30.7.12

The Return of Our Bipolar Sun (or, "Is That Your Pole Moving, or Are You Just Glad to See Me?")

Hey, wait... it's June! Get back on those trees! Hey!

Anyone who grows plants or pays attention to trees or has a sun tattoo knows that, all global warming and drought data aside, something's up with the sun. ALL of Da-da's trees have been changing into their fall foliage tuxedoes earlier and earlier, with this year seeing the first yellow leaves on June 1st. Other people who raise plants that do best in hot sun have been lamenting their stunted, dormant appearance -- the plants, not the people. Damn, that's good writing. Ready for an untenable segue?

Trained in astro- and geophysics, Da-da's a solargeek, and he's been studying His Big Hotness for over two decades now (check out his old post, "OUR BIPOLAR SUN") and... well, his conclusions -- besides that the sun is HOT, ow -- and all the sentence dash and ellipsotic ASIDES and confusion the sun induces in (bad) writers... wherewasda-da? Oh. Conclusions! Da-da's conclusions have all been verified by Japanese researchers doing research in Japan Huh.

The sun is so wishy washy.

Officials of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation said on April 19 that the activity of sunspots appeared to resemble a 70-year period in the 17th century in which London’s Thames froze over and cherry blossoms bloomed later than usual in Kyoto.

In that era, known as the Maunder Minimum, temperatures are estimated to have been about 2.5 degrees lower than in the second half of the 20th century. The Japanese study found that the trend of current sunspot activity is similar to records from that period. (The Asahi Shimbun)

With recent corn and soy production problems due to drought caused by global climate change (don't call it global warming, call it what it is: global climate change) -- which wouldn't be as bad if commodities brokers weren't involved in the process, hello CORN LIBOR (and gold LIBOR and oil LIBOR, etc.) -- this new sun news might actually be a good thing. A cooling sun could help ameliorate existing climate whackiness long enough for us to begin to fix the problems on our end (cold temps would help re-fix leaky methane back under the sea floor where it belongs; no methane hydrate mining please, you morons, it's greenhouse gas value is ten times that of CO2).

Of course, the first step to any recovery is admitting you have a problem, so... lay off the pipe, turn off your phone, go for a walk and try to think about these things. Play one of those Kung Fu flutes. Then take down your pants and slide on the ice already growing on the Thames. Just in time for the Olympics! Da-da's pretty sure those fake UFO reflections will look really pretty reflected on the ice. Someone get a shot of that. All jocularity aside, this will mean more changes, esp. in terms of the food supply, so getting that Star Trek food machine production going (yes, there really is one) is pretty imperative. It will also mean more sledding! If you can invest in a ski slope, do it now.

Note: it could take about four years for us to know if the sun is indeed going into a minimum. You angry villagers will have plenty of time to stalk LIBOR Frankensteins into assorted castles for appropriate burning. But wait, there's more. This is the best one. Ready?

Remember Da-da's post from a few days ago, "ESCAPE FROM GLITCH MOUNTAIN"? Look at the pics, then come back to this.

If that crowbar Da-da put in your head can keep your mind open a little longer, you might also notice that lots of hideously huge, planet-sized vehicles have been allegedly appearing next to the sun for the past two years. Could these... these... crap, Da-da's gonna do it... could these SPACE BROTHERS be repairing the sun?? Or... reprogramming it? Perhaps something really bad was in store for us, solarwise, and they've since fixed it? Here's a most recent pic. Look at all the, "glitches."

Ships... er, glitches galore.

And um, if they can build something three-times the size of the earth and camp out in the sun's corona (or go inside the sun), then Da-da's guessing that they know the solar score. Da-da's also guessing that they are altruistic as all get out (part of that SPACE BROTHER thing, along with the tie-dye). And for you paranoid doomsayers, note that if "they" can build such ships and operate so close to the sun, they could just as easily have caused it to fry us all already -- and they didn't. Da-da thinks they're good. They're the sun doctors, fine-tuning our little middle-aged star for optimum life span performance. Consider it the sun's five billion-year wellness check.

