachs.

“Of all the speculative deals I’ve seen here, this was right at the top,” (Terry McDonnell, publisher of Business Real Estate Weekly in Scottsdale, AZ) said in a telephone interview. “It’s hard for me to think of a more speculative deal of this magnitude in Maricopa County.”

Calpers, the nation’s largest pension fund, had investments valued at $209.7 million in MW Housing Partners III in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2007, according to its annual report. The next year, the investment had a negative market value of $102.9 million, the fund said. MW Housing wasn’t listed as a Calpers investment in fiscal 2010, its most recent report.
-Bloomberg

Sigh.
So to make it simple, public employees in California invested some of their salaries in a pension fund. That pension fund invested that money in a planned living development in Arizona (somewhere that perhaps some of those employees might have wanted to retire to). That development tanked when the housing bubble (created by companies like Goldman Sachs) burst, and the investment was foreclosed upon. Three years later, Goldman Sachs purchased the property for 8% of the price that the public employees (through their pension fund) had paid for it. Now, the public employees can't afford to retire, have one less place to retire to even if they could afford to retire anyway, and Goldman Sachs has a shitload of cattle-grazing land.
Oh, and Goldman Sachs continues to get away with fraud, and public employees are getting blamed for all of the problems in America.
Got it?

KofC sues BofA

First the Mormons, now the Catholics. The Knights of Columbus are seeking a court order to allow them to look into the fraudclosure practices of Bank of America. Bank of America is not specifially named in the lawsuit, but the Bank of New York is.

Knights of Columbus requested the court order in a lawsuit against Bank of New York Mellon Corp. (BK) that seeks an accounting of two trusts that hold mortgage loans. Knights of Columbus owns mortgage securities in the two trusts, for which Bank of New York is the trustee, according to the complaint.

The complaint doesn’t assert any claims against Bank of New York or seek damages, Kevin Heine, a spokesman for the bank, said in an e-mailed statement.

An accounting is necessary to learn of losses to investors stemming from failures by Bank of America to promptly pursue valid foreclosures and sell homes it has seized, Knights of Columbus said. The group also said investors have no assurance that fees and costs associated with so-called robo-signing are being borne by Bank of America or being passed on to investors.

Robo-Signing
Robo-signing is the practice by bank representatives of signing foreclosure paperwork without verify the information in the documents. Expenses include attorneys’ fees for fixing paperwork and defending government investigations into mortgage- servicing practices, and any resulting settlements, according to the complaint.
-Bloomberg

Given the sacklessness of Eric Holder's Justice Dept., ultimate accountability may never materialize, but it is good to know that at least some bankstas are scrambling to deal with lawsuits, which aren't exactly revenue-generating endeavors.

Egypt opens border with Gaza Strip

RAFAH, Gaza Strip – Egypt lifted a four-year-old blockade on the Gaza Strip's main link to the outside world Saturday, bringing relief to the crowded territory's 1.5 million Palestinians but deepening a rift with Israel since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak earlier this year.

The Egyptian move will allow thousands of Gazans to move freely in and out of the area — heightening Israeli fears that militants and weapons could easily reach its doorstep.

Israel and Egypt imposed the blockade after the Islamic militant Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007. The closure, which also included tight Israeli restrictions at its cargo crossings with Gaza and a naval blockade, was meant to weaken Hamas, but it also fueled an economic crisis in the densely populated territory.

Hundreds of Gazans gathered early Saturday as the first bus load of passengers crossed the border at 9 a.m. Two Egyptian officers stood guard next to a large Egyptian flag atop the border gate as the vehicle rumbled through.
-Associated Press

"Too Big to Fail" banks are even bigger and fail-ier

"We have even more 'too big to fail' institutions; more politically interconnected, very deep and wide institutions that could create another systemic event," says (Gretchen) Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times. "It's almost as if the situation that brought us to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac having to be bailed out has now been squared or quadrupled. It's worse, not better."

(Joshua) Rosner, an analyst at Graham Fisher, wholeheartedly agrees.

"The risks are enormous" because there's even more concentration of assets among the biggest banks, which are "too big to analyze and manage," he says.

If the financial system was a "house of cards" before the crisis, the situation is worse today because back then investors had "some sense the numbers being given in annual reports and quarterly filings were accurate," Rosner says. "Now we know the government seems to be [complicit] in allowing them to fudge those numbers."
-Yahoo! Finance

'Narco-tank' found in Jalisco

This is how outgunned the Mexican military is.

The so-called "narco-tank" is a 2011 Ford F-Series Super Duty with steel armor plates welded to nearly every surface and a folding battering ram, or "man-ram" fitted to the front bumper, the BBC reports. The cargo bay was transformed into a metal cabin, complete with gun ports and a rotating turret, presumably to protect passengers from gunfire.
-Business Insider

Check out this video to see some more of the creative ways that drug cartels ply their trade.

It was a wonderful tea party while it lasted

This deserves a humongous LMAO!
Desperate Republicans, in the absence of another 911 to hang their hats on, have been trying their hardest and dirtiest to rile up white America against the big bad government that they are always trying to villify (even though they spend quite a bit of time being in control of it). This has led them in recent years to cozy up in bed with the Tea Party, a confused group of people who have way too much time on their hands, and not enough collective intelligence in their collective heads.
Well, events in upstate New York this week threaten to shed light on one of the right wing's biggest contradictions: the fact that their base is comprised primarily of old white people receiving handouts from the big-spending government.
LMAO!

Rarely in recent years has a single, off-year special election -- like the one on Tuesday in a House district in upstate New York -- triggered such nationwide political tremors, or had such negative implications for efforts to bring America's federal debt under control.

