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Experts at the Royal Meteorological Society are now attempting to make it official by naming it ‘Asperatus’ after the Latin word for ‘rough’.

For the technical details from the meterologists in the Uk Click Here

 by Tom Whipple

Our peak oil crisis is morphing into a dollar crisis. Despite record
inventories, and millions of barrels sitting in anchored tankers, oil
prices continue to rise. Earlier this week the average price of gasoline
rose to $3 in California and many are predicting that the rest of us
will be seeing $3 gasoline later this year.

While analysts are moaning that $70 oil is not justified by supply and
demand, it seems that oil has become a favored store of value as massive
US deficits eat away at the value of the dollar. The dollar goes down;
oil goes up. For now there is so much excess capacity that geopolitical
developments, stockpile reports and run-of-the-mill oil news has only a
minor effect on oil prices.

Much of the recent run up in prices was based on this spring’s “green
shoots rally,” in which many professed to see signs that the recession
would soon be over, and that increased demand would send oil prices ever
higher. The rally, which had its origins in a change in accounting
standards allowing insolvent banks to pretend they were doing well for a
while longer, seems to be slowing and may be coming to a close.

While the psychology of the equity markets is in a world of its own,
most analysts, who don’t draw a paycheck from the financial services
industry, are saying that the tough times are only beginning. Some who
have studied the Great Depression are talking of a downturn lasting a
decade or more. Should this sentiment become widespread and the equity
markets start to move down again, it is an open question as to what
happens to oil prices. Can a falling dollar offset reduced prospects for
oil consumption from faltering economies?

The underlying cause for the dollar’s weakness is the massive deficit
the U.S. government is running, and the continuing sale of billions of
dollars worth of treasury securities. This in turn has left foreign
investors worried that the value of their U.S. treasury holdings will
one day be worth much less than they invested. For the foreseeable
future, these investors have nowhere else to turn, for the minute they
stop buying or try to sell significant quantities of U.S. obligations,
they would immediately crash the dollar and their worst fears would be
realized.

For now, China, Russia and other large holders of U.S. treasury
securities are trying to make the best of a bad situation. They are
talking among themselves about how they might transition to a new world
reserve currency and are slowly reducing purchases of additional U.S.
treasury securities.

For the immediate future, Washington has little choice other than to
issue unprecedented amounts of debt. Although the administration assures
us it will start cutting the deficit someday, this is tied to an
improved economic situation that seems problematic. Despite massive
intervention and purchase of treasury securities by the Federal Reserve,
U.S. interest rates are already moving up, with the rate on the average
30-year mortgage loan increasing from 4.86 to 5.59 percent in the last
few weeks, thereby choking off much refinancing and some new loans.
Another couple of jumps like this, and the U.S. real estate industry
will be having a lot more trouble.

If the U.S. dollar continues to fall, there is reason to believe that
increasing amounts of oil will be purchased as a hedge and that the
price of oil will continue to rise. The increase in oil prices does not
have to be as fast, nor go as high as it did last year to create serious
economic problems. The U.S. economy is in worse shape than it was 18
months ago, and is far more susceptible to the damage that would be
wrought by sustained exposure to $3 or $4 gasoline. Every 10-cent
increase in the price of gasoline takes $40 million dollars a day away
from other consumer purchases. The increase in gasoline prices over the
last six months is now draining an additional $400 million a day from
consumers’ pockets. For every cent gasoline prices increase, sales of
something else go down by $4 million dollars each day.

As strange as it may seem, the peak oil crisis, which has been focused
on geologic constraints to oil production, supply and demand,
geopolitical threats and inadequate investment, seems to be morphing
into an issue of how much debt the U.S. Treasury can sell and still keep
interest rates under control.

We can be certain that the U.S. Congress and government will not stand
by and watch oil price increases driven by a falling dollar wreck the
economy. As we saw last summer, there will be calls to break the
dollar’s link to oil by restricting or even banning speculation. How
well this will work in a globalized world is anybody’s guess. Unless
there is worldwide agreement, activities banned in the U.S. could
continue in Europe, the Middle East or Asia.

The more traditional constraints on world oil production – geologic,
geopolitical and inadequate investment – are likely to come into play
within the next three or four years, no matter the course of the current
recession. Right now there is a surplus of production capacity, and
indeed, already produced oil which is sitting around looking for
consumers. If for one reason or another the recession deepens over the
next year or so, then these surpluses are likely to grow.

It would be a great irony if oil prices were to continue increasing in
the midst of substantial surpluses and falling demand.

/Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the
peak oil issue for several years./

Maybe Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty is just trying to make the many thousands of people who have lost their jobs feel better.  Comparing the current global collaspe to recessions in the past is a bit of a stretch.  The economic policies implemented by previous US governments over the past 8 years, based on the phoney "Chicago" school of economics theory, to which Mr. Flahety and Harper subscribe cannot be compared to any historical recession.

…

"Liberal finance critic John McCallum, a former Royal Bank chief economist, said the comparison has little utility.

"I don’t see the point … we’re lucky because we’re not starving?" Mr. McCallum said. "Next he will be telling us that Canadians are fortunate because they are better off than during the 19th-century Irish potato famine."

Read the full article at the Globe and Mail

Irish film makers got behind the scenes of a CIA-organized coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002.  The film is 1hr 14 minutes long, but well worth watching.

It’s on the "Video" page, so click it on the menu above

Watch the video on how GM lost a 2-3 year lead in electric vehicles, and more incompetent decisions by their high paid executives.  Their opinion was Toyota would lose a bundle on the hybrid.

It’s on the "Videos" page.  Click the link above.

