FROM: http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm
Columbus Would Be Proud
Before we get deeply into the morning's financial headlines, I'd like to note that this is when some years back that Christopher Columbus' posse began the large scale looting of the Americas by landing on Samana Cay some 60-miles southeast of San Salvador. Since that time:
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Spain ripped off most of the treasure of South & Central America, forced people to learn Spanish, and don't they continue their exploits by operating toll roads in Texas?
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England sent their religious castaways here, but kept them on a golden royal leash through interlocking directorships and secret agreements with only the highest of Norte banksters. England is still getting even, promoting Tony Blair's career, for example.
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The new arrivals in N.A. successful installed a consumerist economy by locking Native Americans away on reservations; but only the ones the newcomers didn't kill with small pox. We're trying to do better lately with swine flu vaccine...or are we?
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The newcomers then fought a war over the right relationship between Big Central Government and States' Rights, but repackaged the whole affair as a slavery-only showdown, in order to hide the early march to Marxism which had just recently been invented at the time. Small Government lost, in case you missed it.
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America turned around and saved Europe from the Kaiser's conquistadoring attempts.
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Ditto, WW II when the mustachioed guy tried that.
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The Korean War was fought to a standstill - which drags out even today since politicians got involved instead of military men. Should've flattened the place when we had a chance, and yeah Schwarzkopf was right about all the way to Baghdad, too.
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Vietnam was, as I see it, a losing proposition since the politicians drove that one, too. Still, like we're rediscovering in Afghanistan, there is this thing called 'home field advantage' whether you're talking sports or defending a country. Don't mention the Peace prize there.
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Tired of continental pillage, we've now exported huge segments of industry so America's left with a ninny-class of accountants who thing they can manage, managers who think they can lawyer, and lawyers who think they can count. Seals the case against fluoride, doesn't it?
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More recently, having tired of our borders, especially the Mexican one, we now station our military in something like 143 different countries around the world. We're engaged in two largish wars and who knows how many conflicts (called peace-keeping operations but the bullets hurt either way) right now and despite this our president just got a Nobel Peace Prize.
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To remind ourselves of this fine heritage, parking is free in some cities today. There will be no mail delivery, however the stock market is open.
All of which eventually circles around to my first point of the day: Rain, sleek, snow, and hail may not stop the USPS, but politically holidays like this one does. On the other hand, the market's are open and that's a sure sign of the nation's fiscal condition: Booking revenue is more important than getting the billing delivered. Dumb...really dumb.
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"A three year old with a pocket calculator can figure out we are screwed"
Drudge is attempting to get the attention of the US populous with the following headline this morning:
AFP | Recession-hit Britain to sell off state assets - including the Channel Tunnel linking Britain to France
Wall Street Journal | Mixed Mantra: Consumers Urged to Save More -- and Shop More
China IS an elephant the West can't shove around
Investor Interactive | China is the G7's elephant in the room
LONDON, Oct 12 (Reuters) - The currency emphasis of the Group of Seven finance chiefs' Istanbul meeting last week was that the dollar should depreciate against "emergent Asia".
ECB Governing Council member Guy Quaden was explicit, saying, "The problem is not the exchange rate of the dollar against the euro but rather the relationship between the dollar and certain Asian currencies -- to mention one, the Chinese yuan."
For the G7, China is the elephant in the room. The trouble is you cannot push an elephant around....
ZHENGZHOU, China -October 12, 2009- Chinese leaders are concerned that their nation's enormous economic expansion is becoming an excuse for foreign suppliers to inflate commodity costs. So, they hope to use their three futures exchanges to fight back.
Government officials say the country is positioning its futures markets to be major players in setting world prices for metal, energy and farm commodities. By letting the world know how much its companies and investors think goods are worth, China hopes to be less at the mercy of markets elsewhere......
A futures exchange or derivatives exchange is a central financial exchange where people can trade standardized futures contracts; that is, a contract to buy specific quantities of a commodity or financial instrument at a specified price with delivery set at a specified time in the future.
A commodity is some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is a product that is the same no matter who produces it, such as petroleum, notebook paper, or milk.[1] In other words, copper is copper. The price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand. Stereos, on the other hand, have many levels of quality. And, the better a stereo is [perceived to be], the more it will cost.