Democrat Kathy Hochul won in a solidly Republican district after hammering her opponent for backing a Republican plan in the House to scale back Medicare costs. Medicare is a federal government program that is the biggest single driver of the U.S. deficit, but most voters want it left untouched.
-Reuters

Duh! When you're old and white trash, you have major health problems and you aren't smart enough to think outside of the big pharma box. If you're filthy rich, you can afford your own drugs. If you're not, like the overwhelming majority of right wingers, you have to rely on government welfare-errrrrr, I mean "entitlements"....like Medicare.
Well, the Republicans found out the hard way that you can't keep a major contradiction like that under wraps forever.
Kudos to the Democrats for successfully exploiting that HUGE opportunity. I'm actually very surprised they could be so competent.

Could this be the beginning of a real class war in America, one where citizens actually vote in their own best interest rather than along party lines?
It is true that Social Security and Medicare are huge problems that need to be dealt with, but rather than allowing the rich to keep raping the poor, leaving the poor to duke it out over the meager scraps we are given, maybe we can all finally start addressing the real problem in the US, which is that huge corporations and the uber rich are NOT paying their fair share of the tax burden.

Trucker blows up like balloon

To celebrate the news from the IMF that "inflation is a non-issue for the US", I give you yet another NMA animation. Way too funny.

WHAKATANE, New Zealand, May 26 (UPI) -- A New Zealand truck driver said he is "lucky to be alive" after an air hose became lodged in his buttocks and blew him up "like a balloon."
Steven McCormack, 48, said he fell from the rigging between his truck and the trailer at Waiotahi Contractors in Whakatane and he landed on the hose connected to the vehicle's air brakes, the New York Daily News reported Wednesday.
McCormack said the nozzle pierced his left buttocks and began pumping air into his body at 100 pounds per square inch.
"I was blowing up like a football," he said. "I had no choice but just to lay there, blowing up like a balloon."
Doctors said the air separated fat from muscle, caused his lungs to fill with fluid and compressed his heart.
McCormack was rescued by coworkers and taken to an intensive care unit at a Whakatane hospital. He said it took nearly three days for his body to deflate to normal size.
"You just have to burp it out, or fart it out," he said.
-UPI

The Secret Patriot Act

You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says it’s worse than you’ve heard.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
-Wired

Week of Rage

The latest Corbett Report video.

Don’t mess with the Mormons

Simply put, things are spinning out of the Fed's control. The Fed has been transferring the wealth of the nation to the banking cartel and the financial Power Elite for three long years, and the fraud at the heart of their claim to be "stimulating" the real economy is now in plain view.
-Charles Hugh Smith

Earlier this month, a law in Utah went into effect that gives homeowners incentives to sue if foreclosures are illegal. Today, news out of the Salt Lake state bode very ominous for the fraudclosure gangstas at Bank of America:

Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has sent a letter to Bank of America President Brian Moynihan saying his office intends to enforce a Utah foreclosure law it believes the bank is violating.
The letter is the latest salvo between the Utah Attorney General’s Office and the bank over thousands of home foreclosures being carried out in Utah by ReconTrust, a unit of the Charlotte, N.C.,-based, bank.
Under Utah law, only attorneys who are members of the Utah State Bar or title companies registered to do business in the state can legally carry out foreclosure proceedings.
But California-based ReconTrust has been foreclosing on thousands of Utah homes under its own name.
-Salt Lake Tribune

It is true that BofA is claiming that Federal law allows them to fraudclose on homes in any state, but apparently, Shurtleff ain’t feeling that. In his letter to BofA, he pointed out that federal law can not contravene state or local law. Fortunately, he isn’t alone in that sentiment.

The move to crack down on ReconTrust comes as federal officials and attorneys general in all 50 states are scrutinizing how the largest mortgage servicers, including Bank of America, handle home loans and conduct foreclosures. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating banks’ mortgage securitizations, and California Attorney General Kamala Harris has announced a mortgage fraud task force.
-Bloomberg

So even though Eric Holder and the DoJ are sitting on their hands with regards to corporate crime, at least his counterparts at the state level are up to the task. Even Kamala Harris out here in California has more balls than Holder and the entire Justice Dept.
While it is still true that this might all just be posturing by people with political aspirations, the fact is, fraudclosures are in the news. In a good way.

Things are spinning out of control. Trends are beyond the feeble grasp of central financial authorities. Power is based not just on controlling events in the real world but on the perception of having some control over the real world. Once the central banks' control over large-scale trends and systems is revealed as illusory, then the unraveling of the Status Quo's powers will gain momentum.
-Charles Hugh Smith

Oh no they didn't

French Budget Minister Francois Baroin claimed today that China supports French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde as candidate to be the new head of the International Monetary Fund.

"It's a European consensus," he told France's Europe 1 radio. "The euro needs our attention, we need to have the Europeans (on board), the Chinese support the candidacy of Christine Lagarde."
-Reuters

Unfortunately for Baroin, and all of Europe, that simply isn't true.
The BRICS were quick to push back, reminding the backwards, debt-plagued old world where all roads into the future travel through.

In a unique show of force and unity, the IMF executive directors from Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa issued a joint statement in which they called for an end to the “obsolete unwritten convention” that head of the fund must hail from Europe.
“We are concerned with the public statements made recently by high-level European officials to the effect that the position of managing director should continue to be occupied by a European,” the executive directors said in a statement released by the IMF in Washington. “The convention that the selection of the managing director is made, in practice, on the basis of nationality undermines the legitimacy of the fund.”
-Globe and Mail

In their statement, the BRICS reminded everyone that some former Euro heavyweight named, appropriately, Jean-Claude Junker (seriously), had said back in 2007 that DSK would "probably" be the last European IMF head.
Problem is, there doesn't yet appear to be a good candidate from any 'emerging economies,' and the one name that has surfaced, Agustin Carstens, is some pig from Mexico that most people don't take seriously.
Really? Mexico?
And so the search for another pro-liquidity pervert continues...