Makes one wonder if GM should really be getting those massive bailout funds.

An interesting viewpoint.

World Beat
by JOHN FEFFER | Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Vol. 4, No. 5

Here’s the plot of Pirates of the Caribbean 4. The film opens with Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow dropping anchor in New York harbor. He descends on Wall Street with his mates and, after a quick costume change at Brooks Brothers, storms the boardrooms of Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and other major firms. They don’t need sabers to rake in the haul. Jack’s a clever pirate. He takes advantage of the tools at hand. Applying mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, Jack seizes billions of dollars in booty. He distributes huge bonuses to his crew for a job well done. And just before the government steps in to clean up the mess, the pirates scramble back to their ship and set sail.

Quick question: Why are more than a dozen of the world’s navies converging on Somalia to battle pirates there instead of sailing into New York to capture the Wall Street pirates? After all, CEOs benefited from over $20 billion in taxpayer money using tax loopholes, according to an IPS study. Surely the global economy would be made more secure by forcing former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, who doled out $4 billion in executive bonuses even as his company was collapsing, to walk the gangplank than by cracking down on the bands of privateers in the Horn of Africa.

"Pirate," like "terrorist," has always been a slippery term to define. Just as the British considered George Washington a terrorist rather than a freedom fighter, they portrayed John Paul Jones as a pirate rather than a naval hero. After the Revolutionary War, the shoe was on the other foot when the United States fought several pitched battles with the "Barbary pirates." These fearsome vessels, however, were not really pirate ships. Rather, they worked on behalf of several Barbary states that were part of the Ottoman empire. As Frank Lambert writes in The Barbary Wars, Algeria, Tripoli, and Morocco preferred traditional commerce and resorted to piracy largely because European powers refused to open their markets. If terrorism is the weapon of those on the political margins, piracy is the weapon of those on the economic margins.

Fast forward to the latest piracy news. The newspapers have been full of stories about gangs preying on vessels passing through the Suez Canal and near the Somali coast. They seized dozens of ships last year – including a Saudi tanker with $100 million worth of crude oil that yielded a $3 million ransom – with the help of fast boats, GPS, and submachine guns. The pirates are currently negotiating for a comparable ransom before releasing a Ukrainian vessel that has 33 Russian tanks, heavy artillery, and grenade launchers.

As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Rubrick Biegon points out, the Somali pirates did not start out as Jack Sparrows. "Piracy in Somalia began because traditional coastal fishing became difficult after foreign fishing trawlers depleted local fish stocks," he writes in Somalia Piracy and the International Response. "Desperate fishermen started attacking trawlers until the trawler crews fought back with heavy weapons, leading the local fishermen to turn to other types of commercial vessels. The pirates prefer to call themselves the Somali ‘coast guard,’ noting that, prior to the recent spate of hijackings, they organized themselves to defend their communities from overfishing and, according to several accounts, to protect Somalia’s coastline from toxic dumping by foreign vessels."

Piracy blossomed in Somalia after Ethiopia invaded in 2006 with U.S. support and deposed the Islamic Courts Union. "Under the Courts, there was literally no piracy," observes one maritime security expert. "While many Somalis disapproved of some of the more fundamentalist ways of the original courts, most felt that they were well organized, disciplined, and effective civil administrators who had certainly provided Somalia with its first semblance of order and leadership since 1991," write FPIF contributors Gerald LeMelle and Michael Stulman in Africa Policy Outlook 2009.

The anti-piracy campaign, argues FPIF contributor Francis Njubi Nesbitt, is a giant red herring. "Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in December 2006, backed by the United States, sparked an Islamist resistance that led to thousands of civilian deaths, displaced over a million people, and depopulated the capital, Mogadishu," he writes in Somalia: Waiting for Obama. "But instead of focusing on the aftermath of this crisis and helping foster a peace process, the United States, European Union, and other international actors are engaged in the more dramatic and media-friendly anti-piracy campaign."

Hussein Yusuf disagrees. "Somalia poses a grave danger to the United States and the Horn of Africa today," the FPIF contributor writes in What’s Next for Somalia. "Despite the U.S. ‘Global War on Terror,’ piracy in the Gulf of Aden threatens the supply of oil and commercial trade to the West. Islamic extremists threaten the stability of this region more than ever." Yusuf and Nesbitt offer contrasting interpretations in their strategic dialogue on this topic.

Everyone agrees, however, that the pirates of the Somali coast have raked in quite a lot of money, somewhere around $30 million in 2008. That’s more than a few pearls and pieces of eight. But compare that to the bonuses that Wall Street employees took home last year: $18.4 billion.

At least the Somali pirates were good at their jobs.

This video was created for the AARP U@50 video contest and placed second.

It is based on the Argentinian Political Advertisement “The Truth” by RECREAR

The two songs are
Mind things
Our Lifes, Our Destinies

If this placed 2nd, 1st must really be something!

BRIAN LAGHI
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
January 30, 2009 at 9:00 PM EST

OTTAWA — Canadians say Stephen Harper was motivated by political survival and would never have unveiled this week’s multibillion-dollar stimulus budget were it not for opposition pressure.

A new Globe and Mail-CTV poll also found that, despite moderate support for the budget, most Canadians continue to hold Mr. Harper responsible for the crisis atmosphere that prompted it and believe he hasn’t fundamentally changed.

“Canadians think Harper has done this with a gun to his head,” said Peter Donolo, a partner with the Strategic Counsel, the firm that conducted the poll. “They feel this wouldn’t have happened had the opposition not held his feet to the fire.”

Is anyone surprised?

Read the results here