George Orwell's Black Vision of Total Surveillance Realized With Drones

So says Peter Popham for the UK Independent, here:

The use of drones for the surveillance purposes sketched by Gitlin takes us back to their original function. The critical weakness of the Nazi doodlebug was the lack of control: its only use was as a mechanical kamikaze. Once you had control of the thing, everything changed. George Orwell was the first to describe the possibilities, in his novel 1984. "In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and dashed away again with a curving flight," he wrote in the novel's first chapter. "It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows...". ...

It is the snooping function foreseen by Orwell that is the most significant next step for drones in our societies: with our cities and public buildings already saturated with surveillance cameras, we may fondly suppose that the state's monitoring of our daily lives has gone as far as it can go. But we ain't seen nothing yet. ...

Orwell's black vision of total surveillance – "It was even conceivable," he wrote in 1984, "that [the Thought Police] watched everybody all the time" – is finally achieving its technological apotheosis. In a few weeks, the US Army is expected to deploy in Afghanistan its latest helicopter-style drone, the A160 Hummingbird, equipped with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras. Able to hover, unlike current drones, it will have "unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground", the Army says. Able to track people and vehicles from above 20,000ft, and with a 65sq-mile field of view, it will have 65 steerable "windows" able to follow separate targets. More modest surveillance drones may be used to enhance police monitoring of London's Olympics.

We Lack Sustainable Streams of Real Income from Productive Activity

So says Jeffrey Snider, here:

Central banks can proclaim that banks and the economy are one and the same, but that does not make it true. Again, there was no real danger of deflation in the real economy as currency, as in the usage of money to transact, was never in short supply. What has been in short supply, and remains in short supply, are sustainable streams of real income due to productive activities - the kinds of activities that have a hard time flourishing under continuously dysfunctional monetary regimes.

Today's Gold to Oil Price Ratio is About 15.86

In other words, 15.86 barrels of oil buys one ounce of gold.

Oil could rise to about $111 per barrel from today's $104.93 to achieve the perfect balance of 15:1.

Or gold could descend to about $1,575 the ounce to achieve the same thing.

The dollar has been trading in a fairly steady range of 3 percent for much of 2012 to date.

World's Most Disastrous Oil Spills, Updated

(see here and here)

Buy and Hold Investors Since October 2007 are Down Over 2 Percent

(source)

Justice Stephen Breyer, Secular Humanist: We'll Decide What's Enduring

Man the measure of all things:

“Why would people want to live under the ‘dead hand’ of an eighteenth-century constitution that preserved not enduring values but specific eighteenth-century thoughts about how those values then applied?”

-- Justice Stephen Breyer, Bill "Depends on what the meaning of is is" Clinton appointee, quoted here

He might as well have said:

“Why would people want to live under the ‘dead hand’ of an eighteenth-century constitution archaic Hebrew narrative that preserved not enduring values but specific second millennium BC thoughts about how those values then applied?”

Hmm. Why would they?

TARP Will Cost Taxpayers $60 Billion, Says Special Inspector General

Here:

"After 3 1⁄2 years, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“TARP”) continues to be an active and significant part of the Government’s response to the financial crisis. It is a widely held misconception that TARP will make a profit. The most recent cost estimate for TARP is a loss of $60 billion. Taxpayers are still owed $118.5 billion (including $14 billion written off or otherwise lost). But the analysis should not be focused alone on money in and money out. TARP’s costs and legacies involve far more than just dollars and cents. Using a microscope to narrowly focus on the profit or loss of TARP risks losing sight of the bigger picture of whether TARP has been successful in meeting its goals and whether lessons learned from the financial crisis have been adequately implemented so that Treasury, banking regulators, and Congress do not find themselves in the position of rushing out another massive bailout of the financial industry, i.e., TARP 2.0.

"While TARP and other Government responses to the financial crisis may have prevented the immediate collapse of our financial and auto manufacturing industries, and improved stability since 2008, the tradeoff is not without profound long-term consequences. A significant legacy of TARP is increased moral hazard and potentially disastrous consequences associated with institutions deemed “too big to fail.” TARP’s legacy also includes the impact on consumers and homeowners from the large banks’ failure to lend TARP funds. TARP continues to be subject to criticism that TARP helped large banks but not homeowners. In addition, after 3 1⁄2 years, community banks have an uphill battle to exit TARP because they cannot find new capital to replace TARP funds. Finally, TARP’s legacy includes white-collar crime that SIGTARP is uncovering and stopping."