Yes, that's a real, unretouched satellite photo of the sun from May 9th.
Maybe everything really IS gonna be okay.

MSNBC: "The Fed Caught Red-Handed"

You can wake Da-da now, because he passed out after he saw that this ran on MSNBC.

MSNBC! And it ran on March 24th?? This must be a news test balloon to see what people would do with it. What happened was... it never got seen. Till now.

Like Da-da's always said: It's not Federal. It's not a Reserve. And it's not a Bank. What is it? It's a PARASITE, one that will guarantee that your children are on the same silly fiscal treadmill you and your parents and your grandparents have been on since 1913. Check out this early 1900s cartoon describing the new Federal Reserve plan, set to be ratified (without Congress' approval) in 1913.

A cartoon from the early 1900s. Note that, the "Nat'l Reserve Association" was changed to,
the "Federal Reserve" to make it sound more governmental.
And who knew that giant rapacious octopi liked donuts. Or is it barfing donuts into the NYSE?

Is It Just Da-da...

...or are people who you know and don't know all looking more and more familiar? Maybe Da-da's just getting old. Then again, there are only 43 faces in the entire world...

29.7.12

We Are Not Amused

Anyone know why Queeny was wearing her Happy Face for the Olympic opening ceremonies? Does she know something we don't?

Lost Horizon, Regained

C'mon you apes, you wanna be unenlightened forever?

Da-da knows that all the banksters and war mongerers and profiteers of the world, despite their worst apocalyptic intentions, cannot thwart or dispel the spirit of hope flowing unchecked through our projected screen of reality. These fiends may do their worst, may destroy our entire system, but then again... it wasn't much of a system, anyway. And those fiends haven't really done anything that lasts so very long. They are your brothers, your relatives, and even awful relations deserve a second chance -- after you've sobered them up, made them lose weight and burn all of their velour sweatpants... and disarmed them, o'course. That which is loved never dies. Except maybe velour sweatpants. And we all have friends in high places. And we all now have the opportunity, even those of us who've done so very wrong, to not only DO THE RIGHT THING, but to rebuild the world in a way that we can all be proud of, giving ourselves a future we can look forward to, and that will be good for us. (And yes, you can always buy more velour sweatpants.)

28.7.12

Happy Kinkajou Day

The Kinkajou awoke at midnight and saw through Capitalism's shadow, which means...
a thousand years of The Federation! Contact Starfleet Command! Kirk, Spock, let's hang out!

27.7.12

Escape From Glitch Mountain

Um, that's big. About three times the width of the EARTH.

Check this out. Da-da's covered a lot of NASA's, "anomalies" tracking near the sun the past few years, but these latest instances are amazing. Something very very big is moving very very fast in straight-line, FTL acceleration. FTL is, "Faster-than-light." There it is, folks. Let's hope they're here to protect us from ourselves. (Above and below images courtesy, TruthBehindtheScenes.)

Note that, if a clued-in alien species really wanted our attention without scaring the pants off us, they might appear over and over again not only in our skies, but also in front of something we had lots of cameras pointing at (um, the sun?). Here's the awesome compilation video:

Aaaand here's Da-da's Rogue's Gallery of NASA's other recent, "glitches."

This from the same day as the above images, different satellite.

Those are gravity waves coming off the sun. Note that the sun rings like
an enormous bell from the millions of nuclear explosions going on
inside it every second. The sound waves alone would atomize you.
Oh, and that's a gigantic space Dorito, by the way, launching smaller objects.

These were the metallic spheres that started it all.

Sure, one pic could be a glitch. Two maybe. But not all of them, NASA-pants. Not from multiple satellites run by multiple countries. Like the Fed and the Not-So-Sweet 16 Central Banks, maybe NASA's the glitch.

