Philadelphia Is Destroying Its Public Libraries

Some targeted library branches may be saved

Mayor Nutter said yesterday that five of the 11 library branches once scheduled to close permanently on Thursday are instead on track to be taken over by private foundations, wealthy individuals, companies, and community development corporations.

It was not immediately clear which branches have sponsors and the mayor did not identify the benefactors.

But Nutter expressed confidence that in time private operators could convert each of the branches now on his budget chopping block into community “knowledge centers” that would offer similar or perhaps even superior services to those now available. Though the services would vary from branch to branch, Nutter said the centers would likely retain book collections, computers, and perhaps even trained librarians.

Emphasis added by me.

This guy is certainly true to form to his surname: Nutter.

Hey, how’d you like to have to rely on, say, the Exxon-Mobil Knowledge Center for information about the oil companies?

I could go on in that vein and get really inflammatory, but fuck it, this blog dies tomorrow and I’m burned out as it is doing this.

This is the systematic destruction of the world as we have known it by the same bastards who brought us to this brink.

Are there any men left in America to stop this shit?

Zig Ziglar

He’s led some life.

When I was born, the doctor handed me to my mother and said, “Mrs. Ziglar, you have a perfectly fine, healthy baby boy.” Nine days later he picked me up and sadly shook his head, indicating that I was dead. Yes, I died when I was nine days old. However, my family has told me that my grandmother walked to me, picked me up, held me in her hands, and started talking to me. Of course, we all know that she was not really talking to *me* . . and in a matter of seconds breath came back into my body; at age seventy-five it’s obvious I lived.

My friends, it’s been like that ever since.

— Zig: The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar by Zig Ziglar; pg. 1

And here’s a lesson that was swept aside in the Rush to Greed from the 1980s on …

Coach Jobie Harris was my history teacher, and in many ways he changed and enriched my life. He taught me more than American history. He once said, “If you have an ability that goes beyond providing for your own needs, you have a responsibility to use that ability to reach down and help those up who do not have that capacity. As a matter of fact, if you don’t reach down and help lift up those less fortunate, the day will come when due to sheer weight of numbers, they will reach up and pull you down.”

— Zig: The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar by Zig Ziglar; pg. 71

Emphasis added by me.

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #482: Keiser

Max Keiser: Predicting the collapse of Iceland

Aljazeera re-aired Max’s 2007 prediction of a collapse of the Icelandic economy.

While the program aired in August 2007, it was filmed in April 2007.

Watch for the scene in the Blue Lagoon in which Max predicts a global Depression to be caused when all these debts driven by low interest rates burst.

Emphasis added by me.

It wasn’t just debt — it was outright fraud. Isn’t that correct, Bernie Madoff, you bastard?

Things will get dramatically worse between now and Obama’s Inauguration.

You’ll have to find your Doom fixes elsewhere, however. I won’t be blogging after Wednesday.

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #481: Unrest

Russia, China warn of dire economic straits in 2009

Russia and China issued stark warnings on Wednesday about the impact of the crisis on their recently booming economies in 2009, with Moscow saying the downturn could spark unrest in the streets.

Emphasis added by me.

It won’t be the only country where that will happen.

More:

Commenting on the worsening situation, Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky, warned that unpaid wages, the threat of layoffs and unpopular government anti-crisis measures “may aggravate the protest mood.”

China’s top economic planner also warned of “great challenges” ahead.

The head of the National Development and Reform Commission, Zhang Ping, said “grave risks” lay ahead for goals of fast growth and high employment if the government did not manage to stimulate demand and maintain export growth.

Emphasis added by me.

We all think of Germany as one of the richest nations on the planet. They just opened my eyes to a dimension I hadn’t fully considered:

In a sign of the times in Germany, poodles, terriers and sheepdogs queued up for rations in the country’s first soup kitchen for pets, housed in a disused school in the former communist east Berlin.

The soup kitchen was opened in October and offers free food for pets belonging to pensioners and the growing ranks of Berlin’s unemployed.

Julia Raasch, who heads the soup kitchen, said: “We’ve already signed up nearly 400 people. And our stocks are dwindling fast.”

Emphasis added by me.

I mentioned stocking up on pet food here. But what happens when that runs out? And you can’t afford to buy any more?

Next year will be very bad.

The Last Man In England?