DSK DNA update

Well, this whole DSK fiasco has me going lower than I thought I could ever willingly go, so I might as well press on, now that I've gone this far.

A DNA sample taken from Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF chief accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, has been matched to material found on the maid's shirt, sources familiar with the case tell NBC New York.
-NBC New York

Another white dude felled by the ole 'DNA on the shirt' evidence.
Then this happened:

During their investigation, authorities cut out a piece of carpet and swabbed sinks and other surfaces in his hotel room. Investigators told the AP they believed the carpet in the hotel room may contain Strauss-Kahn's semen, spat out after an episode of forced oral sex by the maid.
-Inside Bay Area

Not sure why the Associated Press had to go there, but here I am as well. While here, I take note that it took over a week for the DNA on shirt evidence to come back, and remind you all that we're supposed to believe that Osama bin Laden's DNA was confirmed within a few hours at most. In a hostile foreign country. Or on a boat. Whatever.
In not enough time.

1, 2 , 3, 4, FIF!

Attorney General Eric Holder has managed to stay out of the news during his tenure, but given the current landscape, is that a good thing?

In November 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder vowed before television cameras to prosecute those responsible for the market collapse a year earlier, saying the U.S. would be “relentless” in pursuing corporate criminals.
In the 18 months since, no senior Wall Street executive has been criminally charged, and some lawmakers are questioning whether the U.S. Justice Department has been aggressive enough after declining to bring cases against officials at American International Group Inc. (AIG) and Countrywide Financial Corp.
Prosecutions of three categories of crime that could be linked to the causes of the crisis -- corporate, securities and bank fraud -- declined last fiscal year by 39 percent from 2003, the period after the accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc., Justice Department records show.
-Bloomberg

Some of the biggest Wall Street gangs have benefitted from the crisis quite substantially. Goldman Sachs’ 2009 profits were a record for the firm and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s earnings have been at an all-time high as well. But that isn't stopping the Justice Dept. from acting as a lap dog for these and other corporate crooks.
Back in March, Holder’s DoJ was actually caught conspiring with Bank of America (whom DoJ should have been investigating for fraudulent foreclosure and debt collection practices) to try to silence Wikileaks.
Not only has the DoJ been helping silence whistleblowers, they’ve been trying to divert America’s attention away from the real problems. Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, at a May 3 Congressional hearing, pointed out that Federal prosecutors have been more focused on immigration offenses than the financial crisis.

“The department is spending its resources prosecuting nannies and busboys who are trying to get back to their families,” she said. “And yet we have not brought any prosecutions on the bandits on Wall Street who brought the nation and the world to the brink of financial disaster.”
-Bloomberg

The Justice Dept. claims that they are pursuing corporate fraud, but the reality is, they aren’t pursuing fraudulent corporations.

Using government data compiled by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research center, Bloomberg News identified cases coded as corporate fraud by the Justice Department last year. Most involve people accused of stealing from companies, not wrongdoing by firms themselves.
-Bloomberg

Once again, we see that the Justice Dept. is protecting corporate criminals, not prosecuting them.
The FBI claims that after 911, they had to reassign agents away from criminal cases in favor of “national security” cases. Ummm, the FBI doesn’t consider the fleecing of our government to be an issue of “national security?”
Apparently not. And apparently, putting black men in both the White House and the DoJ has done nothing to bring white collar criminals to justice.


I plea Da Fif

Left Behind

A new study by Deloitte confirms that the rich will only continue getting richer over the next decade.

From a total of $92 trillion held by the world's richest in 2011, by 2020 the world's millionaire households will possess $202 trillion, or roughly 4 times current global GDP. Even though much of move up is attributed to the wealth surge in the developing world, the biggest beneficiary is, you guessed it, the United States where the millionaires (those with net wealth of at least $1 million), who currently account for $38.6 trillion of total wealth, will see their assets increased by 225% to $87.1 trillion! And while a comparable study of how much wealth the lower and middle classes are set to lose over the next decade, we are confident that it will be roughly comparable...inversely. So if anyone harbored any illusions that the current status quo was about anything but the rich getting richer, all those can be promptly swiped aside.
-Zero Hedge

Obviously, current Fed policy notwithstanding, this wealth won't simply materialize out of thin air (or a printing press). This wealth will continue to be stolen from the poor (i.e. everyone that isn't a millionaire). Who needs a rapture when you have the Fed and a compliant puppet regime that has only rigged the game in favor of the elite thieves/rapists/cokeheads?



Well, the jokes on the bankstas, cuz even though we're getting left behind monetarily, we'll still be co-habitating with the chosen people in the same physical space on the same finite planet. Their "paradise" will be physically surrounded by billions of starving, pissed off people.
Looking at it that way, I guess the only thing that is going to get left behind is the people's belief in authority, and the subservience that goes along with it.
Can't wait.

2nd Anniversary of Melissa Roxas kidnapping

Today, it has been two years since Melissa Roxas was abducted and tortured, and there is still no justice for her or any of the other victims of human rights violations committed by former-President Arroyo and her military.
The Philippine Commission on Human Rights recently released a resolution after "investigating" Melissa's case, and essentially exonerated the military. Apparently, the New People's Army kidnapped her and tortured her in an attempt to get her to falsely claim that she was a member of the New People's Army.

Read and sign the open letter to demand justice for Melissa Roxas by clicking here.

DSK daily recap

Wow, so today was a full one on the DSK-related news front.
1) He resigned as the “head” of the IMF
2) He was granted bail
3) A grand jury voted to proceed with the indictment against him

Representing the defendant, William Taylor argued to the court that Strauss-Kahn was an "honourable man" who had only one desire at this time, "to clear his name". He presented the judge with the details of a New York security company, Stroz Friedberg, that would be responsible for ensuring that the former IMF chief would not flee the country.
Stringent conditions would include an electronic bracelet that would send a signal to the company and a police station the moment Strauss-Kahn left the property, video cameras to monitor him inside the property, and a 24-hour rotation of armed guards who would be physically present at the apartment.
Taylor said that Strauss-Kahn's wife, Anne Sinclair, had bought a property in Manhattan under her name, and that it had been scoped out and approved by the security company as a suitable location for him to remain under house arrest.
-The Guardian

Representing common sense, New York state Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus noted that, “If the defendant were to be able to leave the country it might very well be impossible to bring him back.”

