Archive for shananapocalypse
Mr. Roarke is dead!
There will be no more fantasies.
Ricardo Montalban, the Mexican-born actor who became a star in splashy MGM musicals and later as the wish-fulfilling Mr. Roarke in TV’s Fantasy Island and the title character in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, died Wednesday morning at his home. He was 88.
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2009 promises to be like 2008- only with a worse economy
Here’s a few stories that caught my eye:
German billionaire kills himself over losses. The funny thing here is that he probably still had about a billion more than me and I’m having a great time. What the fuck is wrong with people? Try living life instead of thinking life is all about the cash. I sure don’t have much, but what do I really need anyway?
and this in case you forgot the economy is sour.
And finally, instead of talking about the economy or the fact that Israel is on a genocide mission, maybe we should focus on some important news like the Bush cat being dead…the one member of the Bush family that was probably innocent…unless you count killing birds.
Do you think they will spend more on the cat funeral than on the funerals of all the Palestinians that are being massacred?
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Peruvian Jesus Born to Virgin Mary on Christmas ‘08
I would say that this raises the armageddon meter considerably…of course, it could also be the result of way too much planning…
LIMA (Reuters) – Virgin Mary, a 20-year-old Peruvian woman, gave birth to a baby boy on Christmas day and named him Jesus, Peru’s state news agency said on Friday.
The baby’s father, Adolfo Jorge Huamani, 24, is a carpenter. Religious Peruvians compared him to Joseph the Carpenter in the Bible.
“Two thousand years later the story of Bethlehem is relived,” read the headline about the birth in El Comercio, the main newspaper in Peru, a predominantly Catholic country.
The mother, Virgen Maria Huarcaya, delivered the 7.7 pound (3.5 kg) boy, Jesus Emanuel, in the early hours of Christmas at the central maternity hospital in Lima, the capital.
“A few days ago we had decided to name my son after a professional soccer player,” the father said. “But thanks to a happy coincidence this is how things ended up.”
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A sign?
I know that I haven’t written in a while about the dramatic changes that I think we are just beginning to see, but I don’t want you to think that I’ve stopped believing. We are living in the midst of the most incredible events in human history. Things are changing and they are changing very fast. Mumbai is, unfortunately, the first link in a fairly terrible chain of events. As usually happens when things such as this go on, there are signs visible to those who are willing to look. Here is one that you can see in a couple of nights:
Monday evening, Dec. 1, a slender crescent moon, just 15-percent illuminated, will appear in very close proximity to the two brightest planets in our sky, Venus and Jupiter.
Venus has adorned the southwestern twilight sky since late August. No other star or planet can come close to matching Venus in brilliance. During World War II, aircraft spotters sometimes mistook Venus for an enemy airplane. There were even cases in which Venus drew antiaircraft fire.
This winter, Venus is the unrivaled evening star that will soar from excellent to magnificent prominence in the southwest at nightfall. The interval by which it follows the Sun will increase from nearly three hours on Dec. 1 to almost four hours by Jan. 1. It’s probably the first “star” you’ll see coming out after sunset. In fact, if the air is very clear and the sky a good, deep blue, try looking for Venus shortly before sunset.
Jupiter starts December just above Venus and is moving in the opposite direction, dropping progressively lower each evening. By month’s end Jupiter meets up with another planet – Mercury – but by then Jupiter is also descending deep into the glow of sunset. In January, Jupiter will be too close to the Sun to see; it’s in conjunction with the Sun on Jan. 24.
A very close conjunction of the crescent moon and a bright star or planet can be an awe-inspiring naked-eye spectacle. The English poet, critic and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) used just such a celestial sight as an ominous portent in his epic, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” In addition, there are juxtaposed crescent moon and star symbols that have appeared on the flags of many nations, including Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Algeria, Mauritania, and Tunisia.
Also on Monday evening, you may be able to see the full globe of the moon, its darkened portion glowing with a bluish-gray hue interposed between the sunlit crescent and not much darker sky. This vision is sometimes called “the old moon in the young moon’s arms.” Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the first to recognize it as what we now call “earthshine.”
As beautiful as the view of Venus, Jupiter and the moon will be from North America, an even more spectacular sight awaits those living in parts of Western Europe where the moon will pass in front of Venus.
Astronomers refer to this phenomenon as an “occultation,” taken from the Latin word occultāre, which means “to conceal.” This eye-catching sight will be visible in complete darkness across much of Eastern Europe. Farther west, Venus will disappear behind the dark part of the moon either during evening twilight or just before the Sun sets. When Venus emerges, it will look like a brightening jewel on the slender lunar crescent. For virtually all of Europe, the Sun will have set by then, the exception being southern Portugal (including Lisbon).
Such favorable circumstances are quite rare for any given location. For example, the last time London was treated to such a favorably placed Venus occultation such was back on October 7, 1961. And after 2008, there will not be another similarly favorable Venus occultation for the United Kingdom until January 10, 2032.
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The New – New World Order
Suddenly the United States is becoming a socialized capitalist consumer society.
We are entering a new and unsettling phase in the relationship between government and business, one that neither sector particularly wants but cannot avoid. One result is that the line between public and private interests increasingly is being blurred so much as to become unrecognizable.
Nowhere is that more obvious that at Fannie and Freddie, two massive enterprises that combined their government-sponsored creation and backing with publicly traded stock. Fannie and Freddie were perfect fodder for the sort of mischief that privatizes gains while socializing losses.
That’s what happened at Freddie and Fannie, which used their below-market cost of credit as much to reward shareholders as to fulfill their mission in providing secondary market liquidity to encourage homeownership. Meanwhile, the companies effectively lobbied Congress to keep their capital requirements lower than they should have been.
The federal takeover of Fannie and Freddie, which combined own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $11 trillion in mortgages, marks the biggest government intervention in financial markets in decades — arguably since the Great Depression. The ultimate cost of bailing out Freddie and Fannie alone could easily top the roughly $125 billion spent in the late 1980s and early 1990s seizing failed savings and loans and selling off their assets.
You may ask, Is it time to murder my neighbor and steal his canned goods?
That’s probably a little premature, unless he’s wondering the same thing, and is planning on murdering you. In that case you’re probably justified in murdering him a little bit, or at least sleeping in the nook behind your bedroom door with a loaded crossbow cradled in your lap. (stolen from Cracked.com)
China has apparently been issued the first foreign oil contracts in post war Iraq. Isn’t that surprising given that the United States has spent trillions there? Not surprising when you consider that China is now the first world power on the planet.
On August 23, Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain Al Shahristani flew out of Iraq and headed for China. Five days later, he signed a $3b contract with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). The agreement revived an earlier deal signed in 1997 for the development of the Ahdab field, located 160 kilometres southeast of Baghdad.
Contrary to post-invasion predictions, the first foreign contract for the development of an Iraqi oil field has not gone to a western oil major. In fact, the deal with a Chinese company has signalled that Iraq might have begun to strongly resist western oil interests, seeking a free run over its mammoth energy resources. The jury is now out on whether the deal with China will set a precedent that will derail the American oil project in Iraq.
And apparently, the end of the world has been put on hold until a transformer is repaired…of course, as I mentioned before, it will not be a sudden and violent end, it is more an end to the empirical and rationalist world views of the enlightenment.
Here is a question for you, who do you think lost more
1) the folks that were primary stockholders in mortgage banks that allowed predatory lending practices to drive the value of their stocks artificially high or
2) these folks in Wai’anae
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