Pistol-whipped husband vows to get revenge on robbers who beat up his wife during raid on their home

A husband whose wife was beaten up by robbers during a raid on their home has vowed to get revenge if they meet again.

Graham Eaton, who was also pistol-whipped by the thugs, told how the couple were held at gunpoint in their £750,000 converted barn and warned they may be killed.

Mr Eaton’s terrified wife, Lesley, had a knife held to her throat and the butt of a pistol smashed into her eye during the half-hour ordeal at their home in Wimborne, Dorset.

He was struck on the head with a handgun, tied up and beaten about the legs with a baseball bat.

The couple were convinced they were going to be tortured and killed until Mrs Eaton faked a heart attack and the three thugs fled.

Now Mr Eaton, who runs a successful horticultural business, has vowed to get revenge on their attackers.

He said: ‘I can look after myself but I will never forgive them for what they did to my wife.

‘I just want to get revenge for that and want to meet them man to man and see what they’re really made of.

‘I would kill them and I know I’m capable of doing that to them and I’ve told the police that.

‘They are scum of the earth and should be exterminated – we are quite robust but what they did would kill someone fragile and older than us.’

Graham Eaton should be the next Prime Minister.

He’d sort out the shit I see daily in the horrifying headlines I get from England.

I’m telling you, if England goes under, we all do.

Previously here:

England Needs Serious Sorting Out
This Smells Like … Hope
Happy Veteran’s Day 2008?
Writer Melanie Phillips: The Multicult Cult
England: Land Of The Doomed West
Writer Melanie Phillips
You’ve Been Google-Burgled!
What’s Up In England?!
Smile U Dumbo
Sick England: Happy Slapping
Disintegrating England: Soldiers Go Hungry!
England Continues To Fall
But They’ve Given Murdoch Great Footage!
You Decide: Greed Or Stupidity?
Bloody England
England: You Can Die For Nothing There
England Continues To Sink
Degenerate England
Britain: The Lion Stirs?
England Slides Into National Insanity
England Goes Totally Off Its Nut
England: The Coming Explosion
Britain’s Last Man
Britain Commits Suicide — Again!
Dark Future
Hey! I’m Not Homeless! I’m A Geek!
Cue My Blog’s Title Picture…

Caliban’s End Is POD Available

Following up on an earlier post, after Lulu sorted out all the problems they caused him, Paul F. Stewart reports he has a satisfying POD copy of his novel, What Lies Beneath, in his hands at last.

It looks like this:

Happy ending?

No, not near.

When you use a service such as Lulu, you are at its mercy.

If Stewart wonders why he’s not getting any sales, it could be due to the fact Lulu apparently hasn’t found time to actually list it.

Look at this pathetic search result:

Click = big

Despite searching both by title and “creator” (WTF?) name, what came up was not his book. Not even close. (I’ve redacted the result because the guy in it is not the subject of this post and can damn well get his own post pimpage somewhere else!)

This is not good for any writer.

Does Lulu care? Ya think?

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #480: FAIL!

Situation report: global economy, December 2008

What’s next?

Viewpoints about the crisis have coalesced into three camps.

1. The “normal global recession” camp. Just another cycle, US GDP down perhaps -3% peak to trough.

2. The “worst recession since the 1930’s” camp. A bad scene, but the world’s governments are now on the job. Fiscal and monetary policy will do the job, again. US GDP down 5% or so. See this example.

3. The “worse than worst” scenario. Government policy might not work — or it might work but only with long lags. Uncertainty rules; the outcome is unknowable.

I don’t give a damn what opinions have coalesced around as “possible” outcomes.

There is only one outcome: Utter collapse and misery for hundreds and hundreds of millions.

How many of you know the fraud is on a worldwide scale of a quadrillion dollars?

How many of you yet understand that fraud was the everyday way business was being done?

How many of you think we’ll be a placid population while undergoing massive starvation and panic?

Let me try to explain the situation in a manner I think everyone can understand.

Your Windows XP PC has been running for several hours. It’s really a unit a few years old, but that’s what you have to deal with. Firefox has been running because you’ve been on the Internet all that time.

With your limited CPU and RAM, every time a new browser tab is opened, you risk everything seizing up. It’s almost like Browser Roulette: Which tab will lead to a website with so much Flash and Javascript crap that it will totally freeze Firefox?

Our economic system is old. Every new fraud has been a new browser tab. The system has frozen. It is going to crash.