Must be nice to:
1) Regularly stay in $3,000 a night luxury hotel suites
2) Be able to ride first class anytime without having to make reservations
3) Have the wherewithal to purchase any property in Manhattan, let alone on a few days notice
I can’t think of a worse candidate to grant bail to.
Actually, I can’t think of a better candidate to have his mugshot, or better yet a pic of him doing the perp walk, floating around on the internet.

As for his resignation, the posturing to name his successor started quickly.

European officials, who have picked IMF heads for 65 years under a deal that also gives the U.S. the lock on the top World Bank post, moved to retain the privilege, with Sweden backing French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde. Russia and South Africa have called for an emerging-market candidate, while some Asian policy makers suggested someone from their region.
-Bloomberg

At the risk of understating the obvious, this is very interesting.

Lagarde is the favorite for the job, according to odds at London-based bookmaker William Hill Plc. It is offering six pounds ($9.71) for every four pounds bet that Lagarde will be the next IMF head, down from odds of 20-1 previously.
Nout Wellink, a European Central Bank Governing Council member, told the Dutch talk show Knevel & Van den Brink late last night: “I know a fantastic candidate, that’s Jean-Claude Trichet,” whose term as ECB president ends in October.
Japan, which has the second-biggest share of voting power at the IMF with 6.25 percent, has yet to decide on its stance, Tetsuro Fukuyama, the government’s deputy chief cabinet secretary, told reporters in Tokyo today.
The U.S., which has the largest share of votes, at 16.8 percent, has also given no indication of a preference.
South African and Russian officials said yesterday the next head should come from an emerging economy. Trevor Manuel, head of South Africa’s National Planning Commission, is “highly respected in the world,” Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said of his predecessor in an interview in Pretoria.
Russian central bank Deputy Chairman Sergei Shvetsov said a developing country should be given the chance to run the IMF to better reflect the role of those economies in global trade. South Korea’s central bank governor made similar remarks before the announcement late yesterday that Strauss-Kahn would resign.
-Bloomberg

Russia wants someone from the under-developed world eh?
What say you China?

BEIJING (MNI) - The new IMF leadership needs to reflect changes in the world economic order and be more representative of emerging market economies, Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan said Thursday in his first public comments since the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
"The senior management team of the IMF should better reflect changes in world economic patterns and should be more representative of emerging market economies," he said.
-iMarket News

Oh. Et tu China?
For some perspective on the enormity of what is at stake here, we turn to the ever-reliable Tyler Durden:

It is also safe to say that with China now unofficially Europe's backstopper (and there were those wondering why China is buying all those Spanish and Portuguese bonds), what China wants, China gets.
-Zero Hedge

Dinosaurs in Oakland City Hall beat out the forward thinkers

If the Oakland gang injunction case has anything to teach us, it is as a fairly predictable case study on the design, intentions, and impacts of police suppression tactics. Gang injunctions are part of a long history of racialized and violent policing that regularly claims the lives of poor people and people of color in Oakland. In the face of this daily reality, the City Attorney’s office mounted an aggressive public relations campaign claiming that Oakland’s gang injunction is somehow different from the rest and that gang injunctions do not lead to racial profiling. We know from our own experiences that this is a clear and dangerous lie. Despite the fact that the City Attorney claims that the power to determine who is enjoined or not rests in the hands of the courts, enforcement of these gang injunctions (stopping, detaining and arresting individuals) relies on the police visually identifying young men of color. This guarantees, and provides legal justification for, a dramatic increase in police harassment of young men of color in the so-called “safety zones.”
-Stop the Injunctions in Oakland

On Tuesday night, the Oakland City Council reaffirmed its commitment to the police state in two of its hottest real estate markets.

OAKLAND, Calif. — Oakland officials have agreed to continue supporting the city's gang injunctions.
In a 4-3 vote on Tuesday, the City Council decided not to end funding for a gang injunction currently in place in North Oakland. The council also agreed to continue funding the pursuit of another gang injunction in the city's Fruitvale district.
An Alameda County judge has yet to decide on that injunction.
-Oakland Tribune

Gang injunctions don't prevent violence, but they do destroy families, and in turn, communities. They are good for big business too. City Attorney John Russo, who just so happens to be leaving Oakland to go develop the former Navy Base for the neighboring city of Alameda, certainly thought it was a good investment of public money. And despite a $58 million budget shortfall, the City Council has now agreed to continue this escalation of the war on the poor.

With all due respect to the many cops who uphold the law, the OPD has too many rogue cops like “the Riders,” who have not yet been held accountable for their actions. This is why the Oakland Police Department is currently under threat of federal receivership by a U.S. District Court judge.
Consequently, Oakland cannot be trusted with unfettered police power, which is what gang injunctions allow – named defendants are guilty until proven innocent. The issue that must be addressed if positive change is to be realized is increased opportunities for youth, legal scholars say.
-SF Bay View

Interestingly enough, the Oakland Tribune reported today that not only did Oakland police shoot and kill two men just a few blocks outside of the Fruitvale injunction zone last night, but the City has also agreed to pay $630,000 to cover medical bills for a man whose back was broken when oakland police smashed into his car in 2006. The man, Daniel Pena-Marquez, was not a suspect in any crime, and was not being pursued by cops, he was just an innocent driver who was in the wrong place at the wrong time (The City has already paid out $211,000 in workers comp claims to Officers Jacqueline Shaw and Tyman Small who were in the patrol car that broke Pena-Marquez' back).
In addition to the fact that Oakland Police are untrustworthy and incompetent, Incarceration nation isn't sustainable. Yes, it's been good for business, but prisons are huge wastes of energy. In many ways. As we continue to plunge down the post-peak slope of Hubbert's curve, we will be forced, one way or another, to start accepting new ways (or to some us, the correct ways) of thinking.

