Well, we have a new executive branch division (for lack of a better word), called the "Council of Governors", that was just set up by executive order diktat. There will be ten governors (existing, this is a new role for them in addition to their normal governor action) who will sit on this council and coordinate homerland security and national guard and other assorted stuff.

Isn't that special. Note: we have ten FEMA districts already, perhaps this is why they chose ten as the number. Gee, I wonder what will be going down soon? Has anyone noticed anyone waving their hands around lately and asking why we don't have a "council of governors"? Did I miss the memo? WTF is this all about? Have we been lacking sufficient numbers of governmental appointees, komissars, overlords and plutocrats?

An interesting article where odds are given for a variety of perhaps possible and in some cases, probable events to occur during 2010. The author has agreed with me in one of his odds makings, about a coming food shortage and big price jump being probable, he gives it an 80% chance. I don't agree with his China economic odds, I think they are higher than his 20% rating, and that they will be increasinly a lot more insistent on getting their way due to their threat of being able to collapse the dollar "at will". They have the catbird seat in that having a command economy, they can shift customers to *whomever they choose*, including internally, because they got the real stuff, and everyone else..do not. That is their big, highly credible fallback ace in the hole.

  They also can just give better deals in goods to those areas they source raw materials and energy from, a totally robust enough market and large enough to ignore the US and Europe if push came to really hard shove. That's right, I said ignore, as in "go pound sand, sucker, and thanks for the free giant manufacturing base, have fun with YOUR tens of millions of out of work and annoyed people, higher energy costs, and worth-less-daily IOU paper!"

I keep reading all the time people saying china "needs" the US as a market and so on and dang, that was true 30 years ago, but please, get with the modern times and take a look at what has happend since then, this isn't true now, they GOT what they wanted, it is a fait accompli, it is past tense, they now have the means of production, the worlds largest ever created. The "two billion armpit" theory, the way they first sold this con, and I know some of you clearly remember that, has been debunked now by true facts modern day reality. They not only got a shipload of IOUs they are sitting on now from their exports, but as they were eating that deal raw, they doggedly kept shipping the machine tools and expertise needed to run and build same home, now they don't need much more, so the artificial need to sell us stuff at incredibly cheap prices to maintain that swap is *over* for the most part. You go way back and look, see what China was importing, not exporting but buying, importing, for the past few decades, and I have, you'll see what I am talking about. A to Z, the ability to make any-thing. That's what they have been spending on, and even then, buying as much as they needed, they still made enough to dramatically increase internal spending, buy up the raw materials and energy sources they need all over the planet, plus accumulate the biggest pile of IOUs from other folks ever. In 30 years they pulled that off. If you ain't scared, you ain't paying attention.

    The IOUs used to be at the top of the wealth heap, but now, they are at the bottom (where they belong) and if they need to sacrifice them, they can, and pull through it. Temporarily painful, but not near as painful as it would be to the IOU issuers when their supplies of most everything get cut off. I don't think they will need to, the western pols and businessdweebs who have been selling everyone out, selling the US and Europe down the river for short term gains just don't care, they are, and have been, *professional liars*, high stakes conmen, grifters, so, seeing as how this is their nature, they will keep their little rigged scam going as long as possible, and will kowtow to them and give them most anything they want. But even if there was resistance, say due to populist pressure and social unrest, China retains the "go pound sand, sucker, we don't care, keep your toilet paper, we got all the real stuff" backup option.

And all of those US and European black suited grinning grifters who wrangled this big huge wealth transference scam so they could skim a few points from it..they all think that when this big push comes to shove situation occurs that they can go just relocate and sit over there and be some sort of big poohbah or something.,,man..ain't a single damn one of them turkeys ever cracked a history book to see what really happens in similar situations. Here's a hint, it involves the locals going "we don't need you anymore, you were a traitor to your own people, untrustworthy to the extreme, plus,,your services no longer needed...you are now an unreliable liability not an asset.. bye". Pop to the head, some local fatcat takes over that operation.

Our understanding of how extensively inhabited the ancient Amazon was has been bumped up perhaps by as much as ten times due to satellite imagery. They have found hundreds of ancient settlements that show sophisticated structures, and they think there might now be as many as two thousand similar sites.

"Since these vanished societies had gone unrecorded, previous research had suggested that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support the extensive agriculture needed for such large, permanent settlements.

"We found that this picture is wrong," Schaan said. "And there is a lot more to discover in these places.""

As a note: Amazonian ancient agriculture made extensive use of "biochar". This is *perhaps* one way they were able to colonize those poor soil uplands areas.

