02.02.11
Posted in Extremism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:57 pm by George Smith
The altie Cleveland Scene published this photo plus caption of Jeffrey Levenderis, the castor seed pounder. It’s a bit of piling on; almost all the white guys banged up over powdering castor seeds for the sake ricin over the past ten years have been generally pathetic down-and-out individuals. Levenderis is no different.
But this is what passes for journalism, particularly at the altie news blogs. Something sarcastic, meant for a cheap laugh, no interest in bringing light to a subject, even for a paragraph.
Then move along to the next something or someone else to be given a gratuitous kick down for the sake of shits and giggles.
The history of ricin arrests in the US during the war on terror years is worth telling for its illustration of the intersection of the ginned up fear of biological and chemical terrorism and how that has resulted in a process that regularly grinds up and spits out weak and confused people from the fringes of society. And that process is totally unique to America. We own it.
And if you were the survivalist he-man Kurt Saxon and had written the Poor Man’s James Bond — from which Levenderis’ ricin recipe ultimately derives — and your primary legacy was that your idiotic books had contributed to putting a noticeable amount of people in jail, what would you think of yourself?
That you were somehow stubbornly demonstrating the right to freedom of the press? And that this was a shining example to the kinds of people who actually credulously read the stuff?
“A federal grand jury in Cleveland indicted 54-year-old Jeff Boyd Levenderis of Tallmadge near Akron on Tuesday on one count of possessing a biological toxin and one count of making false statements,” reads the Dayton Daily News today.
There’s a book in this and other perplexing and common-sense defying stories unique to the American condition but connected to the war on terror.
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Posted in Imminent Catastrophe, Satan's Bank, Stumble and Fail at 10:03 am by George Smith
Last night’s Ed Show on MSNBC featured an extended riff on Wall Street speculators and the price of food worldwide. It linked this — using financial giants Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch — repeatedly. (Follow the link, click on the tab for “Speculation wreaks global havoc” — if interested.)
Host Ed Schultz linked it all to riots, which start out as protests over food pricing, in the Middle East, specifically in Tunisia and Egypt.
The upshot, which was posed as a question for viewers to answer at the bottom of the screen was this: Does US business represent a threat to national or world security?
For the thrust of the segment, the implicit answer was yes.
Schultz brought in Dylan Ratigan to discuss this and the latter wasn’t ready to go along with the supposition. Ratigan averred, however, that it was a complicated story, one in which Wall Street speculation played a part.
DD isn’t going to embrace the idea but it does again bring up the question I’ve discussed over the past year. (See here, in my last posting for 2010.) And Paul Krugman has devoted a bit of time lately to discussing commodity prices and worldwide fluctuation in the same without mentioning speculators.
But that this idea has now shown itself at a mainstream media outlet, albeit one that’s increasingly hitched its fortunes to viewers from the center left, is still quite startling.
In any case, I’ve made posts over the past couple of years where, demonstrably, US businesses have threatened US security. Most notably, from large agribusiness, via the examples of mass food poisonings written off as an acceptable cost to the industry. For example, it’s just a fact now that US agribusinessmen have proven to be better at distributing disease than bioterrorists.
And in a much broader sense, the worldwide economic collapse brought on by Wall Street has had grave implications, causing instability and suffering, and consequent problems for security, worldwide.
Schultz’s segment, reprinted and cleaned up a little from here, approaches the same conspiratorial tone the mainstrean usually likes to laughingly dismiss as the property of cranks and crackpots:
Yemen and Tunisia have also had mass protests. They’re all autocratic, majority Muslim nations, but they’re not all oil states. Tunisia is mostly secular.
So what else do these countries have in common?
One thing is high food prices, a factor in how all the riots really started and how all of it started. And it’s not a coincidence that all of them have high food prices right now.
Food prices have skyrocketed around the world and a big reason for that is Wall Street.
It started in 1991 with surprise, surprise Goldman Sachs.
Before then, wall street speculators played only a minor role in food prices. The way it worked food companies and their suppliers, america’s farmers, wanted to keep their business stable. Even if prices spiked for wheat, corn, or other agricultural commodities.
So they’d hedge their bets, signing contracts, futures, to lock in prices for some point in the future.
Speculators helped, putting enough money in the system to keep things liquid.
After the depression, FDR saw that speculators could drive up the price of wheat, corn, whatever, by betting on commodity futures the way Wall Street later bet on dot coms.
Distorting food prices like that could destroy the very stability future contracts were created to provide so FDR signed into law what are called position limits — limits on how much of the total betting could be done by wall street.
And what do you know it worked.
For decades the price of wheat was driven by fundamentals like the weather and Wall Street couldn’t stand it.
In 1991, Goldman Sachs asked the commodity futures trading commission, the CFTC, to give them a waiver on those position limits, so they could bet as much as they wanted.
A CFTC appointee for the first president bush said sure.
More than a dozen other firms followed suit.
Goldman Sachs even created commodities indexes. To simplify the betting and goose casual investors into the casino. Again, Wall Street followed suit.
