In July 1990, Sedlmayr was found dead and mutilated in his bedroom. Through lurid reports in the Munich tabloid press, his homosexuality became a matter of public knowledge for the first time. In 1993, half-brothers Manfred Lauber and Wolfgang Werlé, former business associates of Sedlmayr, were sentenced to life in prison for his murder. They were released on parole in 2007 and 2008.

Hey guess what you stupid idiots? Trying to change history or get your name and notorious crimes removed from the public knowledge gets you this: published everywhere. So go ahead, murderers Manfred Lauber and Wolfgang Werlé, sue me too. Sue me because you brutally murdered and mutilated Walter Sedlmayr and now want history to forget about it.

You two had life sentences and were released less than twenty years after your crime.

You can read about the details on the UK Guardian, who can’t publish their names because they publish a German edition.

Instead of 7.2 million net jobs lost since December 2007, the preliminary benchmark estimate suggests the U.S. has lost over 8.0 million net jobs during that period.

This is something I like to harp on, as any long-term reader of this blog can testify (raise up brother!). So it turns out the .Gov has ‘underestimated’ job losses over the last two years by nearly a million. Of course, these are just preliminary estimates.

Some guesses: This estimate will be “beat,” the revision number will be lower (by 100,000 or so) and everyone will cheer and the stock market will bump up a little bit, the .Gov will say “I told you so. Green shoots!”. Weeks or months later the number will be revised, showing everyone that things are, once again, worse than we actually thought.

I’ve noticed estimates to the upside tend to be high (optimistic) and to the downside tend to be low (also optimistic) unless you’re talking to Dr. Doom (Mr. Roubini) in which case estimates are based on actual calculations and not data seasoned with wishful thinking (also known as “talking your book” i.e. favorable to what you’re selling)

Dateline August 27, 2009
Paul Krugman: “Deficits Saved The World”

Dateline November 3, 2004
Paul Krugman: “[The Budget Deficit] is comparable to the worst we’ve ever seen in this country. It’s bigge[r] than Argentina in 2001.”

Deficits for War bad, mmkay, deficits to support an industry that would put me out of a job if it failed are FUCKING GREAT WOOHOO!

So a half billion dollar deficit (circa 2004) is the “worst we’ve ever seen.” A nearly 2 trillion dollar deficit is Woo-fucking-Hoo? Maybe he meant it was the “worst we’ve ever seen” in that “a democrat could totally quadruple that, hit a run right outta the park.”

He goes on to say that it’s not the amount of debt we have, it’s how it compares to our GDP. Guess what Paulie K, our current debt is almost equal to our GDP. Our debt is rising, currently, at a pace of 20% a year. Our GDP… is not… rising. It’s only not sliding backwards thanks to your economist friends massaging the numbers so we don’t have a giant panic in this country. If our debt rises another $9 trillion, that means we’ll have almost $20 trillion in debt. Nearly 2x our GDP. As we haven’t paid off any debt since the Clinton era (remember those social security surpluses we had, that we raided for our illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan?), and before that who knows when the last time we actually paid down debt vs. ran it up?

We’re a nation of minimum-paymenters. Our household debt vs. GDP is already astronomical, in the 300% plus range (last I heard was 350% but that was before a whole lot of write-downs and foreclosures so that money owed may have gone poof). And that’s crippling our country, it’s what helped precipitate this crisis. So the answer must be to get the government debt up to 200% of GDP, so we can have a combined debt of something like 500% of GDP. That’s a 5:1 leverage ratio. Of course, I do believe GDP is poised to shrink, we’re still leaking jobs, and the only reason the “unemployment rate” has gone down a fraction of a percent is people have stopped receiving unemployment, not gotten jobs.

Jobless recovery? Why assume that. I assume jobless fail. All our jobs are going overseas. Fuck man, I got back in touch with one of the Pakistanis that my last job used as their first line of outsourcing. I found out that not only did MY department get outsourced to the Philippines, the Pakistani office got outsourced to the Philippines as well. The pinoys, bless their hearts, did exactly what management wanted them to: blew through calls at an average of two minutes per call. They didn’t really fix anyone’s problems, but that wasn’t something management had to care about at the moment, they wanted zero call time and short calls. A year before, they didn’t care about call time as long as we fixed problems and kept customers happy.

You heard that? My American company fired its Pakistani outsourcees in favor of outsourcing elsewhere. Shit is that fucked up now.

