I couldn't make this stuff up.

 

On September 26th, customers of Wachovia recieved the following letter from their local branch. I have printed the entire letter, since I don't have a link for it:

 

 

And 48 hours later, with percision timing the swiss would envy, the entire bank is gone. I could swear I've seen this movie before.

 

Things are really accelerating now. There are global precious metal shortages, banks are falling upon eachother like ravening wolves, and central banks are cranking out dollars at a rate of a trillion dollars per day. And to cap it off, the Dow experienced the largest single-day loss in history (777 points). And the week is only beginning.

 

If you have ever wondered what a global systemic economic breakdown would look like, enjoy your front row seats.

 

Talk about anti-climactic.

 

As more fact become available, this story just becomes less interesting. As it turns out, the pirates thought they were hijacking a commercial shipment. Rice or car stereos or something, who knows. Imagine their surprise when they opened up the cargo hold and instead of finding boxes of vibrators and dvd players, they found these tanks?

 

Well they seem to have used up all of their lead time. The ship is now under observation by the U.S. Navy. I'm not really sure how it's America's business to secure an Ukranian ship sailing under a Belize flag, carrying Russian tanks destined for Kenya and hijacked in Somalia, but one can imagine that the hellfire missiles won't be far behind.

 

And these stupid pirates never bothered to offload the tanks! What's up with that? The last I heard, they were attempting to ransom the tanks for 20 million dollars. At this point, the Kenyian government is certainly not going to pay the ransom. No, it's far cheaper to hire Blackwater to go in and kill all of the pirates.

 

So let us enumerate the stupidity:

 

1) They didn't unload the ship RIGHT AWAY

2) They took it to Hobyo, another known pirate hideout

3) They attempted to ransom it

4) They are STILL SITTING THERE!

 

This could have been a really entertaining story, but instead, it's just going to end up as another bunch of dead guys in some god forsaken desert. Ho hum.

 

The dictionary defines balls as follows:

 

balls, Slang: Vulgar.

a.	boldness; courage; brashness.

 

Well I think the dictionary needs to be amended. They should put a picture of the guy who came up with this plan next to the definition, because whatever else you want to say about him and his men, you have to admit: Their balls must be 35 kilograms of solid brass. First, the excerpt:

 

 

 

Now Somalia isn't so much a country, as it is a collection of mostly autonomous fiefdoms. Independantly owned and operated, as they say. Oh sure, they have a "central government" seated in Mogadishu. They have a President. They even have representitives who sit on various international organizations like the UN, the Arab League and the African Union. But in reality, it's what John Robb would call an hollow state. The "government" is virtually powerless to govern. Not only do the various autonomous zones have their own standing armies (which they use against eachother and against the state), the government had to "rule in exile" for a number of years.

 

In addition to this (because it's not bad enough yet, right?) there is a thriving pirate community which the government has acknowleged it is powerless to control. This latest move is another in a fairly long series of increasingly bold and outrageous actions since the "government" "reclaimed" the capital in late 2006.

 

But this hijacking completely redefines balls.

 

It's one thing to think you can get away with something like this, but it's a totally different matter to know you can get away with it. And the (slightly disconcerting) fact of the matter is, they probably will. Who's going to stop them? The Americans can't or won't because they are otherwise engaged. The Russians can't because nearly every ship they have is rusting away in Vladivostok. Not that it would matter, because chances are good that the ship has already been offloaded anyway.

 

The only other alternative is an airstrike. And let's be honest here: Finding a brown tank in a sea of brown sand is a lot harder than it sounds, even for those fancy German optics on everyone's spy satellites. I mean, we know pirates control the "port" city of Eyl (a fairly generous description, since it's 7km inland and has no permanent mooring facilities), but there's no garentee that's where they went. For all we know, they scuttled the ship out from under the tanks and rowed them to shore on inflatible rafts. With a potential payoff like this, the possibilities are endless.

 

And really, what are a bunch of pirates going to do with 33 MBT's, anyway? Not much use for them on the high seas. No, they are going to sell them to the highest bidder. And who do you think that will be? Best guess is the Islamic Courts Union, but there's another possibility: They might turn around and sell them to the Somali government. Wouldn't that be an interesting twist? I can picture the conversation now...

 

 

And that, my friends, is balls.

 

It looks like I scored a hat trick. As the final installment of my St. Patrick's Day Massacre prediction, it appears as though Washington Mutual is no more.

 

In a not-so-well disguised threat to congress, the FDIC pulled the plug on WaMu today. This marks the biggest bank failure in human history, and guess who gets to pick through the bones? JP Morgan. Again. That's no mystery, really. It has long been suggested that JPM would be the last bank standing. The threat, however, is simple:

 

Approve the bailout, or every bank in the country will fall.

 

It's no coincidence this happened the day before Congress was to vote on the big $700B "bailout package" (really the final looting of the treasury by the private sector). These kinds of takeovers are planned months in advance. In order for the FDIC to move in like this on a Thursday and have the doors open on the next day, they had to have had this plan assembled since...well...March. Since they have obviously been planning for this for a while, the choice of date can have only 1 purpose: to influence the vote.