One of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole. Well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, these are basic resources and agricultural products such as iron ore, crude oil, coal, ethanol, salt, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminum, copper, rice, wheat, gold, silver and platinum.
Commoditization occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently. As such, goods that formerly carried premium margins for market participants have become commodities, such as generic pharmaceuticals and silicon chips.
Latin American Herald Tribune | Ecuador’s President Says Big Hydro Project on Track
Ecuador is providing about 15 percent of the funding for the power plant, with China's Eximbank financing the other approximately 85 percent of the project. ...CHINA IN AFRICA
Rwanda president lauds China's role in Africa, slams West
BERLIN — Rwandan President Paul Kagame Sunday defended China's programme of investment in developing African countries, while slamming Western nations and firms for polluting the continent.
"The Chinese bring what Africa needs: investment and money for governments and companies. China is investing in infrastructure and building roads," said Kagame in an interview with German daily Handelsblatt to appear on Monday.
In contrast, the West's involvement "has not brought Africa forward," the president was quoted as saying.
"Western firms have to a large extent polluted Africa and they are still doing it. Think of the dumping of nuclear waste in the Ivory Coast or the fact that Somalia is being used as a rubbish bin by European firms," he added.......
SeedDaily.com | Dinner is grass in South Sudan after drought kills crops
NASA’s “OPERATION ICE BRIDGE” TAKES OFF IN PUNTA ARENAS
Monday, 12 October 2009
Investigations Provide Important Clues Regarding The Advance Of Climate Change
Surveillance flights by NASA’s “Operation Ice Bridge” began this week from the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas in a quest to measure the impact climate change is having on the Antarctica’s sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers.
Aerial view of the city of Punta Arenas where NASA researchers will travel to seekevidence of climate change.
LAKOTA NEWS
By Patrick Springer, Special to the Journal
BLACK HAWK — Jackie Means has only faded memories of her childhood pilgrimages to Custer State Park to view the famous buffalo herd.
Her first adult visits, back in the 1960s, remain much more vivid.
“There were buffalo all over,” she said.
Back then, the herd’s size numbered 2,500, its peak, since reduced to prevent overgrazing its Black Hills refuge.
Those glimpses of the buffalo were family reunions of a sort. Means’ paternal grandfather, Scotty Philip, once lauded as “The Man Who Saved the Buffalo,” raised the bison that provided the foundation for today’s Custer State Park herd.
The park’s herd started in 1914, three years after his death, with the purchase of 36 buffalo for about $11,000 from the Philip ranch near Fort Pierre.
Actually, Philip had a bit of help. He bought 83 buffalo from the estate of another rancher, Fred Dupree, who had rounded up five bison calves when buffalo were on the brink of extinction.
But, as descendants of both the Philip and Dupree families attest, there was more to the story of how those two legendary ranchers helped spare the American bison from annihilation.
Their wives, Mary Good Elk Woman Dupree and Sarah Philip, were unsung heroines in the saga, largely ignored by historians but credited by their families for their roles.
Both women were Lakota, for whom the buffalo are sacred. And both, according to their descendants, helped persuade their husbands to rescue buffalo for their preservation.
So a bit of spousal prodding, it seems, helped to save the buffalo.
“She kind of lived both lives,” Means said of her grandmother, who was of Lakota and French ancestry. “The buffalo were quite predominant at that time. She always bemoaned the loss of the buffalo. She even wept once.”
In response, as the story was related by Means’ parents, Scotty Philip decided to do something.
“Our grandfather said, ‘Well, we’ll see if we can find some buffalo.’”
Undoubtedly, commercial motives also played a part, said Means’ cousin, Cathie Draine, also of Black Hawk. She recently edited a volume of her grandfather George Philip’s letters, with reminiscences of his days working on his uncle Scotty’s ranch.
Bison, which once roamed the prairies by the millions, were by then scarce but sought after by a handful of ranchers because of their impressive hardiness and adaptation.
“Scotty felt that the buffalo were remarkably suited to the northern Great Plains,” Draine said. “My instincts tell me Scotty was a first-class businessman and clever enough to read the writing on the wall. It just made good sense to save them.”
Whatever his motivations, Scotty Philip knew where to find buffalo: the neighboring Dupree Circle D Ranch on Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.
