Dreamtwister

This one comes right out of the Bush (the elder) files.

 

Let's hop into the way back machine. All the way back to 1993. In one of his last acts as President, he bought between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks from a refiner, shipped them to Fort Knox, and had them gold plated. Keep in mind that at the time, gold was trading between $320 and $390/oz. That's a fraud of between $166.4 and $234 billion. Today, it would be at least $613.6 billion worth of fake gold.

 

Have no fear though, my idiot man-child readers who still think this is a left/right thing. Because this happened in late 1993. Some of the Tungsten blanks weren't shipped and plated until 1994 - Clinton's watch. In fact, only 644,000 bars of fake gold ended up in Fort Knox at the time. The rest (between 656,000 and 856,000 bars) ended up for sale on the open market as real gold.

 

And this is where the Chinese come in.

 

It appears that a "significant quantity" (between 5,600 and 5,700 bars) of the gold in their Hong Kong vaults at the London Bullion Market are in fact gold-plated tungsten frauds.

 

They have got to be PISSED. Maybe that's why Obama was over there, recieving his brown badge of courage from President Hu. I don't know what they have planned as a response to this outrage, but I imagine it will be swift, brutal, and efficient. The Chinese don't screw around when it comes to financial crimes:

 

 

But if you can believe it, this isn't even the worst of it!

 

In 2003, a new financial instrument was created for buying and selling gold. It is called an "Electronically Traded Fund". Literally "digital gold". Gold could now be bought and sold again and again, without ever leaving the vault - and thus never be exposed to testing that would unveil the fraud. As if the ability to literally create gold for the market with a few keystrokes and lease gold held in their trust to third parties for profit wasn't eggregious enough on it's own, the SPDR Gold Trust (NYSE: GLD) says this in it's prospectus:

 

 

Translation: "The stuff we have...it looks like gold, but we don't actually know if it is gold. And we don't have to know. If it turns out it's not gold, it's your ass."

 

Where do I sign up?

 

And it's not like nobody was trying to stop this from happening. In 2004, the offices of Stuart Smith, then vice president of operations at the New York Mercantile Exchange were raided by the NYPD on the authority of the Manhattan District Attorney. You see, NYMEX is responsible for tracking every gold transaction conducted on the exchange. If there was a fraud underway, NYMEX records would have revealed it. Interestingly enough, Smith took an "administrative leave" from the exchange and vanished down the memory hole. Of course, the investigation died as well.

Shocked and dismayed. No, really. This is a complete surprise.

 

 

It seems that as many as 170,000 doses of H1N1 vaccine in canada had to be recalled after 6 people that we know of suffered from severe allergic reactions. I can't say for sure exactly what caused the allergic reactions, but since flu vaccines are cultured in eggs, and egg allergies are pretty common, that is where I would put my money.

 

Of course the recall is an utterly meaningless gesture at this point, since nearly the entire batch has already been administered. And naturally, Health Canada persued this matter with it's typical vigour, issuing a public advisory immediately upon recieving notice of the recall.

 

Just kidding. It actually took 6 DAYS for word of this to trickle out into the blogsphere. As far as I am aware, Health Canada still hasn't issued a warning.

 

I'll tell you one thing. If I were one of GSK's victims, I'd be considering legal action right about now. I mean, this is Canada we're talking about, not the United States. Down there, the pharmaceutical companies were given blanket immunity from prosecution. But not here. Here, we can still sue. Of course, the Canadian Government has offered to pick up the tab for GSK if they lose, so really these victims would just be suing their neighbors and themselves.

 

But at least we know the government and the pharmaceutical corporations have our best interests at heart. Right?

 

Right?

I remember joking about this a few years ago with some of my friends.

 

It seems there was a...shall we say colourful individual with whom we were aquainted. It seems he believed that "they" were putting microchips in his soft drinks. Of course, we all laughed when he told us this. He really was quite indignant. Needless to say, we don't hear from him very much these days. So much more's the pity, since his paranoid delusions of the 90's have now become the reality of the 00's:

 

 

 

The µ-chip, or mu-chip as it is more ironically known (mu is a Japanese word that means "nothing", which this chip quite clearly is something), measures 0.4mm x 0.4mm. To put that into perspective, it's smaller than a grain of table salt. It is capable of storing a 128 bit Universal Unique ID, or enough unique ID numbers to catelogue 3x10^38 ( That's 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) people. To put it another way, That is enough to catelogue every human being who has ever lived...ever. Or to put that another way, if we began tagging people right now, we would not run out of unique ID's for another 833 undecillion years. That's about 200 trillion trillion times longer than the total estimated age of the universe. for all practical purposes, we could tag every human born from now until the end of time.

 

While it probably won't be finding it's way into your can of 7up any time soon, it could easily be delivered in a variety of methods, including intramuscular injection:

 

I'm sorry we laughed, Gord (not his real name).

Do you hear it? That's the sound of every employer in the United States stampeding to the fire exits. Check out this animation:

 

 

So this is the much-touted "recovery"? I think the unemployment levels in Somalia are lower than this. And do you know what the worst part about this animation is? The most recent data is from September. That's right, the last 2 months aren't even included! And of course, this is just the "official" picture, using the government's cooked statistics. For a real accounting of just how bleak the situation is, we need to calculate the unemployment rate the way it used to be calculated before before Clinton:

 

 

That's right. More than 1 in 5 Americans are now unemployed. And what is the government's solution to this unprecidented crisis? Well if they follow the advice of their most famous thinktank, the RAND corporation, the solution will be what it always is: Bomb someone to distract people from the fact they are completely screwed.

 

I feel safer already.