As reported in “Betraying the Model City: How Gang Injunctions Fail Oakland,” the substantial social and financial costs of gang injunctions “divert a tremendous amount of resources from vital programs that could build strong, stable and healthy communities.” While the costs of gang injunctions are devastating to Oakland neighborhoods, community groups throughout the city continue to provide programming that offers more than quick fix solutions at a fraction of the cost.
-SF Bay View

The sustainable way involves communities working together to get along. The locusts' way (John Russo's way) involves racist and classist violence that serves only the interests of rich rapists (like DSK) and adulterers (like The Schwarzenator) who care little about the people of Oakland.
Fortunately, the City Council also agreed to not expand the injuctions to other areas of the city. Kudos to Councilmembers Desley Brooks, Rebecca Kaplan and Nancy Nadel for being forward thinkers who care about the future of today's Oaklanders.

DSK mugshot

DSK victim may be HIV+

The hotel housekeeper whom IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly sodomized and attempted to rape may be HIV+ and/or have AIDS.

The IMF chief's alleged sex-assault victim lives in a Bronx apartment rented exclusively for adults with HIV or AIDS, The Post has learned.
The hotel maid, a West African immigrant, has occupied the fourth-floor High Bridge pad with her 15-year-old daughter since January -- and before that, lived in another Bronx apartment set aside by Harlem Community AIDS United strictly for adults with the virus and their families.
The Post has not been able to ascertain whether the maid, 32, has HIV/AIDS because of medical confidentiality laws.
But the agency rents apartments only for adults with the disease. A Harlem United worker said at least one adult in the household has to be HIV-positive or have AIDS to qualify for one of their units. A healthy adult with a child with HIV or AIDS is not eligible.
-NY Post

Wow.
Yesterday, Zero Hedge broke the news that DSK was being housed in NYC DoC's West Facility for inmates "with contagious diseases." While that was embarassing news at the time, it doesn't compare to this morning's bombshell, which explains why DSK is on suicide watch.

Not sure which is worse, waking up next to a dead hooker, or finding out that the woman you forcibly sodomized is most likely HIV+.
This news doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of a setup, but it certainly squashes any argument that DSK is any kind of innocent victim here. Whatever happened in that hotel suite was likely not consensual.

US Debt animation from NMA

Lol.

China dumps US Debt for 5th straight month

In addition to officially beginning to loot US pensions today, The US Tresaury released its Treasury International Capital (TIC) data for March 2011, and it's not the best of news.
Foreign holdings of dollar-denominated short-term U.S. securities, including U.S. Treasury bills and other custody liabilities, decreased $18.3 billion, and Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury bills decreased $21.9 billion.

The key trend in US paper holdings continues to be China, whose total US debt holdings dropped for the 5th consecutive month in a row at $1144.9 billion, and the largest one month decline since November 2010.
-Zero Hedge

DSK rape and arrest animation

So that's some Chinese cartoonists version of the story.
ABC News offers a more official version:

International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly forced a New York City hotel housekeeper to perform oral sex and submit to anal sex, in addition to allegedly attempting to rape her, according to a complaint filed today by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.

The complaint charges Strauss-Kahn with two counts of criminal sexual acts in the first degree, one count of attempted rape, sexual abuse in the first degree, unlawful imprisonment, sexual abuse in the third degree and forcible touching.

The complaint says he forcibly touched the housekeeper's breasts, attempted to pull off her panty hose, twice "forcibly made contact with his penis and the informant's mouth" and that "the defendant engaged in oral sexual conduct and anal sexual conduct with another person by forcible compulsion."
-ABC News

So I stand corrected. DSK is an alleged sodomizer and attempted rapist.
He is not officially a "rich rapist" as I previously reported.

Getting blown while the world burns

As US Debt races towards the national debt ceiling (ETA = tomorrow) that was raised just last year, word out of New York is that IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested on board a Paris-bound flight for forcing a Times Square hotel employee to give him - yup, you guessed it, head.
Talk about theatre of the absurd.
The alleged incident took place at the upscale Sofitel hotel on West 44th Street near Times Square.

The trouble began at around 1 p.m. yesterday when a 32-year-old housekeeper entered Strauss-Kahn's $3,000-a-night suite at the luxury Sofitel on West 44th Street -- apparently unaware he was still inside.
The married Strauss-Kahn was in the bathroom, and emerged naked, chased her down a hallway and pulled her into a bedroom, where "he jumps her," a source said.
"She pulled away from him and he dragged her down a hallway into the bathroom where he engaged in a criminal sexual act, according to her account to detectives," Browne said. "He tried to lock her into the hotel room."
Soon afterward, Strauss-Kahn got dressed and headed off to JFK for a flight to Paris.
When he was approached on the plane by Port Authority cops, he said, "What is this about?" sources said. He was taken off the aircraft without handcuffs.
Two law-enforcement sources said Strauss-Kahn was trying to flee authorities. Police said he left his cellphone and other personal items in the room.
"It looked like he got out of there in a hurry," Browne said.
Strauss-Kahn, who had a meeting planned for today with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, has an arrangement with Air France that allows him to get on any flight and sit in first class, the sources said. He was traveling alone.
-NY Post

I guess it shouldn't be any surprise. Not only does Strauss-Kahn have a history of sexual deviance AND corruption, but the IMF has been raping developing nations for decades. The only thing that's truly newsworthy about the story is where it happened. This really speaks to the world banking cabal's opinion of the United States. Or is it the other way around? Is this like that scene in Godfather II where the corrupt Senator wakes up next to a dead hooker? Hmmm.
When you're the hooker, or in this case, the housekeeper, does it matter which rich rapist is ultimately guilty?