    I have long recommended that instead of allowing the huge forests of the western US to just burn up in wildfires every year, year after year, the current "best practice" conservation measure they have, that instead we establish a new major industry of manufacturing this biochar with a lot of this now completely wasted wood and make it available to all our farmers at a fair but cheap as possible price, for the common good, to improve soil tilth for the long range, increase productivity and yields, revitalize older clapped out soils, and provide a lot more useful jobs.

    Right now, we, a very large number of "we", are headed towards an eventual ag disaster, because our soil tilth, the thing that keeps the soils healthy, that rich carbon mixture that helps things grow and helps to regulate water supplies as well, and acts as a major climate modifier, is on an almost perfect one way trip to being lost, as for all practical purposes it is being stripped from the rural areas and it just vanishes into the urban areas, where it becomes an unwanted and now too contaminated to reuse "product" that is mostly just hidden away/dumped someplace. In essence, most modern farming strips carbon from one area, ships it to another, and that's it..in ye olden days, this carbon was continually replaced in the same place it was needed all the time. That's why they were able to live without "modern" tech and burning petroleum and injecting chemicals, etc, and it is that simple. They maintained their carbon bank where it was needed.

    We really only have any sort of mass quantity food now from running a finitely available carbon-theft culture, which is barely sustainable due to the artificial fake out of adding a few expensive to produce chemicals, such as ammonia nitrogen, or expensive to mine, phosphates. Yes, these are some minimum nutrients needed that get spread in the very top level of the soil, and none of which are really a total replacement for the carbon tilth and rich microbial and fungal layers, the "sponge", that is continually lost.

  Our modern ag is a time bomb of epic fail. I can't tell you exactly when it will go off, but it *will* go off, that sucker is gonna blow, and it will *suck* food wise then. It will go from pretty darn good "appearing", which it is now, to zip and nada. Hmm, something like a speed freak has this apparent superhuman energy level..well they do, but not for long, and the destructive part of running in "turbo" mode becomes easy to see.

    You can only run massive soil depletion so long and try to keep it going with some getting more expensive daily fertilizers. Eventually, it just isn't going to work very well.

Biochar, because of its structure and how it must be placed deep, sequesters carbon quite nicely for centuries and is always there to give plants the boost they need, and to help maintain this vital soil tilth. This is a much better and much cheaper idea, with many more practical benefits, than-say- creating those millions of artificial co2 sucking phony "trees", then pumping that down some mine where it does no good forever, and so on, those sorts of "solutions" they keep pushing. We should learn from our own human history here.

Whenever there is some really important geopolitical stuff going down, or soon to be, the illuminated controlled propaganda press and government makes a big effort to get you looking someplace else, and they do that by throwing misdirection or fluff pieces (Brittney Jackson Woods stuff) up on the front page. Lately it has been "Yemen", one of those almost non countries that never hit any news headlines at all ..since the 60s almost. Lately -> "Look over here at Yemen! Really, place all your attention here!". Much frantic hand waving and so on.

This is like stage magicians diverting attention, pretty transparent. They've been doing this for centuries. Still works well for them, but we don't have to always look where they want us to look.

So, if they want us to look at Yemen, I say the real juicy stuff is elsewhere, so I takes me a look.

Hmm, I found this little gem. Now maybe I am wrong, but this is closer to what is really important lately. Pakistan energy crisis soon.

Oh ya, a nation of near 200 million folks, all sorts of quasi revolution going on there, dead of cold winter, a known nuclear power, people getting real annoyed with the daily US drone strikes inside, plus their own home grown bomber loons, their normal corrupt government and military "wipe the whole village out just for fun and training" guys, and they are *also* maybe going to have to shut down the oil and gasoline production in a week and change, basically because the loot doesn't exist to pay the bills and credit is tapped.

Middle of winter-no gasoline, no diesel, no heating oil.....and already on the verge of a big blow out anyway...but look at a couple hundred goat herders in Yemen.

Much hoopla around the latest apparent "by the numbers" stock market gains. Well that's nice...but they keep calling it proof of a "jobless recovery", which is supposedly "good". I am not really sure how this is suppposed to be good for everyone, but "they" claim it means "the economy is getting better!". Anyway, perhaps with a question mark, maybe this is an explanation how this came about.

This would also square nicely (along with some other reasons) with helicopter ben and pals really not wanting any auditing of the fed and why it was so hard and took so long to even get it out of committee.

All of you guys have great white collar skills (I am not worthy, I bow to your keyboard, microscope and soldering iron mad 5killz), so I thought you might want to see some skills from the other side of the economic equation (which is, blue collar job versus white collar job classification is clearly answered thusly: do you wash hands before or after taking a leak ;)).

