Here are the poor, dear, desperate suffering home-owners whom savers (often retired folks on pensions, or thrifty low-income people) have to bail out:

Bloomberg:

“Harvey Collier, a mortgage broker in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, says he gets as many as 10 calls a month from people planning to default on their loans. The twist: They first want financing to buy another home.

Real estate professionals call it “buy and bail,” acquiring a new house before the buyer’s credit rating is ruined by walking away from the old one because it’s “underwater,” or worth less than the mortgage. It’s an attempt to escape payments on a home whose value may never recover while securing a new property, often at a lower price with a more affordable loan.

The practice, which constitutes fraud if borrowers lie on loan applications, is continuing even after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the biggest U.S. mortgage-finance companies, beefed up standards to prevent it, according to brokers such as Collier and Meg Burns, senior associate director for congressional affairs and communications at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Whether driven by greed or desperation, the persistency of buy and bail underscores the lingering impact of the worst housing crash since the Great Depression.

“People were holding on, hoping the market would turn around,” Collier, who won’t work with applicants who intend to go into foreclosure, said in a telephone interview. “But now they’re giving up because there’s no light at the end of the tunnel in places like Florida.”

It’s bad enough that the thrifty and prudent have to foot the bill for all these slick white-collar tricksters, but on top of that, we’re supposed to be broken-hearted for them……

The Fed announcement today:

“The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.

To help support the economic recovery in a context of price stability, the Committee will keep constant the Federal Reserve’s holdings of securities at their current level by reinvesting principal payments from agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in longer-term Treasury securities.¹ The Committee will continue to roll over the Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities as they mature. “

Hard to tell exactly how this will pan out, but, for now, gold popped up and the dollar sank…

Bretigne Shaffer has an excellent analysis at Lew Rockwell on the way the media is, again, drumming up support for expansion of the war in Afghanistan by appealing to women’s rights. This was precisely the same strategy employed during the war in Iraq, when statistics about female kidnapping, honor killings and so on were massaged to argue that further American intervention in the area was needed, when, in point of fact, the opposite was true – it was the US intervention that had  provoked the deterioration in the general economic picture and, as a consequence, the treatment of women. This is in keeping with the old colonial strategy decribed by post-colonial feminist critics –  “White men rescuing brown women from brown men…”.

“The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission reported in March of 2008 that violence against women had nearly doubled from the previous year, and a 2009 Human Rights Watch report concludes that “(w)hereas the trend had clearly been positive for women’s rights from 2001–2005, the trend is now negative in many areas.” Other reports (including one from Amnesty International in May of 2005) call the first part of that statement into question:

Says Ann Jones, journalist and author of Kabul in Winter, “For most Afghan women, life has stayed the same. And for a great number, life has gotten much worse.”

Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, says “the attacks against women both external and within the family have gone up. Domestic violence has increased. (The current) judiciary is imprisoning more women than ever before in Afghanistan. And they are imprisoning them for running away from their homes, for refusing to marry the man that their family picked for them, for even being a victim of rape.”

Anand Gopal, Afghanistan correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, says “The situation for women in the Pashtun area is actually worse than it was during the Taliban time. …(U)nder the Taliban, women were kept in burqas and in their homes, away from education. Today, the same situation persists. They’re kept in burqas, in homes, away from education, but on top of that they are also living in a war zone.”

“Five years after the fall of the Taliban, and the liberation of women hailed by Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, thanks to the US and British invasion,” wrote The Independent’s Kim Sengupta in November of 2006, “such has been the alarming rise in suicide that a conference was held on the problem in the Afghan capital just a few days ago.”

The US military has made life worse for women in Afghanistan, not better. Is it possible that a US exit will result in their lives becoming even worse than they are now, as Bret Stephens and Time magazine fear? Of course it is possible. But what is certain is that the occupation has had a harmful effect on the lives of the vast majority of Afghan civilians – not a positive one as the promoters of war as a vehicle for social change assert. Also indisputable is that the Taliban has grown in strength since the occupation began, and it only continues to do so. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has looked closely at the motives for terrorism. Even US intelligence agencies have acknowledged that the US occupation of Iraq has strengthened Islamic fundamentalism and .”..made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

To call for even more certain death and destruction as a defense against imagined, possible worse bloodshed reveals a curious kind of moral reasoning. For let’s not forget what it is that Time magazine (despite its protestations to the contrary) and Stephens are defending: The indiscriminate killing of innocent men, women and children, in the pursuit of what they believe to be some greater good.”