There's there's Da-da, who's a glitch trying to ESCAPE FROM GLITCH MOUNTAIN:

"Honey, why did we buy a house atop a big spooky rock skull, again?"

26.7.12

Thursday's Child is Thinking About the Final Frontier

This is the longest damn tunnel ever.

This is by far the best snapshot portraying the current situation, from Richard Zombeck at HuffPost. It is also the most sobering -- and a little horrifying. A must-read for anyone who has others depending on them. But there is light at the end of that dark tunnel. First, read this:

Below the Fold: Rumor Has It We're Screwed

By Richard Zombeck, HuffPost

We're screwed. That's as good a place to start this post as any. Congress and the Administration have been co-opted -- bought and paid for. Financial regulation is a joke and fraud is a business model and seen as standard operating procedure. Fines are so ridiculously non-punitive that they not only don't serve as punishment, but may actually incentivize crime.

I made that point on Revolution Boston 1510 back in November 2011 on The Jeff Santos Show, "If I got arrested robbing houses and had to give back ten percent of what I stole, not only would I keep robbing houses, I'd hire a crew."

In the words of Noam Chomsky:

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
Even the normally conservative publication The Economist used the term "Bankster" in a recent piece.

For some, there's no apparently obvious way out of this. We've become so entrenched and apathetic that upward movement or change seems nearly impossible.

L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, NY, writes at the end of a recent post on Economonitor, "Why We're Screwed" that there are two possible scenarios.

In the first, we allow Wall Street to carry on its merry way, as the foreclosure crisis continues and Wall Street steals all homes, packaging them into bundles to be sold for pennies on the dollar to hedge funds. All wealth will be redistributed to the top 1% who will become modern day feudal lords with the other 99% living at their pleasure on huge feudal estates.
Which will take decades and, according to Wray, seems inevitable and by design.
The second is that, "the 99% occupy, shut down, and obliterate Wall Street," and it's a pretty fair assumption that we won't see that any time soon.

Add to the mix a general public that's beaten, depressed, apathetic, over worked, under paid, over medicated (prescribed or otherwise), and generally misinformed or ill-informed and there's not much fight left.

The LIBOR scandal, for example, has been discussed ad nauseam. Misreported as it is, it's still being talked about. For people who get their news in sound bites in the hopes of appearing well informed at the office or in the bar what they get isn't always what they need.

Larry Kudlow from the self-named "Kudlow Report" on CNBC called the LIBOR debacle a victimless crime. Remember, this is coming from an over paid guy with his own show on a major network. Not some unpaid hack blogging on Huffington Post. Of course, this is the same guy who blamed poor people for the mortgage crisis. A statement like that could only come from someone who either has no business commenting, much less reporting, on the economy, or is simply lying.

Kudlow argues in the segment that when the LIBOR went down it benefitted borrowers, so who cares? The problem is it didn't just go down. It was manipulated in both directions. As far as it being a victimless crime: LIBOR goes up, it affects mortgages, student loans, credit cards, rent, etc. LIBOR goes down and it affects state and local government - schools, nursing homes, roads, hospital - yup, no victims there.

Student loan too high? LIBOR. Rent going up? LIBOR. Mortgage just adjusted to 12 percent? LIBOR. Leaky roof at the nursing home, no pillows at the hospital, three-year-old pot hole on your street? LIBOR. In fact there's probably a little LIBOR in your morning coffee.
Here's your victimless crime explained by Pam Martens over at Alternet. The whole piece is well worth reading as Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years:

The Libor rate was used to manipulate, not just tens of trillions of consumer loans, but hundreds of trillions in interest rate contracts (swaps) with municipalities across America and around the globe. (Milan prosecutors have charged JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Depfa Bank with derivatives fraud and earning $128 million in hidden fees.)