I'm not as good as this guy, but here is an indication about how smooth you can get with a piece of equipment. Think of it as someone who has great videogame skills, but in real life 3d.

  I have done *some* of the stuff shown here, the backstand wheelie balancing and turning stuff mostly, with my utility tractor and my home made cargo box on the back, full of wood or rocks, etc. Can pretty much "lift off" and just tool right down the field and turn, etc OK. The pirouette with the hoe bucket balance point..not yet. Dang boss would fire me if he caught me trying...then he'd try it. heh heh heh He can probably do it thinking about it, saws him run a 114 thou lb (yes, it weighs that much) crawler and shave 1/4" to 1/2" chunks off of huge trees before with the blade. This huge machine and this *delicate* carving, just slick. That's how he cuts the major roots down before pushing over the whooper "tree quake" sized trees.

Anyway, you might like this vid Backhoe dance

He didn't show cross field "walking" which is really neat. Haven't found a vid showing that yet. Started hitting the 'tube looking for stuff when we were discussing the mars rovers and configurations and getting stuck, etc in one of the regular threads. Ran across this one to try and help make my point that the standard tried and true generic backhoe is one of the slickest point A to B wheeled vehicles that can also do a lot of useful work ever designed, and they should just make a scale model version for the next landers/rovers. None of this "getting stuck" nonsense or have to invent something all that radically new.

edit: Here's another one, Backhoe overclocking ;)

I'm trying to get a handle on the happy face production numbers from the government while we have a plethora of officially declared agricultural disaster areas all across the nation. I have a wide geographical range of friends and readers here, so I would appreciate just a general ball park over view of what you might know about this year's crop from your local area, just in general terms. I realize most of you aren't farmers, but might be aware of what the local scene is from local news reports and hearing either brags or complaints about local production, no matter the predominant type of local production. Trying to get a really broad over view on this.

    I was thinking a little about this before, and here is an article where the writer addresses it and thinks it is a looming food supply disaster and there are "tricks" being used to make it seem better than what it really is.

Now all I really know about is what I see in my area, which has been lack of haying in the fall and a lot of flooded destroyed corn fields, etc. My personal production as it is is down 50% this year, and what is saving us is we had stockpiled additional hay previously. But I can see my supply going fast, too, back to back drought years followed by floods has really cut into my surplus stored hay. I have enough for this year, but another year of reduced yields and rank pastures will involve making some serious decisions on what we can support or not, etc. I am also concerned over the next several years output because of the obvious soil surface stripping of tilth due to excessive rains and runoff. I can *see* it got damaged. I am seeing a lot of naked clay soil that used to have at least a modicum of nice organic matter/tilth cover, and I can see the now lower grass production because of it. Much worse than last winter. Now we can compensate,(as soon as it gets dry enough to actually work the fields and not get stuck) because we have massive truck loads of chicken litter available plus a spiffy new spreader truck, but this isn't the case with a lot of farmers, even if they could afford to buy it.

  There is a limited x-supply nationally, and if you haven't been following it, the chicken industry as a whole has dropped a lot of production and closed a lot of plants and farms, or dropped fast flock turn-arounds for a bigger no production time interval to keep the farms open, which reduces supply to get prices back up into the "make some pitiful profit" range.

  This shortage of additional fertilizer, which is commonly used on both pastures and row crops all around the nation (not as much as chemical fertilizers but still a huge amount), will mean most likely, even if the rains get more back to normal, there will be a huge increase in the need for supplementary artificial fertilizer next year to get yields back up.

Thanks for any local input in advance.

There is a hunt on to find more of, and more about, a certain rare mushroom because of some astounding potential medical benefits.

The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee has filed suit in DC against the Federal Reserve bank to force them to come up with all their records about gold market manipulations, international gold swaps,etc. They have refused to do so, so far, citing "trade secrets" exemptions under the freedom of information act.

http://www.gata.org/node/8192

And now it is time on sprockets..not for zee danse, but to test your amazing Randi beating psychic powah skills!

Predictions for 2010, open, any subject ya want, from politics to geophysical events to "the market" to your best guess as to the hot unreleased yet new gadget, anything at all, as long as "it" hasn't happened yet, but you think it will.

And if anyone remembers, we will drag this back up next year to see who did well.

I'm done predicted out over the past year, so let's see what ya'all can come up with.