Rick Ackerman argues that the burden of debt is the key to identifying whether it is the “I” word or the “D” word at work in the economy today: 

“Concerning the inflation-vs-deflation debate, we’re going to try and kick the level of discussion up a notch or two with a couple of suggestions.  First, because the pro and con arguments often bog down in pseudo-intellectual claptrap about what constitutes “money,” we are going to provide you with foolproof way to recognize deflation for what it is – namely, an increase in the real burden of debt. Some will say that this is just a symptom of inflation, but we would tell them that it is ultimately only the symptoms that matter. Trust us on this: You’re a deflationist, just like us, if you believe that paying off your mortgage, servicing the $200,000 debt your daughter racked up attending Vassar, and retiring at 65 will not get any easier within the foreseeable future. If, on the other hand, you believe that Helicopter Ben and his band of tooth fairies will come to the rescue, raising your real income very substantially and causing perpetual increases in the value of your home sufficient to allow you to borrow against it just like in the good old days, then you are an inflationist.

When Money Dies

Our second suggestion is that you beg, buy, steal or borrow a copy of Adam Fergusson’s book, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-inflation. Used original copies of this minutely detailed and fascinating work go for upwards of $800, but if you search the web for the title, you can turn up cheaper ways to access it.  The book is essential for anyone who wants to understand why it would be impossible for the U.S. to trigger off a hyperinflation in the way the Germans did. The mechanisms simply don’t exist.  Fergusson will save you the trouble of searching a million web pages to find out how all those D-marks actually got into the hands of German workers. Surely this question has occurred to you, right?  Nearly all sources say the same thing – i.e., that the government revved up the printing presses, and… Bitteschön!… hyperinflation simply happened. In fact, putting a google of D-marks into circulation required a degree of collusion between the government and major employers that could not exist in the U.S. without major changes in the law.

It turns out that certain large German companies were allowed to print their own money in times of emergency. Because they did so most promiscuously when Germany’s official-currency printers were on strike, as occurred several times, the ironic result was that the most severe stretches of hyperinflation during the nearly three-year period occurred when sovereign notes were not even being printed. Another revelation from Fergusson is that some officials failed to see a hyperinflation threat even when money-creation was at full-bore. Would America’s political leaders be so stupid as to let hyperinflation occur inadvertently? And, was screwing the allies out of war reparations Germany’s motive for hyperinflating? In fact, maintaining a high level of employment was the original goal, and it worked to the extent that Germany in 1921 had full employment while the war’s victors were wallowing in joblessness. This book is a great read, and the answers you’ve been looking for are all here. “

Update 5:

Simmon’s opinions about the Gulf Oil spill seem, in retrospect, to have been discredited by events and reports that appear to show that the spill was far, far less of a disaster than imagined. That being the case, what would be a cogent thesis that would explain what’s been going on so far? (more to come)

Note: We’ve never bought the “peak oil” thesis, at least not in its black-and-white incarnation (“The world is running completely out of oil”). We’ve always subscribed to some version of the abiotic theory, since we read about it in a newsletter put out by respected fund manager Bill Miller (of Legg Mason).

Update 4:

This blog post suggesting some kind of a “hit” on Simmons is showing up on the first page of a Google search for “Matt Simmons death,” so, to all appearances, it’s not conspiracy-mongering per se that’s the problem for the powers-that-be (PTB).

It’s who mongers a given conspiracy. Yours truly is, apparently, not “licensed to spill” (sigh)….

Anyway, the post suggests that Simmons might have become persona non grata for whistle-blowing on the BP story. However,  if you read through commentary about Simmon’s public pronouncements, knowledgeable insiders seem to think he was a panic-monger with a vested interest in what he said, not a whistle-blower. His public statements were intended to bolster stock positions he held. He was, after all, a friend of the Hunt brothers –  famous for having tried to corner the silver market…

Of course, there’s no reason Simmons couldn’t be a panic-monger who turned into a whistle-blower…. or some variant thereof.