Where’s my piece of the bailout pie, Mr. Krugman? Where’s my piece of my tax dollars I sent to your highly-paid friends. Oh, I know, it’s OWED to them as part of my credit card balance because I’m unemployed still. My former salary is paying 4 or 5 Philippine citizens. At least they’re not huffing glue while being child prostitutes, but that doesn’t help me eat. I don’t get paid for bitching about it either, unlike Krugman, despite the ads on this page. Yeah, I’ve made a buck forty from that in a year, not even enough to cover the transaction cost of getting paid, assuming I can get paid less than 10 bucks, which I can’t.

I’ll leave you with a final gem from the article:

Influential economist Paul Krugman says the US will face a severe downturn before the end of the decade unless the $500 billion fiscal debt is rectified.

And now $2 trillion fiscal debts are the ONLY way to save us from the downturn he predicted based on $500 billion in fiscal debt.

Over the years, Kevin Mitnick has gotten used to the attacks on his website and cell phone account that routinely result from being a convicted hacker turned security expert. What he finds much harder to stomach is the treatment he’s getting from his providers.

Over the past month, both HostedHere.net, his longtime webhost, and AT&T, his cellular provider since he was released from prison more than nine years ago, have told him they no longer want him as a customer. The reason: his status as a celebrity hacker makes his accounts too hard to defend against the legions of script kiddies who regularly attack them.

So what does this mean? This means that your cellphone and web hosting providers are NOT securing your information. You just aren’t important enough to be attacked. And I would hazard a guess that most other companies that store you information online are also not securing it.

If the information was encrypted, as AT&T claims, it would take a supercomputer to crack it. As evinced by the distributed.net distributed supercomputer encryption cracking program.

AT&T, as well as most other corporations, are lying to you.

Okay, so you’re now ready to think that the NHS is a pile of shit and valiant Britains have to go to INDIA and PAKISTAN, the place we get our shitting online tech support, to get new organs and face lifts (it’s cheap and you can get a kidney no-questions-asked, or just show up with one on ice in a shrimp cooler).

But wait, this post isn’t actually about how the NHS sucks balls. This post is actually about statistics.

100,000 people traveled out of Britain for health care in 2007. About 0.0017% of the populace. Not a shocking amount, and that mental rant you were busy emailing to one overweight, obnoxious documentary director is starting to fizzle.

In 2007, 750,000 US citizens traveled out of the country for healthcare. Or, about 0.0025% of the populace.

In summary, socialized healthcare will kill you, and you’ll have to flee the country to be able to afford care.

Oddly, mainstream media are ignoring this alarming revelation that Bush may have been half-cracked when he started his Iraq war. My own paper, The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, is the only U.S. newspaper to report it so far. Canada’s Toronto Star recounted the story, calling it a “stranger-than-fiction disclosure … which suggests that apocalyptic fervor may have held sway within the walls of the White House.” Fortunately, online commentary sites are spreading the news, filling the press void.

The mainstream media in America ignoring the voice of the Freedom press? You don’t say.

Now out of office, [Jacques] Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

Of course, he’s the French leader that pussied out on the Iraqi invasion (and subsequent bloodshed), so he has nothing to say but slanderous lies.

Honestly, this is something I read about ages ago, and I still believe it. Sarah Palin believes believes it – she said we had to hope to God that we sent our troops over there on His mission, for His purpose.

update: uckin ell, forgot the link to the story

GEITHNER: Again the most important thing we need people to understand is working with the Congress we’re going to make sure we do enough to bring this economy back. But you know our job is not just to repair the damage done to this economy, bring growth back….

This was an answer to a question. Geithner was on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, discussing the economy. He was asked a question about how 1.5 million people are going to be losing their unemployment benefits this year (2009, not the next 12 months). Here’s the lead-up to this weasely non-answer:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And that means unemployment will remain high for the rest of this year. At the same time we’re seeing reports that up to 1 and a half million people could be losing their unemployment benefits by the end of this year. Does that mean that the Administration is going to have to look at extending unemployment benefits again?

GEITHNER: I think that is something that the Administration and Congress are going to look very carefully at as we get closer to the end of this year . And that’s going to be one important thing to look at.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We already know that a million and half people are going to lose their benefits don’t we?

They’ve already wasted trillions of dollars and are on the hook for trillions more to our banking and finance and automotive industries.