Remember the real estate bubble?
Wall Street wanted to hedge all of those bets it made on mortgages.
So they ramped up their bets on commodities.
And when Wall Street started losing money on sub primes, they bet it on commodities instead.
By 2008, Wall Street had five times more futures contracts in commodities than it did in 2002.
Commodity indexes held about $13 billion in 2003.
By 2008 it was over a quarter trillion.
That’s how we got the oil bubble.
And record high gas prices added to the cost of shipping food plus speculators looking for another bubble, and you get a food bubble.
Estimates speculators held 65% of corn futures’ contracts, 68% Of soybean, 80% of wheat. By mid 2008, the IMF food price index jumped more than 80% in just a year and a half before.
It was the first time in history the proportion of people going hungry worldwide went up.
The number of chronically malnourished people rose by 75 million in 2007.
40 Million in 2008.
That’s why Egypt had riots back in 2008.
Along with 30 other countries, Italian moms marched against the price of pasta. Wall street speculators admitted they were doing it.
In 2006 Merrill Lynch said speculation accounted for 50% of the price of commodities. Half the price.
In 2008 a Goldman Sachs research paper said, quote, without question, increased fund flow into commodities has boosted prices.
2009 — even Republican senator Tom Coburn admits the speculation, quote, helped to inflate futures prices and there by disconnect futures from cash prices impairing farmers’ and grain elevators’ ability to hedge price risk.
Even Coburn said there was so much Wall Street money distorting prices that farmers and other guys who actually need commodity futures couldn’t use them to keep their companies stable anymore.
We don’t notice price hikes so much because most of our food prices come from marketing and packaging.
But in the developing world, the price of food is everything.
And what country imports more wheat than any other?
Egypt.
Where the price of wheat rose 70% last year.
Last summer Goldman called a report on the role of speculation in food prices, quote, misleading and blamed other factors.
A lot of reports mentioned that Russia cut off its wheat supply last year. What they don’t tell you is why. Because futures traders asked them to.
And, of course, there’s always a reason to promote Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein.
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02.01.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Imminent Catastrophe at 2:10 pm by George Smith
Next week, the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy/bomb Iran/missile defense lobby will roll out its new ‘blockbuster’ documentary, Iranium.
DD is so there.
The production values on the website, here, are top notch.
Starring the usual cast — Frank Gaffney, Clifford May and assorted perps from the GOP far right — DD readers might also want to reserve their seats now.
Some dude, Robert Dreyfuss, at the Nation blogs about a screening of it at the Heritage Foundation — here.
Dreyfuss has apparently just discovered the favorite meme the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, the one it has peddled since 2008 or so:
Perhaps the high point of the film was when Frank Gaffney, the extreme right militarist who leads an outfit called the Center for Security Policy in Washington—waxed poetic about how Iran could soon be able to detonate a nuclear “electromagnetic pulse??? (EMP) weapon in the American heartland that would, he warned, “take down the entire power grid??? across the United States. Not only that, said Gaffney and others, but this “strategic EMP attack??? would destroy everything in the United States that relies on electronics, and with a few years “nine out of every ten Americans could be dead.??? This, Gaffney warned, with a serious face that made it clear that he wasn’t joking, was to carry out Iran’s “stated purpose of bringing about a world without America.???
What Dreyfuss and the Nation may have missed: The Cult has been making this movie over and over for the last couple of years, from shorter documentaries to commercials for YouTube.
Now the Nation’s audience of progressives who like their stories dressed up as new intellectual air-freshener get the scoop.
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Posted in Cyberterrorism at 10:04 am by George Smith
Ludicrous. Do it again, must break finger.
Talk to the press hot on a story of mythic proportion too much, you can screw up.
Today’s case, Ralph Langner, the German computer security expert, perhaps seeking to defuse some of the mania now surrounding the Stuxnet worm.
From AP, where the reporter and editor obviously don’t know much about nuclear reactors and the difference between fission and fusion:
But German cybersecurity researcher Ralph Langner says that, while the virus has infested the reactor’s computers, “Stuxnet cannot technically mess with the systems in Bushehr.
“Bottom line: A thermonuclear explosion cannot be triggered by something like Stuxnet,” said Langner, who has led research into Stuxnet’s effects on the Siemens equipment running Iran’s nuclear programs.
Thermonuclear explosion. Ahem.
See here — Google is your friend.
For the computer security man and AP reporter:
Fellows, regardless of your position on the story, nuclear reactors generate energy through fission. A thermonuclear reaction is the hydrogen bomb, a different animal. Sadly, nuclear reactors aren’t potential fusion bombs.
Oof. The only thing that’s gone thermonuclear on Stuxnet is the reporting, so to speak.
Route this one to trash.
Actually, there’s a bit of humor here.
If Stuxnet actually could cause a thermonuclear explosion, the presumed joint Israeli/US malware operation would have accidentally given the Iranians a much bigger bomb than the one they’re trying to make.
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