-- Christy L. Romero, Quarterly Report to Congress, April 25, 2012

Moochelle's Spanish Vacation in 2010 Cost Taxpayers At Least $467K

As reported here:

The five day trip cost at least $467,585, according to Judicial Watch.

The total cost of flying Michelle Obama from Camp Andrews to Malaga and then to Mallorca and back to the United States was $199,323.75.

That tab is based on just 17 hours and 15 minutes of total flying time. ...

The 15-member flight crew stayed at Tryp Guadalmar, a nearby motel where group's lodging cost was $10,290.60 and car rental costs were $2,633.50.

In addition, their food cost was $876.30, which included an American indulgence of $57.68 for four bottles of maple syrup and a package of pancake mix.

Secret Service records, meanwhile, show that the costs to the agency for the vacation were $254,461.20.

This total includes $26,670.61 for a chauffeur tour of Costa del Sol and $50,078.78 for a travel planning company SET P&V, S.L.

Q1 2012 GDP Reported at 2.2 Percent, Q4 2011 at 3.0

I am the chief obstacle to growth.

From the Bureau of Economic Analysis, here:

Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "advance" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter of 2011, real GDP increased 3.0 percent.

Compared to Q1 2011 at 0.4, today's report at 2.2 looks pretty good, until you remember that Q1 2010 roared at 3.9 percent, Obama's best quarter so far but hardly what one would expect from an economy truly in recovery from the depths to which it sank in its little depression of 2008-2009. The post-war period in the United States saw average growth of 3.5 percent, so one lousy imprint of 3.9 does not a recovery make.

America is clearly not growing like it should, nor like it can. And the chief obstacle to that is spelled "Obama".

Here is the most recent statement of historical GDP from the release for the period 1996-2011:

A Little Thursday Night Dog Humor

h/t Sheik Yer Mami

Global Warming Alarmist James Lovelock, Now a Geezer of 92, Backs Off Predictions

Not that he wasn't a geezer already in 2006 when he was still thumping his global warming tub:

In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.” ...

Six years on he's singing a slightly different tune:

“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.

He pointed to Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers” as other examples of “alarmist” forecasts of the future.


More here.

The Depression in Peripheral Europe

In order of severity: Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and then even the 17 country Euro area itself, all with four years of sub-standard GDP relative to the 2008 peak.

(source)

Top 10 US States With Low State and Local Debt Burdens

(source)

US States are in a Heap of Debt Trouble: $8 Trillion Worth

In a less than $2 trillion budget world at the state level.

Because of promises to pay for pensions and healthcare for retired public employees out of future tax revenues, the big squeeze is on, according to Steven Malanga, here:

From 2008 through 2010 (the latest year data are available), state spending rose to $1.9 trillion, from $1.7 trillion. ... 

Several years ago, for instance, the treasurer of Cook County, Ill., Maria Pappas, demanded that all of Cook's municipalities report their debt to her. It wasn't easy. They began with bonded debt, then totaled up pension liabilities, then found they had lots more they'd promised to workers for health care. ...

We couldn't get a handle on just how much debt states and their municipalities have accumulated unless every county treasurer does what Pappas did. But just what we can estimate in bonded debt and unfunded pension and health care promises for retirees now totals about $8 trillion. That's a lot of future state and municipal tax revenues already accounted for.

What's that familiar refrain we keep hearing at the federal level, that a present Congress can't bind a future one?

So how can present municipal and county governments bind the taxpayers to pay in future for unfunded promises in the present, huh?

The UK is in a Depression, Not a Double-Dip Recession

The fact is, UK GDP has not recovered since the onset of troubles in 2008, despite the happy talk of "recovery" in Newspeak which must not call things what they really are, for example, here, at CNBC.com:

"Britain's economy contracted by 7.1 percent during its 2008-2009 recession and recovery since has been slow, with headwinds from the euro zone debt crisis, government spending cuts, high inflation and a damaged banking sector.

"Wednesday's data showed that output was still 4.3 percent below its peak in the first quarter of 2008, and the economy has only grown by 0.4 percent since the government came to power in the second quarter of 2010."