Where is my 0% interest loan from the government? I couldn’t afford the interest, say, on a loan I got to fix my car to travel to a job (since there are no jobs in my industry within 50 miles of home), if it were at bank rates. If I had billions of dollars, the Fed.Gov would give me a cheap, basically free loan. Since I have zero dollars, the federal government wont give me anything – not even unemployment since I quit my last job two weeks ahead of the whole department getting shit-canned. I’m a male, so I can’t get welfare or medicare or any of that. If I weren’t lucky and surrounded by some really fucking amazing people, I’d've been homeless as of last month (or at the very least would have had to tap my meager tiny retirement savings at a HEFTY penalty and been able to survive a month or two more).

So, Tim Geithner is dissembling. They don’t have any clue as to what to do. They really don’t. They won’t answer that question because they can’t.

They have been wrong every step of the way on how bad things are going to get. Why should we trust them this time? Does anyone have even one reason, other than “They’re the Government?”

At least, so far, we can trust this version of the .Gov to not get us into a useless war for their buddies’ profit.

And why dissembling? Dissembling is a “lie of omission” – he knows what Stephanopoulos is saying is true, but will not admit it. The data is there for everyone to see, they’re just refusing to acknowledge it until after the fact. Keeps up short term hope, prevents people losing confidence in the market right know so Goldman Sachs can keep up it’s profiteering until things go to shit again. Rest assured they’ll be well prepared for the next crash and come out of the pile of shit smelling clean with record profits, record bonuses for bigwigs, and record low taxes payed to the United States that has given them so much.

Marek Belka, head of the Washington-based IMF’s European department said “We do not see deflation as imminent. But we shouldn’t completely exclude this possibility.”

Belka’s statement is silly. Deflation is not imminent, it is right here, right now, by any reasonable measure, and even some unreasonable measures such as falling prices in Europe, Japan, and the US, the likes of which we have not seen since the great depression.

And given we have been in deflation for at least 15 months and possibly much longer (on a credit basis), the debate is not whether deflation arrives. At this point, the only question is how long it lasts.

Increasingly, it seems, there’s two stories being told in this world: The tales governments tell, and the tales some bloggers tell that become the eventual owning up to reality that governments tell.

The .gov has gotten it pretty much 100% wrong on all it’s predictions about the future since this crash has started. It’s shocking. And yet the media is just repeating endless their quotes without ANY critical thinking applied. TV news and it’s simplisting and coverage of new factulets frustrates me to no end. And the fact that some people take this as verbatim reality scares the FUCK out of me.

Espcially when those people accept the new data without any questioning of why the information was so wrong last time. Without a flicker of awareness to the wool being pulled over their eyes, or not even caring because they got that pimpalicious new Hummer. They’re gonna take some mean onramps this afternoon.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this is Depression 2.0 – it’s not going to be the same, nothing ever is, but it was caused by many of the same types of reasons as the original Great Depression. We’re just now starting to see people dropping off the unemployment rolls – unfortunately, it’s people whose benefits have expired, not gotten jobs. This number is expected (by top rated economics bloggers) to grow the way unemployment did at the start of the spike. It should in fact be nearly a mirror image because unemployment will run out for people in the order they got it, and our economy is patently not creating the jobs to take care of these people.

The rich were bailed out (failed out) in their times of “need.” Why do they ignore the poor in our times?

And if you don’t believe me that news organizations lie to you and censor the news, think again.

Ben Bernanke … deserves to be reappointed. Both the conventional and unconventional decisions made by this scholar of the Great Depression prevented the Great Recession of 2008-2009 from turning into the Great Depression 2.0.

Too bad we’re not out of the woods yet. Great Depression 1.0 took five years to see the stock market hit bottom and things to really hit the fan – after a few bear market rallies like the one we’re seeing now.

Streitfeld is writing about the growing wave of ruthless credit card defaults, but this also raises question about the credit card industry in general. Why aren’t consumers being educated on the dangers of not paying off their credit card balance each month? Maybe that will be a good role for the new consumer financial protection agency. And why are transaction costs for retailers still so high with all the innovation and advances in technology?

Two questions are posed. There is only one answer: money. Because the people in control can make even more of it the more the status quo is kept.

The main point of the article was on the rising tide of credit-card defaulters, people who’ve realized how they’ve fucked themselves, and just cutting off the cord to their creditors. A good thing? Well, not for the system in general, that’s for sure. But for the general well-being of the American public? A diminished lending sector would be good. Debt is a prison. There used to be debtors prison. Debt is the thing that turns our pretty possessions into chains of self-made repression.

