Juicy Jane's Buzz Dive

Hello, darlin...

Been a while since I been round these parts, so I should make it sexy and exciting.

Preflight Check

The Economist cautiously praises the Senior Senator from NY's tax schemes. China is cozying up to South Africa. An interesting choice, given the apocrypha of social unrest ruminating about them parts. China has engaged in a lot of under-reported dealings in Africa, especially Egypt. and the Middle East. With American interests in the Middle East growing ever more volatile, China's quite infiltration into that sphere of events opens up omnious possibilities and complications.

In other oil product news, Greenpeace continue to wage their war against modernity by trumping up fears of the iPhone poisioning you. After all, if you consume the equivalent of a dozen melted iPhones chocolate sundays, you'll probably not do too hot. The brights at the Washington Pox demonstrated that fear and figures don't mix. In the course of "remarking" on VA lax gun laws, they prove that per capita they actually work better than gun abstinence.

US plans to widen access to intelligence satellite data
*Don't Be Paranoid or Anything*

The United States intelligence community plans to allow more federal and local authorities to access data from US reconnaissance satellites for counter-terrorism and other law enforcement purposes. Such use would be unprecedented and could encounter legal difficulties and other barriers.

" Cost prohibitive? Civil liberties? But, but it looks so cool on 24!" Or put more succinctly,

Google Earth? We don't need your stinkin' Google Earth!

Eastern Promises
*Red Heat*

Russia's Byzantine security community, so long united in their mistrust of the West and support for President Vladimir Putin, are increasingly parading their rivalries more openly as the prospect of political change opens up new opportunities for empire building and the settling of personal and institutional scores.

On 1 October, three officers of the Federal Drug Control Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Narkokontrolya Rossii: FSNK), including operational support department head General Alexander Bulbov, were arrested at Moscow's Domodedovo airport by a joint team from the Federal Security Service (Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti: FSB) and the General Prosecutor's Investigations Committee.

Accused of illegal wire-tapping, protection racketeering and bribe taking, they were quickly arraigned and placed in pre-trial detention. They are awaiting trial and have denied the charges. Viktor Cherkesov, director of the FSNK, promptly wrote a lengthy article for the respected newspaper Kommersant in which he suggested the arrests were actually part of a struggle between security agencies, especially intended to discredit investigators working on the so-called 'Three Whales' smuggling case.

I guess the post-Putin playing for keeps has begun.

Attaturk Shrugged

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called on his senior advisors to meet on 16 October to discuss the developments in Turkey and offered "urgent negotiations" with senior Turkish officials over the situation in northern Iraq. However, he warned that Iraq would "never accept a military solution to the differences between Turkey and Iraq".

Maliki's comments came after the Turkish cabinet approved a request from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to submit a motion to parliament seeking authorisation for military action.

Cat Fight!

I don't get this at all, eh?
*From Feudal Serf To Spender, This Wonderful World of Purchase Power*


You just can't beat the Pink Avenger to break something interesting to you,

Canadian shoppers are up in arms. Many have suddenly noticed that their dollar does not have the same purchasing power as the US dollar, and they are struggling to understand why.

The comparison has become much easier in the past 10 days since the "loonie" - named after the aquatic bird on the Canadian one-dollar coin - soared to parity with the greenback for the first time in 31 years.

With the currencies at one-for-one, consumers no longer need to do any arithmetic to work out that the conversion rate on foreign exchange markets is not the same as that on store shelves.

Thus, the price of Alan Greenspan's just-released memoir, The Age of Turbulence, is listed on the dust-jacket as C$26.45, but just US$20.99. Similarly, the cover price of the Financial Times is $2 in New York but C$2.50 in Toronto.

Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at the Bank of Montreal, calculated last week that the prices on a random sampling of goods were an average of 24 per cent higher in Canadian dollars than US dollars.

Complaints are streaming in to newspaper letter columns and radio talk shows.

"Why are we not seeing the price stickers on many goods going down?" asked the host of a two-hour phone-in show on the issue on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Sunday afternoon. Some callers noted that businesses were quick to push prices up when the loonie sank to an all-time low of 62 US cents in early 2002.

The reason? A combination of things. For one, the mentality of prepetual inflation for prepetual prosperity has obliterated Say's Law and Gresham's Law from collective consciousness of the retail industry. Two, buisinesses, unaccostomed to such windfalls, intends to milk it for as long as they can. Third, in all fairness, the decimination of downward price changes has never had a 1:1 time ratio, historically. It's a bit like the opposite of the stock market rule: stocks go upprices go down the stairs and drop out the rise meteorically out the window.