Interesting survey/poll that shows government workers (as a majority percentage) think the economy is getting better, while people in the private sector think (know) it is getting worse. I guess you can maintain a different perspective if you have an almost guaranteed job where the money to pay for it is taken from all your neighbors by official diktat.

I am for "term limits" for all governmental workers. No pensions, ten years in service max, then back to the private sector with all the private sector risks. I think that would do more to help the economy and our political makeup than anything. This includes politicians and day in and day out bureaucrats.

I think anyone who has been paying attention would agree that a lot of the government produced economic indicators have been severely cooked over the past..long time now, to make things look better than what they really are. The subject of this interview has a well respected website called shadowstats.com that recreates the released figures and translates them back closer to reality, to what they should be before enron and **AA accounting took over in the Federal government and so on. Here is a short Q and A with him on what to expect with the economy, about what I have been saying for three years* now, here and before on Technocrat.

*more like decades, but I can't throw a link to that to prove it. I knew we were hosed when they started the Wall Street war on domestic manufacturing, to be replaced with credit/inflation and "services" to..credit. You can only get away with calling an IOU produced wealth for some time, and I think we hit that maximum level a few years ago now. What you see today is spin and damage control efforts, along with the fast rise of the "security for a few fatcats" police state "investment", said investment they take FROM you to benefit THEM.

Oh ya, tangibles still rule. You don't have to be religious at all to grok that "just weights and measures" is a better and more fair idea than the thumb on the scale and the grifter's spiel and promises model that we have now as official economic policy. All those conmen are in the business of selling you *vapor*, giving you the magic beans for the cow "trade", no different from the street corner three card monte hucksters, so never expect them to say or do anything contrary to that model.

You know the "no fly" list? This is the list of "suspected terrorists" who are not allowed to fly, or subjected to extra scrutiny etc. Pretty much anyone on the list (I forget the number but it is in the hundreds of thousands by all reports) is presumed guilty by default, and it is near impossible to get off the list if once accused. It is a punishment, without benefit of a trial, or public accusation until you try to fly. You cannot face your accusers in a court of law, nor be judged by your peers, or even be given the information of why and how and by whom you got on this list, so perhaps you could dispute it. In short, it is an "enemies of the state" list, pretty close to being totally tyrannical, just one step away from them being proactive like they are in some nations with "disappearing" people, with the death squads. I mean, that is *exactly* what comes, sooner or later but it always comes, after they start compiling these "lists". Still in force today during this latest regime rule. To *me* one of the more blatantly unconstitutional and just plain wrong and dangerous things out there now as regards this government.

Now they have a senate bill which will place these unaccused convicted in advance "enemies of the state" on the "no guns" list as well. The "star chamber" military junta enemies of the state list.

Now the bill technically doesn't mention the "no fly" list, but that is exactly what the no fly list is, secretly accused/suspected/annoyed the wrong person/mistaken identity list all inclusive, labeled as terrorists or suspected terrorists, so this is presumably the list they would use for this new act, if it passes and gets signed into law. And again, just like the no flying list, the people who find themselves on it can be denied for any reason, etc, at best, perhaps get a total redacted out document which still won't explain what they are accused of, etc. Just a big fat "no" in other words. No trial, no nothing, just the government says no and you are SOL.

One of the few main reasons I totally reject flying anymore on the commercial airliners, I just slap refuse to countenance that illegal charade. I wouldn't hand them people a penny for a round the world first class flight, nor be subjected to that ridiculous security theater and boot licking and groveling you have to do just to travel. I had wished tens of millions of my fellow citizens had done similar, just boycotted air travel, but it seems it is accepted now, along with that star chamber list, and I think that is a dang crying shame, and ..well,,,shameful.

http://www.thomas.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:S.1317:

Savvy investors, stay tuned to the risk of social unrest and make a killing!

That's right, taser stocks, tear gas manufacturers, plastic "detainee" cuffs, and don't forget to go long on black shinola jackboot polish! Security! Can't have any of those uppity homeless out of work street people interfering with the "viewscape" as you get in and out of your limo! Some of them actually smell bad, too, they just won't take a bath, and never clean their clothes! Disgusting wretches. To think, they demand food when they refuse to pay for it! And housing! Well, they had their chance when they refused our more than generous work offers, set at the agreed upon global minimum wage of $2.50 per easy 14 hour day. *More* than generous, we are being robbed blind by these incessant outrageous labor demands and we lose tremendous shareholder value. This is simply unacceptable and our crack risk analysis and intelligence people are warning us of this "unrest". So take advantage of the tip!

  Good thing we have our security forces well prepared to deal with these insurgent terrorists, or should we just say, worthless lazy bums.