Fred Dupree, a French Canadian and former fur trader at Fort Pierre Chouteau, was by the 1880s enjoying a second career as a successful cattle rancher.
In one of history’s ironic twists, a man who once traded in buffalo robes — the industry that almost hunted the bison to extinction — would become an important figure in the animal’s resurrection.
In the winter of 1881, a hunting party from the Cheyenne River reservation set out in pursuit of a huge movement of buffalo, the remnant of the once-great northern herd.
Donovin Sprague of Rapid City, a historian and the great-great-great grandson of Fred and Mary Dupree, believes the inspiration to take several buffalo calves coincided with that hunt, which took place between the Moreau and Grand rivers.
The hunters had to rove far afield to find buffalo to shoot. Sprague believes the hunters found most of their prey near the Slim Buttes in Harding County.
“It’s kind of an oasis there,” said Sprague, who is director of education at Crazy Horse Memorial and also teaches history at Black Hills State University.
The hunters, including a couple of Fred Dupree’s sons, ultimately killed 2,000 buffalo. After two decades of intense hunting pressure, it seemed clear to anyone who was paying attention that the buffalo’s days were rapidly dwindling.
Perhaps the following spring, Fred Dupree sent a party, including two of his sons, to locate what remained of the buffalo herd, this time on a mission to capture calves.
The rescue party managed to get seven calves, by one account, taken while their mothers slept. Two calves died in captivity, but five survived — the forebears of today’s Custer State Park buffalo herd, estimated at 1,330 head at last month’s roundup, and unknown thousands of other bison.
Once again, a wife would play an important but unheralded role in saving the buffalo. Sprague said that the impetus to capture the calves came from Good Elk Woman, for whom the buffalo was central.
“It’s unimaginable to think what Lakota society would be without the buffalo,” Sprague said.
By the time of Pete Dupree’s death in 1898, the buffalo herd had grown more than tenfold. Philip bought them all, and later, his ranch hands, with help from a couple of Duprees, somehow managed to drive 57 buffalo to Philip’s neighboring ranch 100 miles away.
“That must have been a bucket of laughs,” said Draine. “Sadly, we don’t have any family papers chronicling that experience.”
When stragglers were added later, the acquired herd numbered 83. After Scotty Philip’s death in 1911, the once-modest herd grew considerably, exceeding 900 by some estimates. The ranch hosted buffalo hunts, with 200 set aside for slaughter, but sold 36 head to Custer State Park.
That founding nucleus herd quickly grew after settling on its Black Hills sanctuary. Three years after arriving, the herd grew to 50, and to 70 by 1919, almost doubling its original size.
By 1951, the herd acquired 60 buffalo from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which had received surplus animals from Wind Cave National Park, to introduce new bloodlines.
The sale of surplus bison became an important way to raise revenue and to prevent overgrazing, and annual live auctions after the fall roundup began in 1965.
For more than 40 years, bison auctioned from Custer State Park have helped to start or expand countless park and ranch herds throughout the West. Ranchers will be among the bidders for 200 to 250 surplus bison at this fall’s auction Nov. 21.
“A lot of the private herds out there have some Custer State Park background,” biologist Gary Brundige, the park’s resource program manager, said.
After 43 years of auctions, the park has supplied between 16,000 and 17,000 buffalo to other herds, by Brundige’s rough estimate. There is no way to tell how many offspring those buffalo later produced over multiple generations.
But it’s easy to see that the historic Custer State Park herd has played a major role in preserving the bison, now estimated to number 500,000 — a dramatic recovery from the estimated 1,091 buffalo living in 1889.
“The park’s pretty proud of that,” Brundige said. “The park was a big player in the recovery of bison numbers.”
The Dupree and Philip families naturally share some of that pride. For Donovin Sprague and other Lakota, it helps keep a culture vital. For Jackie Means, 85, the Custer State Park buffalo herd is a living legacy of the grandfather she never knew and the grandmother whose memory she keeps.
Her heirloom family photos were lost years ago in a fire, and her grandmother’s stately mansion near Fort Pierre is gone. Its upstairs balcony offered a view of the site occupied by Fort Pierre Chouteau, where Fred Dupree once worked in the fur and hide trade before turning to ranching.