It's just a coincidence, but I seem to recall a Dutch girl I went to skrool with once telling me how everything got more expensive once they switched from guilders to euros. Just a penny for your thoughts...

So why support Ron Paul?
I was surfing around last week, and found this gentle zing from big daddy Roci over at Code Monkey Ramblings.

And appraising from a purely mercenary point of view, you'd be inclined to agree with Roci. Which of course begs the question, why support Ron Paul?

I was going to go into a long spiel and disect Roci's post bit by bit. But I've come to realize
there's no need in that and it would defeat the purpose of responding to Roci's post.

The simple fact of why I should support Ron Paul's bid for presidency is this: things change. And things can change for the better.

The federal government wasn't always a leviathan. It wasn't designed to be a leviathan. If people of all walks of life and political stripe can engage in actions and choices that make things worse than before, than they can engage in actions and choices that make things better. If incrimentalism can make things worse, than incrimentalism can make things better.
If Nineveh can repent, than so can Washington. Doesn't mean it will happen overnight. But that's OK, we didn't get to where we are now overnight. Reagan contracted the money supply, if only for a minute, and coupled with tax cuts, managed to get us out of the Keynesian malaise of the seventies.

It doesn't mean Ron Paul, or whomoever comes after him in bids for Congress and the Presidency, won't make mistakes. But the point is to change course and start heading back towards where we should be. We can't start over, and we can't erase the past. Yet neither should we attempt to create a New Jeruselem before Kingdom Come as evil ones have in the past. What the American people and the American government can do, is acknowledge with honesty and sobriety, that bigger government hasn't solved much and in fact created more damage than it sought to remedy.

It's the redeeming quality of the American character. From the time of the Boston Tea Party to the New Deal to today- we're willing to sacrifice a little here-and-now comfort in the status quo in exchange for a better tomorrow. Sure we've stumbled along the way, but like Vince Lombardi said,

It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up.

Britain: A Nation of Rapists Coming Soon to a Court Docket Near You!
*Don't Be Paranoid or Anything*

Hmm. It's not often that something in you read in the Scum lends food for thought. But you got to reluctantly give credit where credit is due, sometimes.

MEN were warned yesterday they risk a rape charge if they have sex with a drunken woman.

The law is to be tightened, putting a burden on men to ensure a woman has agreed to sex.It follows concern about the low conviction rate in rape trials.More than a third of alleged victims had drunk alcohol.

Ministers now want to give juries power to decide if a woman was too drunk to give consent.A campaign will be launched next week, with ads in men’s mags and posters in pubs. It will drive home the message that women must agree to sex — and be free and sober enough to make the choice.

A Home Office spokesman said: “It will be a provocative campaign to educate young men.” The crackdown follows a recent case where a man was cleared after his alleged victim admitted she was too drunk to recall what happened.

Now, coupled with the following,

The entire UK population and every visitor to Britain should be put on the national DNA database, a top judge said today.

Lord Justice Sedley, one of England's most experienced appeal court judges, described the country's current system as "indefensible".

"We have a situation where if you happen to have been in the hands of the police, then your DNA is on permanent record. If you haven't, it isn't ... that's broadly the picture," Sir Stephen Sedley told the BBC.

Article continues

---

---

"It also means that a great many people who are walking the streets, and whose DNA would show them guilty of crimes, go free."

He said that expanding the existing database to cover the whole population had "serious but manageable implications".

"Managble implications", I'll say! Seeing as how Britain has gone most gently into that good night of EngSoc thus far, you can rest assured this is but around the corner. On the bright side, hopefully cam-phone of Birds and Hens of the Sceptered Isle slurring, "I, Porsche Smythe, of s-sound m-mind and buh-body... OH SOD IT, SHAG ME!" will be admissible in all those cases of buyer's remorse gone baddate rape. Time will tell. Oh well, the collective abdication and abolishment of individual responsibility marches on.

Democracy NowWOW!

In other breaking news, Godron Brown's taking a page out of Al Gore's sappy political playbook and has decided to "reinvent government".

Gordon Brown drafted in opposition politicians and ‘citizen juries’ to help shape his policies and bring an end to ‘politics as usual’ on Monday as Labour’s narrowing poll lead damped speculation of an autumn election.