Debt scares me, but at least now the worst can happen is they just call you a lot. I could survive without a phone. I could shred collections mail. Court’s the only thing that would compel me. No misguided sense of conscious would compel me – corporations fuck people over quite regularly, I don’t think much compassion should be shown to entities that have no conscious. These banks, they turn your debit card into a lottery ticket – no shit, I took a picture of the advertisement just knowing I’d have some great future use for it:

And because ‘the next purchase could be on’ Chase – they’re subtly encouraging you to not only make more purchases, but larger ones, hoping that will be the one Chase picks up for you – this was right after they bought WaMu, well after they bought Bear Stearns. They had to have lost some money on those deals, right? They bought failing institutions, why are they giving out free money to customers? I remember when the bank account was for keeping your money safe, not gambling that you might not have to pay one of those swipes.

I also like the whole Chase card eclipsing the WaMu card – very symbolic – and they’re lording their power over you by tempting you to spend more to get possible, but rare, free things.

People are not taught to pay off their balances so they will pay more money to the banks for their goods. Basically leasing them. The transaction costs to dealers are high because the rich cats in control of the banking industry have a monopoly on money trading. If you want to get paid you play their game. If you don’t accept cards, you get less business, because it’s inconvenient, unless you have a dedicated clientèle. People either don’t carry cash or don’t have cash so they’re trapped into using their cards to satisfy their consumer whims.

So, all this extra money, these fees and interest payments (and when you’re not careful, over limit penalties), where does this go? Most of it lines banker’s pockets – and the rest, I assume, helps out programs like “Swipe that thing, next one might be on us” and those silly rewards programs. In fact, one of the arguments against the tightening of credit card rules that Obama, the Funk-Soul Emperor signed into law was the fact that limiting fees and penalizing interest rate hikes would hurt the banks’ ability to offer reward incentive cards.

They’re effectively punishing the poor people that can’t keep up so people that can will be able to siphon off some of the effects of ignorant folks’ decision making. Rich people may spend more, dollar amount, than the poor, but in percentage of income spent, I imagine the pyramid would be well upside down.

And that’s my rant on credit for this evening.

At the beginning of his administration, the new president proclaimed that he would reverse the policies of the Bush White House and throw off the cloak of secrecy that had hidden government actions from the public.

Most tellingly, Obama decided to keep some of the CIA’s most powerful officials – men who had overseen the infamous rendition and torture programs – in important government posts. Recently he threatened to veto a bill that would expand congressional oversight of the CIA.

Obama’s advisers undoubtedly know that previous attempts to challenge the most powerful parts of the secret government have turned out badly for the reformers.

We all knew the line would come. The main question was where would it be.

We all have the illusion of freedom. The illusion of power. But it is just an illusion. The most powerful man in the world is hobbled by the system that purports to make him the most powerful man in the world.

He is still in chains.

We all are.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures and to gain unlawful access to confidential personal data including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

Disgusting. I wonder what he’s been up to here in the ol’ states?

Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has anounced she will resign as governor of Alaska on 26 July and not run for re-election.

Mrs Palin’s term of office was due to end in 2010.

I, for one, smell a rat here.

“I’m taking my fight for what’s right in a new direction,” she said, as her family looked on.
Mrs Palin did not reveal what she intended to do after leaving office, and did not give an explicit reason for her decision not to run for re-election.

But in a written statement, she made it clear that once she had decided not to run again, she did not want to hang on in office until her term expired.

“Once I decided not to run for re-election, I also felt that to embrace the conventional Lame Duck status in this particular climate would just be another dose of politics as usual, something I campaigned against and will always oppose,” she said.

What this doublespeak probably means is: “Once I decided I was going to quit when my contract was up, the contract for an office I swore an oath to uphold, I decided to give up.”

You know all those scandals that dogged her, that she admitted no wrongdoing over? I think there’s something brewing that she can’t weasel out of while in-office, so needs to be out of the public eye before that storm hits and wrecks her chances of being GOP choice 2012. Or, she doesn’t want to be in office while grubbing for the presidency.

But seriously, what kind of politician just quits most of the way through for no reason? Is she going to do that if she’s elected to another office. “Well, I know it’s 3 years from when my term expires, but I’ve decided not to run for re-election for (senate/president) so let some other guy do it. PEACE OUT YA’LL! Fight the Good Fight!™”

I mean, for shit sake she’s resigning a full year and five months before she’d even BECOME the lame duck, Alaska’s next election is in Nov 2010, well over a year and a half before she’d actually be replaced.