Rigging Libor also inflated the value of the trash that Wall Street was parking in 2008 and 2009 at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to extract trillions in cash at near zero interest-rate loans from the public purse. When rates rise, bond prices decline. When rates decline, bond prices rise. The Federal Reserve made loans to Wall Street based on a percentage of the face value of their bonds and mortgage backed securities that they presented for collateral. By pushing down interest rates, the banks were getting a lift out of their collateral, allowing them to borrow more.
As America watches the disparity of wealth grow exponentially, we need to understand that this was not, as Kudlow would like us to believe, a handful of drunken frat boys monkeying with some esoteric index overseas. This was a cartel style, institutionalized transfer of wealth on an unfathomable scale and a crime that the Fed, Congress, and the Administration knew about.
Here's a quote from a transcript that Mark Gongloff of HuffPo wrote about in "New York Fed's Libor Documents Reveal Cozy Relationship Between Regulators, Banks."

"We know that we're not posting um, an honest LIBOR," a Barclays employee tells a New York Fed analyst in an April 11, 2008, call, "and yet we are doing it, because, um, if we didn't do it, It draws, um, unwanted attention on ourselves."

The New York Fed representative expresses sympathy and understanding:

"You have to accept it," she says. "I understand. Despite it's against what you would like to do. I understand completely."
Nice and cozy. Maybe we'd see a little pat on the head or a group hug in the video version. Hot cocoa anyone?

More to the point of this sort of behavior being standard operating procedure, in "Libor fraud exposes Wall Street's rotten core," at the Washington Post.

We don't know who else was fixing bets. Other big banks, including some of the largest in the United States, are under investigation. Barclays doesn't appear to have acted alone, and it is clear that its fixes weren't secret deals by rogue traders. Traders put requests to manipulate the rates in writing and even joked about delivering champagne to those who helped them. It is also clear that many of those who didn't have a fixer -- including consumers, community banks and credit unions -- lost money. Barclays padded its bottom line by taking money from everyone else. It won when it shouldn't have won -- and others lost when they shouldn't have lost. The amount of money involved is staggering.
The article also points out that on any given day, the credit related transactions linked to LIBOR could be worth $800 Trillion.

In L. Randall Wray's piece, "Why We're Screwed," he writes of the banks:

... they took over the whole economy and the political system lock, stock, and barrel. They didn't just blow up finance, they oversaw the swiftest transfer of wealth to the very top the world has ever seen. They screwed workers out of their jobs, they screwed homeowners out of their houses, they screwed retirees out of their pensions, and they screwed municipalities out of their revenues and assets.

Financiers are forcing schools, parks, pools, fire departments, senior citizen centers, and libraries to shut down. They are forcing national governments to auction off their cultural heritage to the highest bidder. Everything must go in firesales at prices rigged by twenty-something traders at the biggest and most corrupt institutions the world has ever known.
No article about the irresponsible and criminal behavior of bankers would be complete without the requisite troll blaming consumers and homeowners. Here's a comment from a reader who calls themselves SirCadbury and is a card carrying member of the "You were asking for it by wearing that skirt" club. Here's the comment (emphasis not mine):

Just because you are good at something and make money from it, EVEN AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS WHO DIDN'T WORK AS HARD OR STUDY, does not make you a thief or any sort of a criminal.

You want to know THE REAL REASON your silly example of schools, fire departments etc.... have lost????? THEIR OWN GREED!!!
There's apparently not enough evidence in the world to stop idiotic comments like this from continuing, but I'm going to try any way.

In a recent article in "The Raw Story" Sarah Jaffe of Alternet wrote "Countrywide whistleblower reveals rampant mortgage fraud part of 'everyday business,'" in which she writes about whistleblower Eileen Foster, who was an investigator in charge of Fraud Risk Management at Countrywide. The article is a great read for anyone who wants to start their day with that sickening feeling that usually accompanies utter rage. The following quote from the piece is for the anonymous "SirCadbury" and others of his ilk, who still think this all about greedy and irresponsible borrowers.

A team of investigators went to Boston to look into the complaints in person and were shocked by what they found. "Typically when you're looking for fraud you've got to really look because one of the primary components of a fraud is concealment," Foster said. "These people weren't concealing it. They were concealing it from corporate, but every person who walked into those branches every day was a participant."