In a speech to usher in the new political season, Mr Brown outlined ways to tap “the wisdom and experience of the British people” and conscripted three senior opposition figures to advise his government.

Meanwhile, the prime minister played down the prospects of a general election in coming months, saying: “There will be a time and a place for a general election but it is not now.

“I am getting on with the business of government and I think people will see by what I say today and what I do in the future that what’s on my mind is making this country successful...”

Allies of David Cameron, the Conservative leader, believe it is the closest Mr Brown has come to ruling out an autumn poll.

Mr Cameron’s team was buoyed by new opinion polls – an Independent/ComRes survey on Monday put Labour and Tories neck-and-neck on 36 per cent – and believe the prime minister would not risk an election without a solid lead. A Populus poll in The Times today puts Labour just one point ahead of the Tories, on 37 per cent.

Yet despite an improved standing, Tory leaders are likely to have been alarmed by John Bercow and Patrick Mercer, former frontbenchers, offering to advise Mr Brown on young people and security respectively.

"Citizens Juries", huh? I think Satan's little helpers in the advertising and marketing world already beat you too that one. Only they call them "focus-groups". Basically, it'll just be a tax-funded way to figure out how to shill EngSoc in more appealing terms. A brand new day indeed...

Signs of the Apocalypse Buzzdive

Well so anyway, got a few minutes to kill here. Thought I'd bring all 4 of you reading this up to date on all the whacky shit I've been seeing lately in the papers.

On a personal note of the apocalypse, I had an effette bank teller offer me a guaranteed loan of 4,600 pounds. Guaranteed as in I'd get it, but to speak nothing of guaranteeing I'd pay it.

Something seems to be winding up. Let's see if we can read the pulp and mulch tea leaves...


This is just Frightening

Read in Rupe's titty-free rag (article unavailable) that the RIAA has successfully garnered royalties for all the quality music they play to soothe the inmates at Guantanamo. Sometimes, stupidity and insanity leap out and envelope your head like an elk's fart. And there's nothing more to be said.

I always thought sub-machine guns were a bit over-kill in crowed areas anyhow...

UNITED KINGDOM - Cops at Gatwick Airport had to buy colleagues doughnuts as a forfeit whenever they left GUNS unattended, a tribunal heard. One left his sub-machine gun in the canteen and allegedly had to buy the whole team a CAKE — the penalty for more serious rule breaches. The sliding scale of unofficial “fines” — echoing [...]

Sure, and it's AMERICANS that don't have a grasp of dangers of firearms...

And in a sure sign hell's freezin' over, the militant earth worshippers at the Methole actually published a front page article questioning... dare I say it aloud... our democratically elected public servants' motives in taxation

Mystery surrounding eco-taxes

Billions of pounds are being raised in green taxes with little or no reward for environmentally friendly consumers, according to two new studies.

Each British family is paying £400 more in green taxes than it would cost to cover its carbon footprint, one study claims – a total of £10billion nationwide.

While green taxes raised £21.9billion in 2005, the social cost of that year's carbon emissions was just £11.7billion, says the report from the TaxPayers' Alliance.

Matthew Elliott of the group said: 'We need more honesty about the costs of extra green taxes when British taxpayers already pay some of the highest pollution charges in the world.'

Only a fifth of people think politicians are genuinely trying to change behaviour using the tax system, a survey carried out by YouGov for the group found.

In contrast, 63 per cent believe Government is using the issue as an excuse to pull in more cash.

Nearly four-fifths oppose the so-called 'pay as you throw' schemes floated by the Government to encourage recycling – despite previous surveys indicating a majority backed the idea.

Mystery indeed!

In far more ominous announcements, the Pink Avenger tells us, in what should give humanity's collective anus curly-whurly, that our modern-day rumplestilkins are all hanging out at Check Point: Charlie for the Zion Curtain

News from Jackson Hole: Saddle up ma, it’s a shadow banking run
*From Feudal Serf To Spender, This Wonderful World of Purchase Power*

Perhaps it’s true what George Bernard Shaw said - that if you laid down every economist in a line, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion. Things are decidedly inconclusive at Jackson Hole in Wyoming, where central bankers are meeting for their annual symposium.

Powerful voices in the Fed are angling for a rate cut to help house prices and buoy markets, but they’re being met by those who see cuts as a dangerous moral hazard in a classic bank-run.