Memory support includes up to 24GB of Triple Channel DDR3 memory.

Then, in features, it says:

Triple-channel DDR3 2000(O.C.)/1866(O.C.)/1800(O.C.)/1600(O.C.)/1333/1066 Memory

Then it claims:

Maximum Memory Supported:
4GB – 32bit
12GB – 64bit
Memory Supported:
800MHz DDR3
1066MHz DDR3
1333MHz DDR3
1600MHz DDR3
Triple Channel Supported

Wait, what? So it really only supports 12 gigs of memory and 1600 MHz RAM? And they’re wanting nearly 300 wing wangs for this cockup. I suspect, as even the 1600MHz is overclocked-only right now they might not be publishing 2GHz specs officially – but saying you can put 24 gigs of RAM in that beyotch is disingenuous.

It does have 3xPCIe16x slots available, so it can host up to 3 video cards (because who doesn’t need that many right?) 14 USB ports (yay I could dump my hubs). But, it’s super-expensive and doesn’t really sound worth it, not that I’ll be upgrading anytime soon anyway. I’d just heard AMD had sexcore chips in the pipe for this month and were expecting to birth duodecacore chips sometime next year. I’ll wait until I can triple or quadruple my proc count before upgrading though, or when they bring 1000+ stream processors right next to the CPU so they can hump and make TFLOPS babies.

Currently, for 2Gs, you can get a 3.33GHz QuadCore Hyperthreading (8 cores show up in windows) with 12 gigs of 2GHz ram and whatever motherboard.

So next year, look for about double the computational density for the same price, and the current specs for 1000 or so bucks (maybe even less). If there’s one thing that’s reliable, it’s the computer industry’s rise – and as soon as that peaks and begins to fall, some usurper technology will come along.

SSDs are already approaching the theoretical limits of SATA2. Last year they had half that capability. Next year we’ll need SATA3. And just wait till they incorporate the ability to put them into a RAID (or a RAFED – redundant array of fucking expensive drives… but they aren’t drives anymore, are they? )

The next few years shall be interesting indeed as we hit the lower limits of silicon.

“Chinese assets are very safe,” Geithner said in response to a question after a speech at Peking University, where he studied Chinese as a student in the 1980s.

His answer drew loud laughter from his student audience, reflecting scepticism in China about the wisdom of a developing country accumulating a vast stockpile of foreign reserves instead of spending the money to raise living standards at home.

You might think they are being rude, but check out what he went on to say:

Geithner renewed pledges that the Obama administration would cut its huge fiscal deficits and promised “very disciplined” future spending, possibly including reintroduction of pay-as-you-go budget rules instead of nonstop borrowing.

“We have the deepest and most liquid markets for risk-free assets in the world. We’re committed to bring our fiscal deficits down over time to a sustainable level.

“We believe in a strong dollar … and we’re going to make sure that we repair and reform the financial system so that we sustain confidence,” he said.

Pay as you go, he says. Then immediately contradicts himself by saying they’re going to bring down fiscal deficits to a sustainable level. Having any deficit is kinda by-definition not pay-as-you-go.

S&P has been threatening to downgrade America’s bonds from AAA – Britain and others in Europe have already suffered this fate. Hardly risk-free, if they’re starting to fall now.

I’d like to point out that the entire time this crisis was unfolding, the previous administration said they were committed to a ‘strong dollar policy’ and look what that got us.

To that end, Geithner said a more flexible exchange-rate regime for the yuan, which would almost certainly see the value of the Chinese currency rise against the dollar, was particularly important because it would spur more Chinese demand.

A stronger yuan would make imports cheaper for China and Chinese exports more costly for foreign buyers.

Why on earth would China be interested in following this policy. They have nothing to benefit from it. We are in no position to dictate anything to them, since they are the ones who own our debt. They may own up to 15% of it (or, who knows, more). What are we gonna do?

In its response, the department said that in this case “disclosure of classified information – even under protective order – would create intolerable risks to national security.”

Why, to protect those who ordered this illegal, unconstitutional wiretapping from prosecution. It, of course, reaches to the highest level of government and the basis for the program was nothing more than paranoia. Not a damn thing to do with national security. That’s always the claim, and it always comes out (too late to do anything about it) that “national security” just means “covering the ass of the last guy in power.”