For the chart, the dark blue line in which shows the current decline in the UK since 2008 still 4 percent down more than three years on, see the UK Guardian here.

It's not a paler shade of gray, dammit. It's a faker form of black . . . on the Firth of effing Forth.

The United States of Moronica

We're even dumber than we look, and our stupid party is the smart one of the two.

From John Carney for NetNet:

"A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that 47 percent of Americans didn’t know which political party supports reducing the size and scope of the federal government. Forty-two percent didn’t know which party usually supports reducing military spending. Thirty-nine percent didn’t know which party generally favors restrictions on abortion. ...

"There’s a substantial ignorant minority on almost every issue. ...

"Forty-four percent of women, for example, did not know Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat (fewer men, 33 percent, got this wrong). Fifty percent of women didn’t know ... John Boehner’s party. ...

"People ages 50 and up are engaged by taxes and partisanship (70 percent correctly identified the party affiliation of Pelosi, 72 percent correctly identified which party is known as the G.O.P.). ..."

Read the rest HERE, if you're smart enough to find the link.

Jeffrey Goldberg Likes One Thing About Newt Gingrich

He wants to go "out there":

All at once, the passengers contorted themselves to get a view out of the starboard windows.

And there it was. The actual shuttle, the space shuttle Discovery, piggybacking a ride atop a Boeing 747, on the way to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where it would be retired. A ripple of excitement -- boyish, unvarnished excitement -- moved through the cabin.

It was an entrancing sight, and completely improbable, especially to people like me, who still don’t quite understand how a 747 gets into the air, even without a space shuttle as carry-on luggage.

The 747 and the space shuttle made a pass over the Washington Monument and the capital’s other grand marble temples, all consecrated to the American idea. They gleamed in the sun as they received a salute from a spacecraft that represented the physical manifestation of American ingenuity and confidence.

Then the 747 left our view. We settled back into our seats, having been elevated for a moment by a magnificent and elegiac vision -- elegiac, because the end of the shuttle program marks the first time since the dawn of the Space Age that the U.S. government has no immediate plan to launch humans into space.

A few minutes later, while we were still parked on the tarmac, ... the plane’s steering seemed to be malfunctioning. ...

We returned to the terminal, and I watched on CNN as Discovery finished the journey to its nursing home in the Virginia countryside. Only then did the obvious thought cross my mind: Newt is right.

This isn’t a thought that has often crossed my mind, especially over the past several months, but on the matter of space exploration and the role it has played in teaching Americans that they are capable of performing exceptional acts of creativity and bravery, Newt Gingrich is exactly right.

Read the whole thing, here.

KIRK:  Ahead Warp One, Mr. Sulu.

DIFALCO: Heading, sir?

KIRK:    Out there. Thataway.

Domestic Drone Authorizations Are Set To Explode

Locations on this map in red are active.

Get the map here.

Government will soon have total information awareness about YOU.

The decision was bi-partisan and sailed through the so-called Tea Party US House of Representatives.

Thanks, Republicans. What good are you?

The New York Times Discusses Bi-Partisan Culpability For The Imperial Presidency

Here:

Mr. Obama's new approach puts him in the company of his recent predecessors. Mr. Bush, for example, failed to persuade Congress to pass a bill allowing religiously affiliated groups to receive taxpayer grants -- and then issued an executive order making the change.

President Bill Clinton increased White House involvement in agency rule making, using regulations and executive orders to show that he was getting things done despite opposition from a Republican Congress on matters like land conservation, gun control, tobacco advertising and treaties. (He was assisted by a White House lawyer, Elena Kagan, who later won tenure at Harvard based on scholarship analyzing such efforts and who is now on the Supreme Court.)

And both the Reagan and George Bush administrations increased their control over executive agencies to advance a deregulatory agenda, despite opposition from Democratic lawmakers, while also developing legal theories and tactics to increase executive power, like issuing signing statements more frequently.

The bipartisan history of executive aggrandizement in recent decades complicates Republican criticism.

Global Response To Debt Was To Triple Down On It

From Reuters, here:

The amount of money thrown at rescuing the world economy since the Great Recession began is truly staggering, probably more than $14 trillion, and the financial spigots are still open. ...

In 2009, the IMF calculated that official rescue efforts totaled nearly $12 trillion, and since then the Fed and the ECB have pumped more cash into the economies they oversee.