Now, when you reach that point with your PC, what do you do? Do you just take the PC and throw it away? Of course not.

With XP and Firefox there are two choices:

1) Bring up Task Manager and kill the Firefox application. But that doesn’t necessarily free up fragmented RAM, so things could still run slow when Firefox is launched again.

2) You kill Firefox via Task Manager and then reboot the PC.

You’re still using the same system, but now everything has a fresh start.

This is what needs to be done with the entire worldwide economic system from all the way at the very bottom to the top.

Worldwide economic reboot.

The only way that can happen is for every government to agree that we’ve all screwed up. The only way out is a synchronized reboot of the system.

I call that 777: The total forgiveness of all debts, period.

Adam Smith was wrong.

And we are not not not going to have worldwide suffering to prove a goddammed point of ideology.

Ideas are created to serve people.

We do not create ideas to enslave us.

I am not offering this up as a suggestion, either.

I am telling you that every single one of you is going to recognize this as the only way out of this mess, period. It’s inevitable, it’s unavoidable, and it’s the only only only thing that will work.

Everyone is going to left holding a bag of shit at the end, one way or the other, from very rich to very poor.

But our nations will be intact, our infrastructure will be intact, the flows of information will remain intact, our populations will not be sick and dying and frustrated, and the massive release of productive energy this will create will be unprecedented in all of human history.

Recognize that.

I pray you all do so before the chaos really begins and gets out of hand.

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #479: Expats

End of the Eldorado dream: A plunging pound and property crash have left thousands of expat Britons on the breadline

This is the key paragraph:

What makes matters more worrying still is that for many there is no way out of this nightmare. The housing market has gone into freefall, with negative equity now widespread.

Properties are being marked down by as much as 50 per cent – and still not shifting. New building has virtually stopped.

Couples are being forced apart, as husbands or wives head home in a desperate attempt to find work.

Emphasis added by me.

That one sentence is what millions of you will be paraphrasing in 2009 and 2010:

What makes matters more worrying still is that for many there is no way out of this nightmare.

Emphasis added by me.

Those are the extreme cases. What is so extraordinary about the situation unfolding on the Costas is the suffering of the silent majority. Those most hard-hit are individuals who least expected to find themselves in financial difficulties.

Having worked hard all their lives, they took the decision to move to Spain to improve the quality of their lives in retirement.

Emphasis added by me.

‘None of us came to live in Spain without money,’ she points out. ‘Unlike Britain, which has an open door policy for anyone who arrives without even a penny to their name, we knew that if you came to Spain you had to have money to survive.

‘We brought our own money with us and we invested it wisely. We bought our own homes and we have never taken a penny from the state. But what is happening now is that we are being buried by economic factors beyond our control. It’s really worrying.’

Emphasis added by me.

But when they decided the Spanish lifestyle was not for them and put the property on the market, they were in for a rude shock.

‘I never really settled in Spain,’ explains Jan, 68. ‘I missed my grown-up children and Barrie had sick relatives in the UK who needed looking after, so we made the decision to move home. This time last year we put the house on the market for £228,000 – but there has been no interest in it,’ she says.

‘Previously, you would have just dropped the price a bit, but because of the collapse of the market we have been told that that would make no difference.

‘We need to make enough to pay off our £100,000 mortgage and to buy a small flat back in England, but there aren’t even property developers out there willing to take it off our hands. As it stands now, our dream house is worthless.’

If that weren’t bad enough, the couple are struggling to make ends meet. Barrie’s pension has fallen by 300 euros a month, while their mortgage repayments and everyday costs have all gone up.

‘Taking everything into consideration, we have worked out that after all our outgoings in November 2007 we had 310.41 euros left over every month,’ says Jan.

‘Now, in December 2008, we are minus 154.24 euros every month.’

Emphasis added by me.

Look at how quickly things can change.

How will it change for you?

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #478: I.D.

Premise: The rich will not be amenable to any solution that essentially reboots the entire worldwide economic system and leaves them holding a bag of shit. A bag of shit, mind you, that everybody else will also wind up holding.

Solving that is not easy …

… why don’t you try it?

Especially all you whiny crybabies who weep for “solutions.”

This is your cue. Go!

Quote: Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki

Why 2009 Could Eat Barack Obama Alive

Anyone who thinks that Republicans own the copyright on war or on corporate cronyism in America hasn’t read a history book.