"One process was to cut a signature off one document, paste it and make a photocopy so it looks like an original signature," she continued. "A part and parcel of everyday business was to do anything it took to fund a loan."

They had templates for fabricating documents, cases of Wite-Out for changing names and a method for gaming the automated underwriting system--plugging in income values until they got one that worked and allowed them to underwrite the loan. They'd keep a template bank statement from each bank, then plug in different borrowers' names and an asset amount to prove that the borrower could make the payments on the loan.
Let's leave it at that.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-zombeck/below-the-fold-rumor-has-_b_1704354.html

Da-da clipped the whole thing so that he might offer a solution. Now, to the light.

Sure, this looks hopeless, but Da-da has an idea. Arrest the perpetrators and the heads of The Cabal. Zero out all our debt. ALL of it. We then retain all of our property and money to $2M. The Central Banks all go out of business forever, replaced by something simple and transparent. Then we forgive the perpetrators. In exchange for returning all the money and going away forever, they get to keep $5 million of all their holdings. They can keep one big house. Two cars. No planes. No exotic properties in this New Age of Austerity. We then redistribute The Cabal's wealth amongst those who sorely need it -- like all the rest of us. We use all that money for education and rebuilding. The massive real estate confiscated is turned into parks and universities. Everyone gets free educations as far as they want to go. And that's only a few trillion. We use the rest of the money to build scads of Starship Enterprises. Or we just zero out all the money and do without it, New Frontier-style.

So, right: it's kinda like the French Revolution, but without all the violence, and with lots of cool space uniforms and doves and bunnies and free schools and geekiness. Da-da figured that, since Capitalism was dead, we might as well start over with something that had lots and lots of upside.

Yup. With $800 trillion, you can build a lot of these.
Or better yet, get rid of money, entirely. And just build it.

The Inn of the Happinesses: Shanghai vs. Peoria

Peoria.

Shanghai.

Anyone wanna call it?

Happy Birthday, Stanley

A pie for Stanley on his birthday. Here he is thinking about blowing up the pie-throwing scene at the end of, "Dr. Strangelove." Waitaminute...

BTW, here's last year's post on Kubrick's treatment of actors. Da-da knew you were thinking about it.

Stan laughs amidst debris of the 16 central banks.

25.7.12

Pay No Attention to That Big Speaker in the Sky

Dude, can you turn that DOWN?

Ok, Da-da has nothing else to do but think and wonder -- or try to think and wonder, while watching children NOT think in wonder -- and he's been wonderthinking if someone, somewhere, has discovered how to create and induce focused gravity waves, and have been testing such a system for nefarious purposes.

Peaceful or not, these potential sound/weather engineers were no doubt wasting their potential -- potentially -- on some spooky arm of the U.S. Government, which has nothing better to do than waste tax dollars on weapons of bass production. Middle-class reduction? Too bad they can't take credit for creating BANKS, those weapons of crass destruction. Wealth reduction? Anyway, here's why Da-da suspects someone somewhere may have discovered how to induce focused gravity waves.

Besides all of these examples, Da-da had his own earwitness event earlier this year:

Pay No Attention to the Clown Banging a Shield Behind the Curtain

The other night, April 12th, at approx. 3:00 am, while Da-da was trying to sleep after visiting with friends in Northern California, Da-da was witness to the weirdest thunder Da-da's ever heard in 198 years of thunder concerts. "Regular" thunder booms and echoes. But this thunder was, to wax onomonopoetic, like this: BAM... BAM... BAM... BAM... BAM... BAM... BAM.... Da-da lost count, but it sounded like seven times. (Seventh Seal? Buehler?) There was no echo, though, just extremely impressive and repeated, loud metallic reports of equal intensity.