So, while I think his death certainly falls under the category of “suspicious,” what the reasons are and who the perpetrators might be are questions that are a bit more complicated than one would first think. Someone who was an adviser to George Bush, did work for Halliburton (which, along with Transocean and BP, was involved in the Macondo well), “exposed” the Saudis about the depletion of their oil stocks, put a lot of money into alternative energy businesses that stood to profit from the demise of the oil industry,  pushed the “peak oil” thesis, tried to short BP stock to a dollar without disclosing his position publicly, and recently pronounced the oil business dead….is likely to have made more than one enemy.

Update 3:

Died in his hot tub from drowning, with heart disease as the contributing factor. That’s the verdict of of the autopsy on Monday.

“Matthew Simmons’ body was found Sunday night in his hot tub, investigators said. An autopsy by the state medical examiner’s office concluded Monday that he died from accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor”

Update 2:

One report says that the cause of death is not confirmed:

Bangor Daily News Today 01:55 PM in reply to MyNameIsTaken

Updating as I go along:

*Coincidentally,  when this news came over PR wire, I was blogging about remote brain-sensing and researching microwave-induced heart attacks (a technology that’s been around for 30 years).

(This train of thought was set off by a link about electronic surveillance and induced illness in the comments section to a recent post about GPS surveillance).

“Neurological research has found that the brain has specific frequencies for each voluntary movement called preparatory sets. When you pick up an object, there is a specific preparatory set for this action. By firing at your chest a microwave beam containing the ELF signals given off by the heart, this organ can be put into a chaotic state, the so called heart attack. In this way, high profile leaders of political parties, who are prone to heart attacks, can be killed off -before they cause any trouble. Neil Kinnock’s Labour government was allegedly cheated out of an election victory by postal vote rigging in twenty key marginal seats. When a new even more electable Labour leader was found, it is rumoured that John Smith, the then Labour leader, was prompted to have a fatal heart attack, while walking in the country with his family, by means of a concealed microwave device which operated on the Vagus nerve to bring about a massive heart attack. Since MI5 have a long history of naked hatred toward the Labour Party, there may be some truth in the above, though no hard evidence has yet been found.”

More here about microwave weapons at The Daily Mail.

I’m not suggesting that this is what happened with Simmons. I’m simply pointing out the coincidence that I was researching microwave-induced heart attacks this morning, and had been discussing Matt Simmons and whether he was the source of the story about a massive volcano of oil under Macondo…

And then we get this news.

Simmons *died of a heart attack in a hot tub at his home in Maine,” according to Deal Journal, which also adds this:

“Simmons was back in the limelight this spring when BP oil’s rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded. He went out on a limb (his critics say too far out) by predicting in June that the spill would cause BP to go bankrupt and that “if a hurricane comes and blows this to shore, it could paint the Gulf Coast black.”

Business Insider notes that Simmons also didn’t think BP’s cap was sufficient:

“What we don’t know anything about is the open hole which is caused by the drill bit when it tossed the blow-out preventer way out of the hole…and 120,000 minimum of toxic poison has now covered the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. So what they’re talking about is the biggest environmental cover-up ever. And they knew that that well, that riser, would finally deplete. And then they could say it’s over. And unfortunately, we now have killed the Gulf of Mexico.” (comment, July 21, cited in BI)

I just noticed that my blog post, which was on page one of a Google search of “Matt Simmons dies,” above Zerohedge, has suddenly disappeared in about five seconds flat…not to be seen for the first several pages (not in the first 15)…could it get buried that deep that fast? Maybe a lot of people jumped on it….

(I just checked and Matt Simmon’s death is the 14th most searched string on google…)

ORIGINAL POST

Not to get all conspiratorial, but we were just discussing Matt Simmons, the energy expert and peak-oil alarmist (or realist, depending on where you stand) on The Daily Bell forum, last Saturday.

Simmons has been accused by some of doom-mongering over the BP oil spill:

“Simmons also says that as the leak has no casing, a relief well will not work, and the only possible resolution is, as he said previously, to use a small nuclear explosion to convert the rock to glass. Simmons concludes that as punishment for BP’s arrogance and stupidity the government “will take all their cash.”

I was wondering if he was the source for one of Pastor Lindsay Williams’ more infamous statements on Alex Jones.…that the Maconda well had tapped into something much bigger, like a volcano of oil…That was just a couple of days ago.

Now comes news that Simmons, aged 67, just died from a heart attack in his pool.

