The Associated Press reports that:

Feds allege plot to destroy Fannie Mae data
Feds allege fired Fannie Mae worker planted virus to destroy mortgage company’s computer data

Friday January 30, 2009, 10:58 am EST

URBANA, Md. (AP)—The Justice Department says it foiled a plot by a fired Fannie Mae contract worker in Maryland to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant’s 4,000 computer servers nationwide.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office says 35-year-old Rajendrasinh Makwana, of Glen Allen, Va., is scheduled for arraignment Friday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore on one count of computer intrusion.

Since there has been so much hanky panky over at Fannie Mae, one would think that if one wanted to get revenge on corporate management, one would make sure that all data remained available to the auditors investigating said hanky panky so they can throw management in prison.

Continuing the series on Ocean Frontier Fertility, an actual iron fertilization experiment is starting as I write this.  You can observe the resulting changes in the ocean’s chlorophyll via the SeaWiFS satellite images from 49S, 16W.  To page between image dates of the SeaWiFS satellite click on the “

<" and ">

” icons above the images presented on that page.

Here is an example of the chlorophyll image taken yesterday, which represents the “before” condition:

You’ll notice that portions are obscured by clouds.  That’s a limitation of satellite imaging.

This experiment, called LOHAFEX (Loha is the Hindi word for iron, Fertilization EXperiment) is a joint project between scientists from Germany and India.  Unlike similar US experiments, many privately financed, that have been killed by “environmentalists”, the Germans and Indians managed to survive the gauntlet of political opposition.  Those of us familiar with the “scientific” community’s behavior in human sociobiology will not be too surprised to learn that the US experiments were stopped by “environmentalists” on the grounds that “not enough is known about iron fertilization”—seemingly oblivious to the fact that knowledge is only gained by testing hypotheses in these pesky things called “experiments”.

Anyway, I wish the Germans and Indians well, but let us not forget that it was US scientists that pioneered the field and then were politically suppressed to make way for German and Indian leadership.

By David Hamilton

One of the weapons used to destroy our young people is what is known as the Culture Wars.  Modern, popular music transmits raw uninhibited energy, emotion and excitement, often with tunes that are catchy enough.  But is negative and corruptive. Those who doubt this need only listen to, say, Heavy Metal or Rap, and then, perhaps, some Tudor church music, and compare the feelings and images that are aroused.  The first produce the desire to hurt or mistreat others, the second, an uplifting spiritual sense and a good feeling towards God and others.

The state of a civilisation can be assessed by its art.  There are deep similarities between our collapsing civilisation and the collapse of Greece and Rome, and we need to use their historical example as guides to correcting our own folly.  The modern manipulators are leading us into degeneracy through popular culture.

In the TV series, I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of Here, an annual show made by Granada Productions, simple people, described as Celebrities, are so degraded as to eat live worms and stick insects.  There are several levels to this degradation.  There is the cruelty it licences towards lower animals.  There is the encouragement to children to eat insects and slugs in the garden.  There is the nihilistic invitation always to indulge in further degradation as nothing more than a means of fun and entertainment.

Literally anything goes.  On one “reality” programme the appropriately named Rebecca Loos, a woman who is “famous” for an alleged affair with David Beckham while employed as his personal assistant, masturbated a pig.  On another show she fried and ate Kangaroo testicles.  This can only degrade our people and our culture.

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By Martin Hutchinson

Those who have visited Michigan recently or the Mahoning Valley of Ohio in the 1980s can recognize the symptoms of a rust belt. A hitherto prosperous industry, paying high wages to its employees, has been overtaken by market changes and is forced into harsh downsizing or even bankruptcy. As a result, the lives of many inhabitants degenerate into alcoholism, home foreclosures and welfare.

This time around, the decaying industry is finance, and the rust belt cities are London and New York.

The parallels with the US automobile industry are closer than they look. In the early years of the auto industry, it included both large companies and small specialty manufacturers, the latter being remembered now as producers of “vintage” cars of very high quality. Then the Great Depression wiped out most of the specialty producers, which could not compete with the mass producers’ costs. For the next several decades the business was dominated by a heavily-capitalized oligopoly with extremely highly paid employees, quite high profitability but deteriorating product quality. Finally, it became clear that the oligopoly was uncompetitive and the industry began to shed workers and close plants.

In finance, the early specialty producers were the London merchant banks; for Duisenberg, Packard and Stutz you can substitute Hambros, Warburgs=2 0and Hill Samuel. They too had superb product quality and are remembered with great fondness by their former customers, but were driven out of the business by heavily capitalized competitors, in this case running behemoth high-risk trading desks rather than mass production assembly-line factories. The employees of the well-capitalized behemoths were even better paid than the UAW workforce in the 1950s General Motors. Then gradually product quality began to deteriorate, and bad practices such as “liar loan” securitized mortgages, accounting “mark-ups” of assets that had not been sold and self-deluding risk management crept in.

The main difference between the two cases is that the collapse of the finance sector has taken the form of a sudden Gotterdammerung rather than the steady but inexorable decline characteristic of the US automobile industry. The bottom line is the same: Detroit needs to downsize radically, but so does Wall Street.

