NCIS San Diego... see PENCILS being PUSHED !

If they made an NCIS TeeVee show based on what they actually do, it would be like watching paint dry...

except even more boring.

nation of fear

Children should not ride bikes for fear of injury or abduction.

Al Qaida hangin' in Queens. Anti-terror agents raid a home looking for bomb making materials. Find none. Why? Because a dude suspiciously drove a rental car from Denver to New York.

Sez the Senate: Go ahead, bring yer gun on the train.

Go to college, get raped. (UPDATE: see below)

Bring on the Tea Baggers.
------------------------
* - UPDATE 9/20/09:
not rape... lies. Aaaaaah yes. The REAL STORY here.

no green shoots

look here.

12% of the worlds container ships are sitting dormant in Malaysia rusting away.

1 out of 8 big freighters just sitting there in the water. They expect it might rise to 1 in 4 within a few years if the global economic situation dips further.

National To Do List, 09/14/2009

1. Fix decades-long broken Health Care System

2. Bring back Glass-Steagall Act, appoint National Finance Cop and other Wall Street and Finance reforms

3. Start national debate on Social Security reform.

4. Enact further temporary tax cuts to help growth and prevent Double Dip Recession. Warn of needed tax hikes starting in 2-3 years.

5. End ill advised, artificially induced war in Iraq.

6. Get in big uproar over Kanye West's drunken MTV Video Music Awards behavior.

information is NOT a crime

Except in Britain it is.

The Home Gunsmith, a website disseminating information for homemade firearms. Now dormant. Killed by the British Government. It's owner, Phil Luty, thrown in a jail cell somewhere. No one knows. The British Government is not saying.

You can imprison and kill bodies, but you can't kill ideas.

Information has a life of it's own. The site lives on:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070317052350/http://www.thehomegunsmith.com/

The books are available as PDFs in those corners of the internet where files and information roam free... there for you to access should you need it, so that THIS doesn't ever happen again.

double-dip recession

The experts weigh in.

Pimco manages $850 Billion in investment. Their CEO, Mohamed El-Erian, sees a 50% chance of a double-dip in 2010.

NYU economist Nouriel Roubini sees a small but rising probability for another dip.

Pimco Chief Investment Officer Bill Gross sees the possibility rising if the government pulls back too swiftly on stimulus programs.

We'll have to eventually pay for all this stimulus money. But if you crank taxes up, you discourage growth. Don't crank up taxes fast enough and the US dollar is worthless in 10 years. It's a precarious high wire act with a hungry bloodthirsty lion at each end of the line.

Richard Rahn of the Cato Institute breaks it down very clearly:

"As interest rates rise, as they must, and international commodity and other prices rise as the global economy recovers, real, after-tax, inflation and tax-adjusted disposable incomes will continue to fall. This means real consumption can rise temporarily but will likely fall again, giving the United States a double-dip recession."

Welcome to your lost decade, America.

CNBC, a leading whorish cheerleader for Conspicuous Greed has a completely different take; one filled with gumdrop wishes and endless wealth that can be found at the end of the rainbow. There you'll find wads of C-notes flowing from the golden star-hole of a Magical Unicorn's anus.

Here's some CNBC video. Let's see what steps out of the Clown Car:

unemployment numbers, august 2009

Less job loss claims, but higher unemployment rate?

WHUT?

Last month's report with the record job losses minus the underemployed and no-longer-looking-for-jobs made the the rate dip one-tenth of a percent. Now this month's report has a different spin of Voodoo

"The pace of U.S. job losses hit a one-year low last month but the unemployment rate jumped to a 26-year high of 9.7 percent"

So how does lower job losses this time cause the unemployment rate to go up? Mystery.

Include the UNDER-employed in the figure (crap part time jobs due to necessity... BLS's "U-6" statistic) and you get the real depressing figures:

"a record 16.8 percent in August from 16.3 percent in July"

I won't even go into the stats for minorities, young Americans (18-29)... and worst of all: young blacks and hispanics.

But if you want to gaze at the depressing reality yourself, look HERE.

The last time it was this grim, I was the young minority.