It’s happened time and again in this country. So much for a government “Of the people, by the people.” We have a government “Of the government, by the government” – something the framers of the Constitution warned against. Once a government becomes about itself and not about the people it governs, it’s no longer true democracy.

The British newspaper Daily Telegraph reported that retired Major General Antonio Taguba told them that he had seen the images that Obama wanted to prevent from being released. The newspaper quoted him as saying: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.”

But Taguba told Salon that while he had seen pictures from Abu Ghraib which showed horrific abuse, he had not seen the 44 pictures which the American Civil Liberties Union was seeking to have released.

So, he has seen pictures that show torture, abuse, rape, and every indecency at Abu Ghraib and others, but he has not seen the 44 pictures currently in question.

Well, at least, he claims to not have seen them, but if he hasn’t seen the 44 grouped together, how does he know he hasn’t seen some of those pictures? He can’t. He led the investigation on this matter a few years back, so he has undoubtedly seen quite many photos of these things he spoke of seeing.

Where are those pictures? Why won’t they let the truth out? We know the truth of what the Germans did, what the Japanese did at Nanking and in the Koreas. We know about Vietnam, the Iran-Contra affair. We must know what has gone on.

As RatchetCat quoted the other day “Secrecy has no place in a democracy.”

This nation of the people deserves to know what it’s people it’s of are up to.

On the issue of money? Congressional investigations and all that good stuff.

But on the issue of mandating torture and the refusal to uphold the constitution? No one gives a fuck. No money in it. No one currently in power to discredit.

It’s not that they shouldn’t be investigating this. They should. But we need to own up to all our corruption, not just some of it, otherwise you’ll have a situation like AIG getting bailed out to save a select few (going after pay-for-play politics) while you have Lehman brothers fall and take all the world market down by a quarter (the torture photos getting leaked anyway, and then possibly witchhunts against the soldiers-of-the-line, but nothing about the men who thought it would be a good idea to make their flunkies torture “enemy combatants” for no good reason, and all sorts of ill-will against us for trying to hide this and the men who caused it).

The issue of torture is a wound to our great nation, and if we let it fester it will only rot us. The truth will come out, sooner or later, one way or another, just like it always does – usually when the men responsible have died, after living our their lives of luxury (or in the case of soldiers of the line who were the instruments, probably ending up in poverty and misery whether or not the issues are brought to light – there’s no way you can receive the proper mental care to rid yourself of having performed those actions).

But hey, the Democrats will get to look noble here, by saying “Hey, look, we got our own guys in trouble too! We let your baddest guys get away; they had a hard job to do. We’re so fair!”

Zeitgeist is a film about organized religion and the way they all relate, how 9/11 was a government conspiracy, and how the banking and financial institutions we’ve raised in our lands control us. It is possible that 9/11 was a government job, America has conducted false-flag operations before, witness the Gulf of Tonkin incident that got us into Vietnam (which, while not quite the literal definition of false-flag operation, was definitely a case of the US use a flimsy false pretext for it’s case for war, which is what 9/11 turned into for Iraq).

But what really gets me is the banking thing. Mind you, this movie was released in 2007, and was made well before the current dust-up that’s hurting our society. And the following quote from Thomas Jefferson:

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies… if the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency… The banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of their property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”

That was worth the price of admission alone. Which was free, because it’s on Google Video.

And yes, it is two hours long.

Just four months ago, the EU thought the EU economy would only contract 1.8 percent and the euro-zone only sink 1.9 percent this year.

Almunia [the EU's top economy official] said quarterly growth is unlikely to emerge until 2010, and that even then both the EU and the euro-zone will likely shrink 0.1 percent over the whole year — provided the banking sector recovers and world trade turns around.

Meanwhile, here at home everyone is crowing about the bottom being in, never a better time to buy, etc. etc. One of these predictions is going to be wrong. JP Morgan says there’s another half trillion in US bank losses coming. The IMF says another couple trillion in US mortgage losses (I guess a lot of that is held by foreign entities or non-bank investors). MegaBear Roubini’s worst-case scenario from 2007 has proven to have been a best-case scenario and wildly optimistic in retrospect.

And remember kids, this time last year we were in the “8th… maybe 9th inning of a credit crunch,” and “the bottom was in.”

Well, the bottom was in if you were underwater on your mortgage, only the bottom of the sinking US financial ship you’d been tossed off.