But now, when Means views the buffalo grazing the park’s pastures on her occasional visits, Scotty and Sarah Philip’s granddaughter can watch something more vibrant than a fading photo album.
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ONE OF THE MANY ARTICLES ON VOLCANO NEWS COMING OUT WORLDWIDE
In its latest update, the Philppine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said that the volcano emitted 853 tons of SO2 in the past 24 hours.
Phivolcs recorded only 505 tons last October 10; 761 tons last October 8, and 350 tons last October 7.
While the volcano’s steaming activity remained moderate and while the crater glow remained obscure, Phivolcs said that they detected seven volcanic earthquakes during the past 24 hours – bringing to 43 the number of volcanic earthquakes recorded from October 5 to 11.
Mayon Volcano’s status, however, remained at Alert Level 2, which is characterized as "a state of unrest which could lead to more ash explosion or eventually to hazardous magmatic eruption." FULL STORY
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THIS MORNINGS BIG EARTHQUAKES SO FAR
The Carribbean shaking is not good for the East Coast
Update time = Mon Oct 12 13:22:09 UTC 2009
| | MAG | UTC DATE-TIME y/m/d h:m:s | LAT deg | LON deg | DEPTH km | Region |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MAP | 5.3 | 2009/10/12 12:44:41 | -11.729 | 166.312 | 60.1 | SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS |
| MAP | 4.9 | 2009/10/12 11:03:11 | -12.004 | 166.403 | 139.5 | SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS |
| MAP | 5.0 | 2009/10/12 10:29:23 | -14.014 | 166.611 | 93.4 | VANUATU |
| MAP | 5.2 | 2009/10/12 09:42:24 | 37.560 | 139.507 | 30.2 | EASTERN HONSHU, JAPAN |
| MAP | 6.4 | 2009/10/12 09:37:17 | -12.393 | 166.533 | 10.0 | SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS |
| MAP | 3.1 | 2009/10/12 07:24:34 | 19.186 | -70.516 | 63.9 | DOMINICAN REPUBLIC |
| MAP | 3.2 | 2009/10/12 06:44:19 | 32.077 | -115.329 | 9.8 | BAJA CALIFORNIA, MEXICO |
| MAP | 5.0 | 2009/10/12 06:37:15 | -12.997 | 165.827 | 128.1 | SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS |
| MAP | 2.7 | 2009/10/12 05:14:06 | 18.482 | -66.303 | 94.2 | PUERTO RICO REGION |
| MAP | 6.0 | 2009/10/12 03:15:47 | -17.200 | 66.602 | 10.0 | MAURITIUS - REUNION REGION |
| MAP | 3.3 | 2009/10/12 02:11:10 | 19.326 | -64.822 | 53.5 | VIRGIN ISLANDS REGION |
| MAP | 2.6 | 2009/10/12 00:40:01 | 33.889 | -118.201 | 14.0 | GREATER LOS ANGELES AREA, CALIFORNIA |
| MAP | 3.1 | 2009/10/12 00:36:23 | 19.232 | -64.775 | 6.5 | VIRGIN ISLANDS REGION |
| MAP | 3.2 | 2009/10/12 00:19:37 | 19.009 | -64.622 | 57.2 | VIRGIN ISLANDS REGION |
| MAP | 2.9 | 2009/10/12 00:19:37 | 19.262 | -64.904 | 5.8 | VIRGIN ISLANDS REGION |
| MAP | 3.1 | 2009/10/12 00:07:35 | 19.208 | -64.691 | 5.6 | VIRGIN ISLANDS REGION |
| MAP | 3.1 | 2009/10/12 00:00:40 | 19.401 | -65.746 | 13.9 | PUERTO RICO REGION |
Just off the Kitco.com website:
Gold deposit of 300 tons found in Qinghai of NW China - chinamining, Oct 12 2009 7:45AM
Gold rises as dollar slides; crude climbs to seven-week high - MarketWatch, Oct 12 2009 9:31AM
The commercial real estate bubble and GHOST MALLS - news for another news update.Currently 34 degrees ... news on upcoming Ice Age is not on my want-to-do list right now .... keep warm and right now I'm thinking MORE coffee....
My news blog: The Cave
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