The trailing edge of a storm was indeed over us, but nothing was happening until the cacophony, which sounded for all the world like a thousand-foot-tall giant banging a club against an enormous bronze war shield, and there was no rain or hail -- or lightning -- where Da-da was. It did, however, make the whole of Marin County vibrate. And while some might think it was due to thunder echoing (the town where Da-da heard the sounds is in a large box valley, suggesting echo to some), Da-da is a recovering musician (jazz and classical) and has rather acute hearing, and can tell if a sound is an echo or not. Additionally, Da-da not only grew up in a box valley surrounded by mountains and thunderstorms, he also spent lots of time in Colorado Springs, the thunder and lightning capital of the world, so he's pretty much heard it all -- that is, until now.

Suffice to say that it seemed like some large and aggressive zeitgeist-y spirit had finally been purged (and wasn't very happy about it), trying one last time to scare the pants off everyone. Well, it worked for the people around Da-da. Da-da himself rarely wears pants to bed, but if he did, they would've been scared off. (Da-da actually wears boxers with little Yodas on them.) So. Slice it right with Occam's razor and you've got unusual thunder. Slice it sinister (that is, slice it left) and you might've just heard HAARP being... HAARPy.

Ah. Now the weird part: The exact same metallic banging sound was reported in San Diego, CA and Lacey, WA at the exact same time, 525 miles south and 750 miles north, respectively. That's some echo, Timmy. Perhaps this was just a West Coast, longitudinal Testing of the Sound System for the Apocalypse? Next stop: rousing the whole earth at once?

In this account, Da-da blamed HAARP (which turns out to be a global system with numerous installations), which could indeed be the culprit mechanism, as it might be able to induce and modulate an electromagnetic vortex in various levels of the atmosphere strong enough to produce a sound -- OR find/create various standing wave resonances in a specific-sized/shaped bodies of ionized air at a distance and modulate sound into it. Those are two ways to potentially generate the observed phenomena.

Another avenue for creating these sounds is via focused gravity wave. The aformentioned weird sounds were the smoking gun. Since they were identical they were clearly a test recording designed to provoke terror, and since they were LOUD, the focused or circular gravity wave hypothesis makes more sense. It's easy to assume a gravity wave application if you know how speakers work:

Basically, when electrical current flowing through some matrix (copper, air, etc.) changes direction, the material's polar orientation reverses. A speaker is basically an electromagnet, and when you apply a modulated AC current to it (modulated by say a spooky voice through a microphone).... BOOM. Sound from the speaker.

Now imagine that someone invents a way of creating gravity waves at a distance -- or reverse engineers one from alien technology (like they did with the laser, the transister, memory metal, etc.) -- using the earth's natural magnetic and electrical fields. However it's created, the circular gravity wave itself acts as the magnet, and the air inside the magnetic toroid (esp. wet air) acts as the matrix. Indeed, the air would have to be the right density to achieve a truly sonorous effect, say 75% humidity or more. Apply a modulated current to said air matrix and BOOM: youse got yer Sound System of the Apocalypse available for use in scaring the extremely gullible and telling people the white zone is for loading and unloading ONLY. It's also conceivable that this technology could be used to create light effects, or perhaps even project images with the help of space-based lasers on satellites. Depends on how much mojo's workin'.

So. If you hear the Horn of the Apocalypse -- or the Gong of the Apocalypse, or the Giant Rubber Chicken of the Apocalypse -- or somesuch spooky sky sound in the coming months, you can sit back and relax and hope that they start playing requests. (Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. POOF.) If all this sky sound system stuff is true and viable, after they use it for scaring the pants off people at the London Olympics, this kinda thing could open up a whole new royalties/copyright stream for recording artists, like Gordon... er, Sting, doing planetary shows. Hey, Gordon, could you turn that down?

All that said... if the End-of-Times Light-n-Sound Show you see is AWESOME and makes you feel GOOD and HOPEFUL and HAPPY and a lot of other nice words -- and nobody dies -- it's probably NOT the U.S. Government acting as producer. It's probably something several orders of magnitude better.