According to Axel Weber, the German Bundesbank chief, the current financial crisis bears all the hallmarks of a bank-run. You know the kind of thing - frustrated savers scrambling to cash in their flimflam paper at the Western Union for its value in gold. Something like that anyway. Weber told an audience at Jackson Hole:

What we are seeing is basically what we see underlying all banking crises

In his analysis, markets, just as in the 19th century, are currently prey to a spiralling liquidity crisis created as investor confidence drops and everyone rushes to get their chips off the table.

The difference is that this time, it’s not a run on the banks. Instead, noted Weber, the current liquidity storm is being weathered by unregulated financial institutions - hedge funds, banking conduits, SIVs and such like. It is what Paul McCulley, managing director of Pimco, has termed a “run on the shadow banking system”.

Haha, having lived once upon a time round them parts, I find a peculiar irony in meeting there. Jackson Hole is the closest place you can go to make a keg run or just buy full-strength beer that's already chilled. I rather imagine there's a lot of heavy drinking going on 'round them parts recently.

Even more ominous than perhaps accountants figuring out how to spin dross into gold is our super-dooper ally China has been pulling a Mongolian Horde on the military's Great Firewall,

Chinese military hack into Pentagon

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American ­officials.

The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack.

Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army.

One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence...trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

While the Chinese are at least kind enough to keep the border skirmishes a matter of Spies Like Us satellite blasting lasers and sending our AWACS back in boxes, Mother Russia is wont to be a bit more prosaic about things

UK jets shadow Russian bombers
*Red Heat Rising*

The UK's Royal Air Force has launched fighter jets to intercept eight Russian military planes flying in airspace patrolled by Nato, UK officials say. Four RAF F3 Tornado aircraft were scrambled in response to the Russian action, the UK's defence ministry said. The Russian planes - long-range bombers - had earlier been followed by Norwegian F16 jets. Russia recently revived a Cold War-era practice of flying bombers on long-range patrols. In a statement the MoD said the eight Russian Tupolev Tu-95 Bear aircraft, flying in loose formation of four pairs, were initially intercepted by the Norwegian air force.

In poking around for some links to that story, I read that the Tu-95 is actually turbo-prop propeller powered. More interestingly, Vox Day's favorite intellectual punching bag and Neal Boortz's little on-air girlfriend, Michelle Malkin, took note of it on her blog. Fortunately for her, she gave no analysis. Vox might getting bored now that he's between books.

Real Quick Buzzdive

Holy shit! I've got work today. But far be a thing like rersponsibility to keep me from bringing you, the non-existent reader, that hard-hitting, cutting-edge analysis that you've come to know and crave.

Today's buzzdive takes us from LA to London.

A third of UK’s biggest businesses pay no tax

Almost a third of the UK’s 700 biggest businesses paid no corporation tax in the 2005-06 financial year while another 30 per cent paid less than £10m each, an official study has found.

Of the tax paid by these businesses, two-thirds came from just three industries – banking, insurance and oil and gas – while the alcohol, tobacco, car and real estate sectors contributed only a few hundred million pounds.

Altogether, these large public and private companies paid £24.4bn in 2005-06, or just more than half of all the corporation tax paid, according to a National Audit Office analysis of the tax raised from the 700 companies handled by the large business service of Revenue & Customs.

It found that 50 businesses, or 7 per cent of the 700, paid 67 per cent of the tax while about 220 paid none and another 210 each paid less than £10m.

Some tax experts were taken aback by the small amount of tax many of the companies paid. Michael Devereux of the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation, said: ”It is certainly surprising."

Excuse me, "surprising"? It's surprising that people with lots of money hire lawyers and tax gurus to milk the system for every loophole it can find or construe to the satisfaction of tha authorities? Sounds like Oxford has an interesting cirriculum for buisiness.

RHE man gets jail time for property fixes

He built a fence, a retaining wall, a patio and a few concrete columns to decorate his driveway, and now Francisco Linares is going to jail for it.

Linares had been given six months to get final permits for the offending structures or remove them as part of a plea agreement reached in January, when he pleaded no contest to five misdemeanor counts of violating the Rolling Hills Estates building code.

Oh I'll sleep easier knowing this hardened criminal learned his lesson. Always remember, the "real" in real estate is Spanish for "royal". Just in case you thought your home was your castle.