We are in an ongoing global economic depression. The signs are everywhere, even as they are lost on economic leaders that put private banks and short-term speculative capital before citizens and long-term working capital. Central banks use other people’s future money in the form of debt to do this. No central bank holds, and thus enables, more national debt than the Federal Reserve.
I hate to keep repeating this, but until someone of some ability to do anything gets it, I’m going to keep going. Last week, Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, co-enabler with Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner (among others) of our ballooning debt and mis-prioritized economic policy, urged Congress for another debt cap increase, or else. The guy holds about $2.5 trillion of debt on his books, being used for – nothing helpful to the general economy. A simple transfer would solve the debt cap problem in a nanosecond. Going a step further, a simple exchange of any of the $1.5 trillion of excess bank reserves receiving interest from the Fed, would do the same. Instead of defaulting on, how about retiring, some debt? Thinking outside the box.
All around the world, the bodies and countries with the most power keep screwing people (some like IMF head, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, literally) and entire nations, while supporting their banking systems.
-Nomi Prins

The End Game for Credit Card Nation

Now if American households are being put into debt rehab, why is the national debt increasing? Much of the spending is happening for the top 1 percent of our country that are largely vested in the too big to fail institutions. The working and middle class is being slowly dismantled while money flows to the top to protect the profits of the very few banks that control most of the assets in the United States. Now that trillions of dollars have flowed to the top thanks to working and middle class taxpayers, these banks and the government are turning a blind eye to the public and shutting them out completely by taking away their plastic, kicking people out of homes, and offering a nice consolation of burger flipping jobs.

We are quickly reaching a point where if we do not get our financial house in order as a nation, the national economy might be facing something that is already being experienced by working and middle class Americans. At some point globally the scissors will come out and cut our plastic.
-My Budget 360

Arnie Gunderson's latest on Fukushima

Fukushima - One Step Forward and Four Steps Back as Each Unit Challenged by New Problems from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.

Mexico sees more and more dead people

As more and more and bigger and bigger mass graves are being found in Mexico, it is becoming harder and harder for the Mexican government to really claim that it is in fact, the Mexican government.

The head of the National Action Party in Durango, Juan Carlos Gutierrez, an opponent of the governor, said criminal groups composed a "parallel state" in Durango.
"They collect extortion — a kind of tax — and they have armed forces that seem almost like a clandestine army," Gutierrez said. "These are the characteristics of a state: have an army, collect taxes, maintain peace."
But the mass graves reveal that there is no peace, and that powerful criminal groups are doing the killing.
"Mass graves infer organization, sustained presence and the expectation that the site can be protected from discovery for a substantial period," Housworth said.
-McClatchy

Well, the Mexican government clearly isn't keeping the peace either.

This is the face of collapse.
New players are eating at the governance table, and now they aren't even bothering with such trivial processes as snap elections, revolutions, or coup d'etats. They aren't bothering to overthrow the existing government. They're just simply setting up their own states within sovereign states.

I'm bullish on earth moving equipment btw.

Mr. Rogers doesn't want US bonds in his neighborhood

So on Tuesday, veteran investment guru Jim Rogers said he planned to short US bonds...as early as that afternoon.
Well, yesterday, Rogers told an audience at a conference in Edinburgh the same thing.

"In my view that's coming to an end...the bond bulll market is coming to an end. If any of you have bonds I would urge you to go home and sell them. If any of you are bond portfolio managers I would get another job," he said.

Addressing one bond portfolio manager among conference delegates, Rogers said: "If I were you I would think about becoming a farmer. You buy land and learn how to farm."

"In my view it’s going to be a spectacular way to make money," he said, adding: "This is where the great fortunes are going to be made in the future."
-CNBC

He went on to say that he is still into the US dollar, but was strongly considering selling:

"I would expect to see some serious problems in the foreseeable future….By 2011, 2012, 2013, 2013, I don’t know when, we’re going to have an economic slowdown again," he said. "This time it’s going to be a real disaster because the US cannot quadruple its debt again. Dr Bernanke cannot print staggering amounts of money again."

"How much more can they print without a serious collapse of the US dollar?" he said.
-CNBC

Greek police brutality

We are, in fact, hearing that there is already a protest organized to protest police brutality, which will culminate with more cops beating the austerity out of more protesters, and so forth at an exponential pace.
-Zero Hedge

Oscar Grant civil cases can proceed

A federal judge has ruled that Oscar Grant's family and some of his fellow BART passengers can go ahead with both illegal arrest and unnecessary force civil lawsuits against the transit agency.
According to SFGate, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of San Francisco said that other evidence, including videos, suggested the 22-year-old Hayward man "was completely incapacitated and posed no threat to anyone," and therefore a jury should decide whether any force, including a stun gun, was justified.
It is also questionable whether or not it was lawful for BART police to detain Oscar Grant and the other men in the first place.

Boehner looking for trillions more in cuts

We’re fucked.

Remember GM? Remember how they were deeply in debt and losing money but people kept lending them more money and the government kept giving them money and everything was going to be OK until, finally, it wasn’t? Our whole country is kind of like GM now except there is no cosmic entity that is going to come down from above and bail us out since our ADMITTED debt burden is already 25% of the entire planet’s GDP.
-Phil’s Stock World

Why are we fucked?
Because what’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily what’s good for the American people.