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A brief science lesson. Once upon a time, a british economist named Malthus wrote a short book on a fundamental realization he had, and his concerns about it. The facts that laid before Malthus’s table were that population growth is exponential, whereas resource growth is finite and arithmetical at best. The inevitable result would always be poverty and famine, that there was no path to prosperity available to mankind, and that despite all of our technological innovations, in the end we’d be just as poorly off as our starving ancestors and the starving Chinese and the starving Indians and the starving Africans. Mathematics simply dictated it.

Another man, Charles Darwin, when he read this, realized that this was the case not just for mankind but all living things. All living things reproduced exponentially, while only being able to gather more resources arithmetically. This meant that in the natural world, life was constantly overshooting its carrying capacity, ie more babies were being born than could possibly be fed. Every generation a great die-off must occur, to reorient population to resource accumulation, he reasoned, and the factors that led to some organisms dying while others didn’t created the survival of the fittest. Perhaps one organism had better lungs and thus could run faster, perhaps an organism had better eyes and could spy out prey better than average, or perhaps an organism was better camouflaged than its peers and thus avoided the sharp eyes of predators. Survival traits one encounters in the natural world are impossible to miss, the logic that those who had more and better versions of these obviously effective measures must have outcompeted their rival stock is common sense, the fact that not all living things can survive due to exponential birth rates is a mathematical truth.

Gradually, as each generation is born, competes, and largely dies off, in competition with members of their own species and other species occupying the same biological niche, (perhaps using the same shelter, perhaps the same soil, perhaps the same sunlight, perhaps the same prey, etc) and those predating upon a certain niche, (eating them, infecting them, scavenging from them) certain survival traits begin to emerge as more and more common the longer the game is played, because even a slight advantage over time leads to a dramatic lead over all competition. Once virtually everyone has either died or inherited these winning traits, the competition begins all over again and just as ruthlessly as only some new advantage will help one genetic line emerge victorious over the others. This constant need to improve or die is the seemingly miraculous force that has created humans out of algae. In a name, it is evolution. Genetic change, competition, and the favoring of certain survival traits that keep turning out to be winners, automatically keeps life progressing towards certain ends. Ends that can be discerned if one looks at the history of life’s evolution across time. Ends that all living beings must embrace and adopt, or go extinct for the lack of them, due to the proven worth of those traits that evolution has selected for life over and over and over again.

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HOW BOAT PEOPLE ARE WELCOMED ...

... in Italy:-

Migrants break out of Italian camp

Hundreds of asylum seekers and hopeful migrants have broken out of a holding centre on the Italian island of Lampedusa and marched to the town hall.

Bernardino De Rubeis, the island’s mayor, said that 700 out of about 1,300 people at the centre walked out on Saturday morning.  “It is a very tense situation,” he said.

Police said the group forced open the gates of the camp and marched peacefully to the town centre to protest against their detention.  They were joined by a few hundred locals who also want the inmates transferred to bigger camps elsewhere in Italy.

The Italian interior ministry said there had been “no escape of illegal immigrants” because it was a camp for assistance rather than expulsion, “so there is no obligation to stay there”.

Many were already returning to the camp, it said in a statement.

... and in Thailand:-

Boat people claim Thai mistreatment

Thai authorities are grappling with a scandal over alleged mistreatment by soldiers of hundreds of ethnic Rohingyas refugees from Myanmar.  Details are surfacing about the plight of Rohingya boat people who were apparently beaten by Thai soldiers before being towed out to sea.

The allegations, apparently supported by photographs and witness accounts, have dented Thailand’s tourist-friendly image. Some of the migrants managed to reach Indonesia and videos of them arriving on the shore show them to be in a shocking physical condition.  Others are in detention on the Indian islands of Andaman. Two of those held there have spoken of being abused by Thai soldiers.

THE PRIORITIES OF UK EXTRADITION POLICY

From the Telegraph:-

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Thanks to Bo for this video of Robert Reich and Charles Rangel at an Economic Recovery Plan meeting on 7th January.

Today the $825 billion economic stimulus package was marked up by the House Ways & Means Committee.  It includes money for infrastructure, health care and education projects.  But little to none of it will be coming your way if you are white or middle-class.

The Bishop and the gas man

Rumours that the Pope has signed the withdrawals of excommunication of four “Lefebvrist” bishops of the Society of St Pius X have made news in The Times and caused its religious correspondent to suffer a fit of the vapours.  The reason?  One of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson, is something of a stickler for the historical record of the Holocaust.  As a result of his outspokenness he faces, Gledhill says, ...

... possible prosecution for Holocaust denial in Germany after an interview with a reporter from Stockholm TV in which he claimed that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, merely a few thousand, and that the gas chambers did not exist.

... In his previous utterances which have caused repeated deep offence to the Jewish community as well as many Catholics and other Christians who have heeded the message of Christian repentance towards the Jewish community as spelled out in the documents of Vatican II and elsewhere, the Society has refused to distance itself from him.

... Now it looks as though Williamson might have gone too far, even for his traditionalist brethren, and that he might at last face some sort of disciplinary action from the society, most if not none of whose members do not share his views. This would then make it possible for the Pope to realise his dream of bringing the society back into the fold, without Williamson.

Here’s what she means by “gone too far”.

Incidentally, the Bishop has expressed other interesting opinions.

Wilders to be prosecuted for inciting racial hatred against Muslims

Geert Wilders, leader of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which has nine parliamentary seats, has another big day coming up.  From Al-Jezeera:-

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