Around the World in 80 Clicks, or,
Buzzdive without Borders

















It's Sunday. Whole lotta shit's been going on. We'll get this party started first with a swing over to the always interesting Asia Times,

Taliban, US in new round of peace talks

The talks are based on previous Pakistan-inspired efforts to secure peace deals between the insurgents and the Western coalition in specific areas in Afghanistan with the longer-term goal of incorporating the Taliban into the political process both in Kabul and in provincial governments.

Similar deals were struck last year in the southwestern Afghan provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Urzgan, but they lapsed. In addition to reviving these, the talks aim to include the southeastern provinces of Kunar and Khost. The negotiators are Taliban commanders, Pakistani and American intelligence members, and Afghan authorities.

The Taliban, under the command of Mullah Mansoor (brother of the legendary Mullah Dadullah, who was killed in battle this year), are in Satellite town, Quetta, to talk of teega. The next rounds are scheduled for Peshawar, the provincial capital of North-West Frontier Province, and in the Waziristan tribal areas with Taliban commanders of the southeastern provinces.

Specifically, the deals aim to stop violence in selected areas and give the Taliban limited control of government pending the conclusion of a broader peace deal for the country and the Taliban's inclusion in some form of national administration...

It's never sat well with me the sudden vacuum the war with/on/against Iraq created in coverage of the original front on the war on terror. It's a small wonder the Sludge Report missed this bit.

Moving along our globe-trotting little tour, we come to see yet another new low on the horizon for the War on Personal Liberty Drugs.

Scientists drug-test whole cities
Don't be paranoid or anything

WASHINGTON - Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city's sewer plant...

One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in methamphetamine use city to city. One urban area with a gambling industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller Midwestern locales, said Jennifer Field, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental toxicology at Oregon State.

The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine, Field said.

Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population, but Field declined to identify them, saying that could harm her relationship with the sewage plant operators

Yeah, don't be worried there! People sick enough to root and wallow in your bodily excriments are totally committed to making you and your community better people! ...Or else.

I think this is great. This technology will finally give the drug warriors knives long enough to finally poke bovine America and make them flench. Trust me, collective punishments will cover the "guilty" and the "innocent" alike with this broadest of brush strokes. And if you genuinely think otherwise, just look where the corruption of justice has led us so far in "pulling out all the stops" in stopping the menace

• Asset forefeitures (a phenomenona still unheard of in Europe on the scale scene in America)
• De facto deletion of the 4th and fifth ammendments
• Mandatory sentences that put non-violent offenders behind bars longer than those who have taken human life
• The complete perversion of the criminal justice axiom "the punishment should fit the crime": Namely, treating unprocessed and unripe marijuana plants (including sprouts) as a minimum 100 grams ready to be pushed on the streets. Imagine the reaction the ACLU would have if people caught steeling a hood ornament were charged with grand theft auto?

And so needless to say, just inferring with the prior track-record, you can likely forecast no-knock raids on the scale of entire neighborhoods, city-wide "non-compliance" fines and taxes to force the communities that generate the "drug crime epidemic" are forced to pay "their fair share" to "combat" the bad guys. It may not have dawned on them yet (but it will), put this opens up Parkinson's Law in a way like nothing else has for the war on what you stick into your own system.

After witnessing, off-and-on, the numb-nuttery of nearly a decade of uninterrrupted Labour rule of Scotland, it's nice to see something positive happen,

Forth Bridge Tollbooth to be axed after just one year

A landmark structure in Scotland by Reiach & Hall Architects is facing demolition less than a year after completion.

The firm’s £8.5 million Forth Bridge toll development near Edinburgh, which beat submissions by Richard Murphy, Malcolm Fraser and Bennetts Associates and includes an iconic canopy, could be dismantled because of the new SNP-led Scottish Executive’s policy of abolishing bridge tolls. The client, Forth Estuary Transport Authority (Feta), has issued a £2 million contract to demolish the tollbooths and traffic islands. Feta is also considering removing the canopy despite the fact that the structure has been shortlisted for a Saltire Society civil engineering award. It is also a former finalist in the British Constructional Steelwork Association/Corus structural steel design awards. “It doesn’t make sense to remove it just because tolls are being scrapped,” Reiach & Hall technical director Angus Wilson said. “It was always about more than just revenue collection — it has a real role to play in traffic management. We don’t know whether it will be removed or not. We’ve had no contact with the client since completion last October.” Wilson added that he was due to visit the canopy with the Saltire judging panel this week.

Isn't great to read good news for a change?