The technology for recording brainwaves from a distance has existed for sometime, lending credence to people who’ve complained of government remote surveillance. Here’s a BBC report from 17 November, 2002:

“Scientists have developed a sensor that can record brainwaves without the need for electrodes to be inserted into the brain or even placed on the scalp.

They believe the new sensor will lead to major advances in the collection and display of electrical information from the brain – and could even be used to control machines in a more effective way than is currently possible.

It is a new age as far as sensing the electrical dynamics of the body is concerned
Conventional electroencephalograms (EEGs) are collected either by inserting needle electrodes directly into the brain or by fixing electrodes to the scalp.
This process often leads to trauma, so that it may be necessary to remove some of the patient’s hair.
In addition, the process of attaching conventional electrodes may lead to skin abrasion and irritation.
Now a team from the Centre for Physical Electronics at the University of Sussex has developed a far more user-friendly technique.

From a distance

Instead of measuring electric current flow through a fixed-on electrode, the new method takes advantage of the latest developments in sensor technology to measure electric fields from the brain without actually having to make direct contact with the head.
We deal with patients who have Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia who often have delusions about electrodes in their head
Lead researcher Professor Terry Clark said current imaging techniques were very good at providing information about fixed anatomical structures in the body.
But it had proved more difficult to find ways to monitor the body’s ever-changing electrical currents – the information that was needed to gain a real insight into the electrical workings of the body.
He said the new system provided a way to do this effectively, and because it was non-invasive it was completely safe, and more accurate because it did not interfere with the electrical fields generated by the body.
Professor Clark said: “It is a new age as far as sensing the electrical dynamics of the body is concerned, like seeing in colour for the first time.

Many possibilities

“The possibilities for the future are boundless.
“The advantages offered by these sensors compared with the currently used contact electrodes may act to stimulate new developments in multichannel EEG monitoring and in real-time electrical imaging of the brain.
“By picking up brain signals non-invasively, we could find ourselves controlling machinery with our thoughts alone: a marriage of mind and machine.”
The same group of scientists has already made remote-sensing ECG units which can detect heartbeats with no connections at all.

Professor Tonmoy Sharma, a neuropsychologist at the Clinical Neuroscience Research Centre at Dartford, Kent, said a device to measure electrical activity in the brain without the need for electrodes would potentially be very useful.
“We deal with patients who have Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia who often have delusions about electrodes in their head, and who refuse treatment.
“A non-invasive method would allow us to monitor the effects of drugs on the brain over time, and to tailor treatments more effectively.”

no cookies   | no search-term records   | access log deleted within 48 hours

Scroogle, which is Google scraped of its invasive elements, wasn’t working a few months back, but I looked at the site today and it looks fine.

In case you don’t know why you need Scroogle, here’s why: no cookies, no search-term records, access log deleted within 48 hours.

(From the Scroogle website)

How Scroogle’s SSL option protects your privacy

Secure Socket Layer is an encryption protocol that is available in almost all browsers. If you’ve ever entered your credit card number to purchase something online, you should have checked for the little yellow padlock at the bottom right of your browser. That means no one can intercept your number as it travels between your browser and the online merchant, because the browser has established a secure connection. That’s SSL.

For Scroogle, SSL is used to hide your search terms from anyone who might be monitoring traffic between your browser and Scroogle’s servers. This encryption happens when you send your search terms to Scroogle, and it also happens when Scroogle sends the results of your search back to you. No one snooping between your browser and Scroogle can figure out what you were looking for, because the information is encrypted and looks like gibberish. The connection between Scroogle and Google, which still must happen for every search, is not encrypted because Google doesn’t use SSL. However, this connection is not associated with you at that point, and only Scroogle knows who entered those search terms. Your IP address is dropped before your search terms are sent to Google.

Most employers monitor the websites visited by their employees. There are impressive “employer spyware” packages such as Websense that they use to do this. Because the GET method is preferred by almost all search engines (see this page), even if the employer sees only the web address that you used to arrive at Google, he already knows the search terms you requested. With a record of all the search terms you’ve used while you were at work, each with a date and time recorded in his log, your employer has a pretty good idea of what you’ve been thinking. There are no laws that prevent employers from doing this sort of snooping.

If you use Wi-Fi and you haven’t set up your router for secure operation, your neighbors could see what you are doing on the web. Again, your search terms might be interesting to them.

