Still no talk about Peak Oil production: it peaked in 2005.

In a barely noticed move, the administration is funding the so-called "smart-grid" concept to increase efficiency of electricity delivery...or so the purported reason.

But, as with telephony, the real reason is that consumers can then be socked with outlandish energy bills because they had the audacity to run their dryers in the middle of the day instead of at midnight when demand is low.


....The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.


....Countries struggling to secure credit have resorted to barter and secretive government-to-government deals to buy food, with some contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. countries including Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Morocco say they have signed or are discussing inter-government and barter deals to import commodities from rice to vegetable oil. The countries have not disclosed the value of any deals, and some have refused even to confirm their existence. Officials estimated that they ranged from $5m for smaller contracts to more than $500m for the biggest. While food prices have fallen from their record high last year, this fall is only temporary, a study by Chatham House, the London-based think-tank, suggests.


...."Among the banks advising Pfizer and arranging a loan package to finance part of the purchase price are Bank of America Corp., Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and JPMorgan Chase & Co., said people with knowledge of those banks’ roles."

So here's the bottom line. The taxpayer has kept BofA, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan alive with TARP money and other goodies. Now these same firms are going ahead and "arranging a loan package" that will keep Pfizer's earnings up (maybe) with mass layoffs in a transaction so large that it will of necessity be anti-competitive even if OK with Justice (which it will be).

...Ironic, then, that, as the conservative era ended in the US in 2008, it culminated with an explosion of permissiveness and irresponsibility that made the free-love hippies of the 1960s look like Southern Baptist preachers. After all, the hippies never cost the American nation over one trillion dollars...now estimated to be more than $3.2 trillion.

Caterpillar to cut 20,000 jobs, Home Depot 7,000, Starbucks 1,000, Sprint 8,000, Microsoft 5,000, Intel 6,000, Ericsson 5,000, IBM 2,800, Eaton 5,200, Clear Channel 1,800, Bose 1,000, Pfizer 8,000, Deere 700, TI 3,400, Philips 6,000, ING 7,000, GM 2,000. The privates sector takes it in the balls..

Emperor penguins - those of Marching fame - are headed for extinction as the sea ice they depend on is disappearing faster than they can evolve to meet the change.

Warren Buffett observed that the world airline industry has not made a dime for investors in a century of manned flight.

There is not one major funded retirement program intact thanks to the manufacturers and distributors of OTC derivatives. The unfunded ones are a total loss. Retirement in the future is totally out of the question. Many now retired will end up in the same situation as those trying to live off fixed income. Both categories are being culled from the human gene pool.

The average Merrill employee got $247,423 in compensation and benefits in 2008: avg BofA? $75g's.