Yo, Angel-dude, can you turn that UP?

Scenes From Da-da's Mind-Roasting Summer

Ah, a typical summer day with kids out of school.

24.7.12

Da-da's Mad as Hell and He's Not Gonna Take It Anymore

"First you've got to get up, you've got to get mad..."

Da-da has to share this with you. He was so mad about the LIBOR scandal (and so should you) that he just called all his representatives in Washington, and... they'd never heard of it. Every one of them denied any knowledge of it whatsoever.

If this doesn't give you an indication of the scope of this thing -- the biggest economic scandal in world history -- then nothing will. Or do you like being screwed by banks and their political lackeys in perpetuity?

Here's what's happening in the U.S., courtesy of that renegade tabloid, The Financial Times (you can't find it anywhere else):

US widens Libor-rigging probe

By Shahien Nasiripour in Washington

US lawmakers widened their probe into alleged Libor rigging, requesting more documents from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to determine how the regulator dealt with alleged admissions of manipulation.

The House financial services committee’s investigative panel on Monday asked for all records regarding banks’ Libor submissions at the New York Fed; between the regional Fed and the 16 banks involved in setting the London interbank offered rate; and all records between the New York Fed and other government agencies, including foreign organisations in the UK.

The request comes days after the Fed’s bank in Manhattan and separately the Bank of England made public hundreds of pages of emails, memos and call transcripts from 2007 and 2008 regarding Libor in response to demands from lawmakers.

Legislators on both sides of the Atlantic have launched inquiries to determine whether regulators knew about alleged efforts to manipulate a gauge that influences the prices of hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of financial instruments, yet looked the other way.

The New York Fed said its documents make clear that it “helped to identify problems related to Libor and press the relevant authorities in the UK to reform this London-based rate”. Tim Geithner, who led the New York Fed at the time before becoming US Treasury secretary, said last week that he and his colleagues acted “very early” in alerting other regulators of their concerns.

According to documents from the Bank of England, the Fed was concerned with the accuracy of the lending gauge but it did not tell its UK counterparts that there were deliberate attempts at manipulation.

Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate banking committee, said last week that Mr Geithner should have been more aggressive.

“He should have been investigating what was going on with Libor,” Mr Shelby said. “[Mr Geithner] had information that something was amiss, but he didn’t do more.”

In April 2008 a Barclays employee told an analyst at the New York Fed that “we know that we’re not posting...an honest Libor”.

Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, told a committee of the UK parliament that he had only learnt about “deliberate misrepresentation” of Libor rates a few weeks ago.

Randy Neugebauer, Republican chairman of the House financial services committee’s investigations panel, said on Monday that while the New York Fed worked to identify flaws in Libor and made recommendations on how to fix it, “what is less clear...is how the [New York] Fed dealt with admissions of market manipulation by Libor contributing banks”.

“As you know, the role of government is to ensure that our markets are run with the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and transparency,” Mr Neugebauer added. “Therefore, any admission of market manipulation – regardless of the degree – should be swiftly and vigorously investigated.”

The New York Fed declined to comment. Mr Neugebauer wants documents by September 1.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/24ea3f74-d4ee-11e1-b476-00144feabdc0.html

LIBOR is used as the primary benchmark for all short term interest rates around the world. We're talking approx. $500 trillion dollars here. So, if it's ok for all of the 16 central banks to screw everyone (these "lie-bros" set the daily rates, folks) on loans and credit card debt, is it ok if Da-da and everyone else stops paying his/her mortgage? Car loans? Howbout if the states stops paying? Municipalities? Countries? That's right, ALL of our contracts with these banks are based on LIBOR, a bogus number the central banks and The Fed conjured out of the air to benefit themselves. These contracts WERE based on good faith. Now, there is no good faith.