 

Forget stocking up on gold; you might want to stock up on bullets. Yes, it's that serious.

 

If you're into pain, that is.

 

Glenn Beck wrote an excellent piece on the subprime clusterfuck that is currently well on it's way to grinding the global financial system into dust. The full article is here, but I'll post a brief excerpt:

 

"You visit every bank in town and, using your piles of Tickle Me Elmo dolls as collateral (which, of course, you purchased with money you didn't have) you get as much new capital as possible.

Soon that money is also gone. Even your friends and family refuse to give you any more loans. At the end of your rope, you go to your town council, which gives you a "bridge loan" to get you through the next few months (something that makes your Furby-selling competitors extremely upset).

Unfortunately, no matter how much you borrow, there's still one nagging little problem: No one wants to buy your stupid Tickle Me Elmo dolls anymore.

The longer you wait, the less they're worth. You sell some for pennies on the dollar, but pretty soon you can't even do that. Then things get even worse: News breaks that China is poisoning some Tickle Me Elmos before shipping them to the United States. Now your dolls are not just out of favor, they're toxic. You literally can't even give them away."

He seems to have a pretty good handle on the situation, but he has neglected to something important. You aren't the only one with a pile of worthless Tickle Me Elmos in the basement. Everyone has a basement full of the damn things.

So when you finally do go out of business, your pile of toxic tickles gets added to everyone else's pile. Of course, you can't throw those stupid puppets away (they're toxic, remember?), so when your creditors come to collect your cash register, house and car, they have to take on that stack of toxic tickles as well.

And round and round we go, until there's only 1 ogranization capable of absorbing that mountain of radioactive rayon: The federal government.

People used to laugh when I said America was descending into fascism and martial law.

 

 

 

 

Still think I'm crazy?

One of my regular readers sent me an email recently. I won't publish the entire contents for the sake of his privacy, but the subject was a curious development in the motorcycle underground. Apparently, a trend among some of the larger clubs (Hell's Angels in particular) has been developing, where recruits are no longer required to own a motorcycle. Naturally, this premise sounds absurd on it's face: A "biker gang" without bikes? Sounds kind of silly, doesn't it?

 

Well it turns out this trend is more well-concieved than it would first appear. This comes from an article on majorityrights.com. It seems that in Denmark, the Hell's angels were becoming victims of their own organizational structure. Since it is a well regimented organization (complete with with clear command and control systems and lines of heirarchy) and highly visible within their community (due to the club colours and obviously the motorcycles), the full weight of law enforcement was leveraged against them easily.

 

As a result, attrition had begun to set in. Many members were in prison, or at the very least, well known to the police. This attrition had allowed immigrant gangs (particularly muslim gangs, who are neither highly visible or nearly as structured) to expand rapidly to fill the void left in the criminal underworld.

 

This is not an unique development in the underworld, either. About a year ago, I had stumbled across an article about the Salvadorian gang, MS-13 were beginning to discourage new members from getting the traditional tattoos, in an effort to more easily move among their communities and infiltrate (and subvert) society.

 

What does it mean?

 

The net result here, is that criminal organizations are beginning to realize that high visibility and rigid heirarcies are a bad thing. In essence, they have taken lessons learned by the insurgency in Iraq, and begun to apply them to their own activities. In these times, when individuals can be tracked and eliminated invisibly (through advanced surveillence technology and remote weapons systems), the ability to become invisible and to act independantly has become one of the most important tools available.

 

And that is why biker gangs no longer require members to ride bikes, or even wear the colours any more.

Not only have I lost the ability to keep up with the bad news which seems to be coming in at the top of every hour, I've also lost the ability to keep up with the number of times I've successfully predicted the future.

 

First, there's the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which I predicted way back in March. Not only did Lehman Brothers go down today, but so did Merrill Lynch. Not only that, but it appears that there may be trouble at Washington Mutual, as well. If the federal takeover of Fannie and Freddie were a category 3 hurricane, Lehman all by itself is a category 6.

 

And if that wasn't bad enough, it looks like Pakistan has...reacted poorly...to US airstrikes within their country. It seems that, rather than tribal hillbillies taking pot shots at US helicopters, it's now the Pakistani army. It should also be noted that the article linked there has been censored. Fortunately, I have the original article here:

 

 

Setting aside for a moment the blatant rewriting of history taking place under the watchful eye of our major news outlets, I find it...somewhat troubling that the Pakistani government has apparently changed it's mind. Unfortunately, I predicted this as well.

I would like to take a break from prognosticating for a moment to reveal the results of this study at John Hopkins University.

 

Apparently, the study found that women who binge drink are more likely to engage in unsafe sex, including having multiple partners and engaging in anal sex. Thank you very much government scientists. You uncovered yet another deep, dark mystery that every guy has been aware of for at least 6 thousand years. And how many tax dollars got flushed on this amazing discovery? I'm surprised there weren't any "field experiments". Let me guess, that's for the next study, right?

 

But on the bright side for you guys out there, you now have confirmation that cramming booze down some woman's throat is a scientifically valid method of getting laid.

 

I guess the only real question is "How do I get the government to pay for the drinks?"