In some countries, the government could be monitoring your web activity by requiring your service provider to log the sites you visit, and make the logs available on demand. In fact, most governments wouldn’t even have to ask the service provider for this information. They could tap the line upstream of the provider, and just look for packets containing www.google.com/search. Next to this are your search terms in plain text, with your IP address in the same packet. Government spies salivate at the thought of data-mining this information. With your search terms revealing what you are thinking, and the email you send revealing your network of associates, that’s almost everything they need to know about you.

Besides encrypting everything between your browser and Scroogle, there are other details that may interest you about SSL. We prefer the POST method over the GET method, but if you use SSL, even the GET method is secure. You will see the Scroogle address and the search terms in your browser address bar with the GET method only because the browser displays this before it starts the SSL negotiation with Scroogle. Those search terms don’t go any further than your browser. The SSL in your browser strips off the portion of the URL after the question mark, and then provides this information to Scroogle only after the secure connection has been established.

When the Scroogle results come back from an SSL search, and you click on any of the links shown on that secure page, there is another advantage. SSL does not allow the browser to record the address where that secure page came from, and attach it to any outgoing non-SSL links on that page. Normally all browsers do this, and it’s called the “referrer” address. Using SSL blanks out this referrer, so that any non-SSL site you click on from a Scroogle SSL page won’t even know that you arrived at their site from Scroogle. The referrer will be blank, and your log entry at that site will look like any of the hundreds of bots that crawl the web all day and night with similar blank referrers.

All of these are good reasons to use Scroogle’s SSL option. It increases the load on our servers because the encryption handshaking is complex, but so far it hasn’t been a problem for us. If it does become a problem, we hope to get more donations so that we can add more servers.

Alexander Cockburn in “All The News That’s Fit To Buy” describes how the CIA disposed of Paul Robeson through drugging:

“Consider the CIA’s probable poisoning, at a fraught political moment, of Paul Robeson, the black actor, singer, and political radical. As Jeffrey St Clair and I wrote a few years ago in our book Serpents in the Garden, in the spring of 1961, Robeson planned to visit Havana, Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The trip never came off because Robeson fell ill in Moscow, where he had gone to give several lectures and concerts. At the time, it was reported that Robeson had suffered a heart attack. But in fact Robeson had slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt after suffering hallucinations and severe depression. The symptoms came on following a surprise party thrown for him at his Moscow hotel.

Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson, Jr., investigated his father’s illness for more than 30 years. He believes that his father was slipped a synthetic hallucinogen called BZ by U.S. intelligence operatives at the party in Moscow. The party was hosted by anti-Soviet dissidents funded by the CIA.

Robeson Jr. visited his father in the hospital the day after the suicide attempt. Robeson told his son that he felt extreme paranoia and thought that the walls of the room were moving. He said he had locked himself in his bedroom and was overcome by a powerful sense of emptiness and depression before he tried to take his own life.

Robeson left Moscow for London, where he was admitted to Priory Hospital. There he was turned over to psychiatrists who forced him to endure 54 electro-shock treatments. At the time, electro-shock, in combination with psycho-active drugs, was a favored technique of CIA behavior modification. It turned out that the doctors treating Robeson in London and, later, in New York were CIA contractors. The timing of Robeson’s trip to Cuba was certainly a crucial factor. Three weeks after the Moscow party, the CIA launched its disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. It’s impossible to underestimate Robeson’s threat, as he was perceived by the U.S. government as the most famous black radical in the world. Through the 1950s Robeson commanded worldwide attention and esteem. He was the Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali of his time. He spoke more than twenty languages, including Russian, Chinese, and several African languages. Robeson was also on close terms with Nehru, Jomo Kenyatta, and other Third World leaders. His embrace of Castro in Havana would have seriously undermined U.S. efforts to overthrow the new Cuban government.

Another pressing concern for the U.S. government at the time was Robeson’s announced intentions to return to the United States and assume a leading role in the emerging civil rights movement. Like the family of Martin Luther King, Robeson had been under official surveillance for decades. As early as 1935, British intelligence had been looking at Robeson’s activities. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services, World War II predecessor to the CIA, opened a file on him. In 1947, Robeson was nearly killed in a car crash. It later turned out that the left wheel of the car had been monkey-wrenched. In the 1950s, Robeson was targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings. The campaign effectively sabotaged his acting and singing career in the states.

Robeson never recovered from the drugging and the follow-up treatments from CIA-linked doctors and shrinks. He died in 1977.”