You may have already suspected this, but now that it's a FACT that you are being screwed and lied to. Are you alright with that? Do you know how much interest you've paid on all your bills over the course of your life? How much you've indirectly paid in state and federal taxes? How much your company paid? Your state? Your city? All the states and cities and individuals of the world? All of this is influenced by LIBOR. Not to mention the trillions of dollars in bank bailouts your great great grandchildren are supposed to be paying for. People in the UK are going ape over this, because their media is accurately reporting it. Yet another outrage: the failure of the US media.

Sure, this doesn't surprise you, but when are you gonna get mad?

Wake up and BITE that hand. Get it over with.

Btw, anyone talking this scandal down is betraying themselves as being on the take. Track them for yourself, forward and back.

UPDATE 1:

Finally, some action in the US media. Besides ho-hum WashPost and WSJ pieces, there's an excellent article from James Rickards at US News and World Report: LIBOR Fraud May Be the Mother of All Bank Scandals.

Finally, check out Rolling Stone blogger Matt Taibbi dealing with a CNBC squid on the subject.

UPDATE 2:

Da-da has some new insight from a HuffPost blogger -- AND a unique idea on how to rectify this mess.

Scenes From Da-da's Mind-Roasting Summer

THIS... is the only safe place while school's out. And Da-da's not coming out till it's in again.

23.7.12

The Word at The Fed: Garmonbozia

At The Fed, it's always time for garmonbozia.

FED UP: A Must-Watch, Must-Read for Everyone

This is a must-watch for everyone. And this is a must-read:

The Great Revealing: US Marshals Expose
Biggest Scandal in History

Here's a little back-up from the BBC, which along with The Financial Times, are apparently the only reliable media outlets:

BBC NEWS: Super-rich 'hiding' at least $21 Trillion

Which might actually be more like $800 trillion, enough to completely transform everyone's lives completely. Everyone. If the U.S. media weren't owned by these folks, you might be hearing about it more. The last time something like this popped up (e.g., the $21 trillion dollar lawsuit against the Fed by international investors), we had 9/11 the next day. Jeez, what kind of world do you want your kids inheriting?

Or, just bury your head in the sand and keep pulling, suckers.

Ug

Bleah.

Ug, Da-da's behind on his posts as he's suffering through a bout of food poisoning, brought on by a bad "casual" restaurant burger. A bit too casual. Suffice to say that Da-da's not having any burgers any time soon. Make sure you order your meat at least medium if you do. Da-da's was admittedly rare, but he was hungry and... well, he's not hungry now. Bleah.

20.7.12

The Best Reason to Watch the Olympics?

"All Zargon Blasters must be returned after the main event. Have a good game."

Sure, the Olympics gives everyone a chance to wave flags and parade about the human drama of athletic competition, blah blah blah (how many people can we feed on the amount of money spent training these athletes? oops, sorry), but what's really compelling this Olympic year is the rumored appearance of what some term, "The Cabal's" fleet of faux-UFOs (or the projections, thereof), creating a "false flag" operation to fool the world into thinking that an alien invasion is occurring. Da-da's not making this up, but maybe someone else is.

The intel is coming from Da-da's Pentagon and DOJ contacts, who are some pretty straight, sober people. (Perhaps a little too sober and straight, but they do always seem to beat Da-da at poker.) Anyway, the plan by, "The Cabal" -- defined as those 1%ers who've gone "Rogue Civilization," leapfrogging our crummy pedestrian variant because they have all the money and alien technology -- is for something to occur during the closing ceremony, allowing the Powers That Were to declare martial law and suspend all freedoms... like they haven't done that alreeady?

So, why the closing ceremony? Because if said alienage happened during the beginning or middle, ir would cut into TV ad revenues! THAT was the bit that made it real for Da-da, as with all things on this planet, it's all about the money. Anyway, it might be crap, but then again, if something weird happens, don't assume it's what you think it is. Parenting teaches one to take things at face value, so Da-da's just reporting what he's heard, first-hand, and since fear is easily overcome by laughter, just laugh at the cheesy alien production values and turn your tongue in the other cheek -- or better yet, someone else's tongue.