40 months into the downturn that has given us the worst number of job losses since the Great Depression, we are nowhere near a recovery. This is terrible, this is unprecedented, this is – great for business!
Bill McBride of Calcuclated Risk, reminds us that Wall Street’s "dirty little secret" is that Wall Street and corporate America like the unemployment rate to be a little high. Higher unemployment keeps wage growth down, and helps with margins and earnings – and higher unemployment also keeps the Fed funds flowing freely. Corporations like to see SOME job growth, so people have enough confidence to spend (and they can have a few more customers) but they don’t care if that job growth is in the US or China
-Phil’s Stock World

And things are getting interesting in Washington.

While DC may continue playing its debt ceiling soap opera, crunch time for the Treasury is approaching as the first of three auctions is on deck: the first one for $32 billion in 3 Year Notes. The total raised will be $72 billion without any offsets from maturities. Elsewhere, the Treasury will catch a $16 billion break after it settles $100 billion in Bill maturities offset by $84 billion in new issuance, yet still the net total of $56 billion in new debt seems to be a slight problem since as of Friday, there was just $23 billion in total capacity under the debt ceiling. Granted, the Treasury has already announced it is commencing the tapering off of other debt programs such as the State and Local Government (SLGs) which however will have at most $5-10 billion in favorable impact per month. It is also cutting its debt issuance forecast in half, likely due to an expectation of maturing old Bills without rolling these, a feat which will consume all if not more of the $108.9 billion in total cash available at the Treasury.
-Zero Hedge

Enter John Boehner.

“Without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt limit increase. And the cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given. We should be talking about cuts of trillions, not just billions.”
-Speaker of the House, John Boehner

This calls for a George Washington quote.

Are we going go back from koolaid drinkers of false hope to mindless terrorized sheep? Or are we going to stand up as brave, independent, thinking people and demand real change?
-George Washington

Obama on 60 minutes

IMHO, Obama has a noticeable eye tick whenever he talks about the subject of bin Laden actually being killed and buried. Just say'n.

Thanks for the closeups CBS.

Mob swarms convenience store

From CBS affiliate in Las Vegas:

LAS VEGAS - Caught on camera, a mob of young people bombarded the City Stop convenience store on Sunset Road and Pecos Road and stole $600 in merchandise.

"It became a feeding frenzy," said City Stop owner Jon Athey. "They were in the store for three minutes and 30 seconds… It's a pretty scary thing."

Athey says the crowd darted in and snatched numerous items from the store. "Beer to jerky to candy bars to soda, whatever hit their fancy… potato chips," he said.

Athey says this tactic is known as a "swarm". After 42 years in the convenience store business, Athey says this crime stands out.

"This is the biggest one I've ever seen," he said.
-8newsnow

More on bin Laden assassination

Good Ol' George Washington himself has weighed in on Boogeyman bin Laden's alleged assassination. In his latest post, our founding father breaks down the lies of 9/11 (since it's officially back on the table).

Bin Laden might have been a bad guy ... but the way his life and death have been used have been dishonest.
-Washington's Blog

And in a previous post, quoting a Christian Science Monitor article, George makes the very valid point that by allegedly assassinating and quickly disposing of the body at sea (too quickly to have conducted a DNA test btw), we lost out on the invaluable opportunity to debrief/torture/coerce a false confession out of the world's former most wanted man, a man who allegedly ran what is arguably history's most dangerous terror organization (not counting its parent organization, the CIA).

The opportunity to glean valuable intelligence from the leader of a powerful terrorist organization was lost, says retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who interrogated generals under the command of Saddam Hussein and evaluated US detention operations at Guantánamo.

It is a misconception that ideologues don’t talk, he says. “The opinion that, ‘Oh, he’s such a fanatic, he won’t tell us anything' – that’s uninformed blathering by people who don’t understand the business,” Herrington adds. “The experience with those who worked with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of the other most senior terrorists is that they are narcissists and that they do want to talk – and talk and talk.”

The key, Herrington says, is to “channel those long talking sessions where they begin to – inadvertently at first – reveal things that are useful. All the while he’s talking, he’s telling us things that he doesn’t think are important, but they are.”
-Christian Science Monitor

Increasingly, it is becoming crystal clear that IF bin Laden was still alive in that mansion in Abbottabad, the mission was indeed to silence him, not to bring him to any kind of justice.
And before you offer up any of the "keeping him alive would've riled up the terrorists" idiocy, realize that murdering him in cold blood in front of his wife and then dumping his body into the Arabian Sea was a pretty infuriating chain of events as well.

Boogeyman bin Laden's alleged assassination

The usual suspects, Michel Chossudovsky and Mike Ruppert, have come out with their takes on Boogeyman bin Laden’s alleged assassination.

Obama has pronounced Osama bin Laden to be dead. But according to historical facts and extensive documented evidence, he may never have been alive in the way that the official propaganda has portrayed him. Or alive at all.

Osama bin Laden has been a CIA asset in reality, and a propaganda boogeyman in official fiction.

The official Osama bin Laden narrative, along with “Islamic terrorism” and Al-Qaeda, is a CIA military-intelligence fabrication designed to provide a pretext for an eternal global war agenda, and to provide an ongoing propaganda pretext for the “war on terrorism”.

The “Militant Islamic Network”, including bin Laden himself, has been, since the Cold War a intelligence network that has been “run” on behalf of Anglo-American interests.

The attack of 9/11 was a false flag operation, planned and carried out by Anglo-American intelligence assets, blamed on “Al-Qaeda”, despite no credible supporting evidence.
-Global Research

Everyone wants so badly to believe that it was just a Bush/Cheney thing, but that’s why they’re still hoping for change.

I have personally interrogated underage criminal suspects who could lie better than White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. It has been four days since the P.T. Barnum (“There’s a sucker born every minute”) proclamation of the death of Osama bin Laden (OBL). President Obama’s account of the firefight has had zero credibility from the outset and it continues to fray and wear thin as each day passes.
-Collapsenet

To me, Bin Laden was the trump of trump cards. Obama/the bankstas must be desperate.

You see people will accept lies if their lives get better. As their lives get worse, they will inevitably ask questions. And as their lives disintegrate, they will start looking for both answers and suspects. That was and is the swimming pool full of gasoline that Barack Obama is lighting matches in.
-Collapsenet

The Ruppert article, per the usual, does a good job dissecting the official story, and very easily I might add. He also says that 9/11 is in fact back on the table.
Let's roll.

The Debt Bomb

On Monday, as Legislators returned from recess and the mainstream media pummeled us with images of flag-waving Americans celebrating the latest extrajudicial assassinations, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sent a letter to Congress regarding the debt limit, which will be reached on or near May 16. He detailed the extraordinary measures that the Treasury Dept. will begin implementing this week in advance of that deadline, and also threatened an even bigger financial crisis if he (and his banker bosses) doesn’t get his way.

As I have written previously, default by the United States on its obligations would have a catastrophic economic impact that would be felt by every American. A broad range of government payments would have to be stopped, limited or delayed, including military salaries, Social Security and Medicare payments, interest on debt, unemployment benefits and tax refunds. A default on the Nation’s legal obligations would lead to sharply higher interest rates and borrowing costs, declining home values and reduced retirement savings for Americans. Default would cause a financial crisis potentially more severe than the crisis from which we are only now starting to recover.
-Timothy F. Geithner

It is true that we have a major debt problem in this country, but it isn’t because the government is providing necessary services to the American taxpayer, or even because of public employee unions either. The real problem is the bankstas, who have never ever met a debt they didn’t like.

Hitting the debt ceiling isn’t about spending gone haywire because the Social Security and Medicaid buckets are too small for the people that rely on these programs; it’s about the big-ticket items– like recently, bailouts.
-Nomi Prins

Oh yeah, and government departments that randomly lose several trillion dollars don't help either.
I'm not sure that increasing the debt limit is the main reason why the Osama drama trump card was played, but it is certainly the bigger issue confronting us, especially now that the boogeyman is dead.
So to make sure we're absolutely clear here, we're being asked to take on even more debt by the people who needed to be saved from their own stupid debt in the first place, and obviously, we're going to need to ask them to finance that increased debt for us. That's exactly why they are trying to scare us into raising the debt ceiling. Again.
Make sense?

The decade-long detour

Now that Osama Bin Laden is officially "dead," I'd like to return our attention to where we were on September 10, 2001.


The Pentagon's incompetence/straight up thievery, combined with the government's infinte war on human rights over the past decade, is not only sinister, but it can only be described as "terrifying."


Here's a great, interactive website that really makes government corruption understandable and relevant.

OBL Death Photo

So, yesterday, a photoshopped pic alleging to be a post-assassination Osama Bin Laden made the rounds on the internet, and was debunked rather quickly.
Today, LiveLeak posted another pic of a post-assassination Bin Laden, complete with head shot entry wound slightly above his right eye. No confirmation of authenticity (and no debunking) thus far.


UPDATE - This is allegedly also a fake, which I kinda assumed.

They killed the boogeyman

So, in all seriousness, this is some pretty serious shat. They killed the boogeyman. They let the black guy get credit for it too. Unprecendented. This probably could've happened a while ago. As in under Bush. A major trump card has been played.
What's next?

Bin Laden Burial Video

So I also found a video of Usama Bin Laden's controversial burial at sea. This new evidence sheds light on how a man with kidney failure managed to wage war against the United States for 15 years. Unfortunately for the former world's most wanted man though, the 72 virgin gang bang actually turned out to be a submarine full of British seamen...and Ms. Moneypenny.

Bin Laden Killed to Coverup Evidence?

Well it is a fact that 5 people were killed during a gunfight in the heart of a Pakistani military stronghold far from the Afghanistan border, and that the world's most wanted outlaw had been linked to that location as far back as last August. Allegedly, the US Navy Seals "Team 6" killed Al-Qaeda top dog terrorist Osama Bin Laden during that gun battle.
Now though, the Iranian Fars News Agency is speculating on why he was killed, and whether or not he was killed at all.
Why he was killed:

TEHRAN (FNA)- The US has killed the Al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, in a bid to prevent any possible leakage of intelligence and information about the US-Al-Qaeda joint terrorist operations, a senior Iranian legislator underscored on Monday.
-Fars News Agency

Is he dead though?:

TEHRAN (FNA)- Former Director of Pakistan's Military Intelligence Organization General Hamid Gol questioned the authenticity and reliability of the pictures showing the al-Qaeda Leader, Osama bin Laden, as dead, and said certain ambiguities have made him suspicious of the American account of bin Laden's death.
-Fars News Agency

No hard evidence to report, just speculations....kinda like the US government's case against Bin Laden.

And before all the "of course that's what Iran is saying" arguments start flying, here is a non-Arab take:

Bin Laden Death Video

Previously unreleased video of Osama Bin Laden's final battle. Apparently, it was a pack of ISI hyenas, and not "a small team of americans" who finished off the world's most wanted man.

IMHO, this video might not be authentic because Bin Laden's beard isn't grey, and he is surprisingly agile for a guy whose kidneys failed a decade ago.
Irregardless of its authenticity, we can thank the Don for this one too.

Somebody's watchin all of us

While having your smartphone keep tabs on where you go raises privacy concerns for some, they aren't the only thing monitoring where you've been and what you've doing.

"Unless you plan to pitch a tent in the Canadian wilderness and been live complete off the grid, you are being tracked whether you like it or not."
-PC World

Peak Oil

This Catalyst investigation is a great, digestable breakdown of the Peak Oil issue. This 12-minute clip explores how we may look back at 2011's sky-high fuel prices as the "good old days, when gas was cheap."

"I think it would have been better if the governments had started to work on it at least 10 years ago."
-Dr. Fatih Birol
International Energy Agency

The International Energy Agency says we passed peak 2 years ago.

Happy May Day