From psalience at fastmail.fm Wed Mar 10 00:04:28 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:04:28 +0100 Subject: [THS] Jesse Ventura's piece on 9/11--KILLED BY HUFFPOST! Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100309235732.047055b8@spamarrest.com> From: Mark Crispin Miller As I noted in an item yesterday, Jesse Ventura has a new book out, co-authored with Dick Russell, called American Conspiracies, which includes an excellent chapter on election fraud and its connection to the likely murder of Mike Connell. Well, this morning, Jesse had a front-page piece on 9/11 up at HuffPost: a front- page piece that quickly slipped off that front page--and then completely disappeared. Here's what you'll find there now (or will, until they take that down as well): Jesse Ventura Author, American Conspiracies Posted: March 9, 2010 11:00 AM Editor's Note: The Huffington Post's editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories -- including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post. All that's up there now are the comments left by 65 of HuffPost's readers. It's worth noting that HuffPost already ran an excerpt from another chapter of American Conspiracies, about the US "war on drugs," and they had no problem with that subject. But this one is, as we all know, taboo. Clearly, even to question the official story of 9/11 is to engage in "conspiracy theories" (as if the official story weren't itself a "conspiracy theory," and a preposterous one at that). Such is always the response of the US mainstream media (the foreign media tends to be more open-minded)--and it's also the response of our left/liberal media, as this amazing act of censorship makes clear. So here is the offending piece. Please read it; and let's all try to locate the particular points that are so obviously wild and baseless that HuffPost had to kill the whole piece insantly. MCM Huffington Post/Jesse Ventura - Article #2 ("American Conspiracies") WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON SEPTEMBER 11TH? You didn't see anything about it in the mainstream media, but two weeks ago at a conference in San Francisco, more than one thousand architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11. That's right, these people put their reputations in potential jeopardy - because they don't buy the government's version of events. They want to know how 200,000 tons of steel disintegrated and fell to the ground in 11 seconds. They question whether the hijacked planes were responsible - or whether it could have been a controlled demolition from inside that brought down the Twin Towers and Building 7. Richard Gage, a member of the American Institute of Architects and the founder of Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth, put it like this: "The official Federal Emergency Management [Agency] and National Institute of Standards and Technology reports provide insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers' destruction." He's especially disturbed by Building 7, whose 447 stories came down in "pure free-fall acceleration" that afternoon - even though it was never hit by an aircraft. This is a subject I take up in my new book, American Conspiracies, published this week by Skyhorse. An excerpt follows: Some people have argued that the twin towers went down, within a half hour of one another, because of the way they were constructed. Well, those 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 200,000 tons of steel were designed to hold up against a Boeing 707, the largest plane built at the time the towers were completed in 1973. Analysis had shown that a 707 traveling at 600 miles an hour (and those had four engines) would not cause major damage. The twin-engine Boeing 757s that hit on 9/11 were going 440 and 550 miles an hour. Still, we are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from the planes brought down these two steel-framed skyscrapers. Keep in mind that no other such skyscraper in history had ever been known to collapse completely due to fire damage. So could it actually have been the result of a controlled demolition from inside the buildings? I don't claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the Navy's underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water. And my staff talked at some length with a prominent physicist, Steven E. Jones, who says that a "gravity driven collapse" without demolition charges defies the laws of physics. These buildings fell, at nearly the rate of free-fall, straight down into their own footprint, in approximately ten seconds. An object dropped from the roof of the 110-story-tall towers would reach the ground in about 9.2 seconds. Then there's the fact that steel beams that weighed as much as 200,000 pounds got tossed laterally as far as 500 feet. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started its investigation on August 21, 2002. When their 10,000-page-long report came out three years later, the spokesman said there was no evidence to suggest a controlled demolition. But Steven E. Jones also says that molten metal found underground weeks later is proof that jet fuel couldn't have been all that was responsible. I visited the site about three weeks after 9/11, with Governor Pataki and my wife Terry. It didn't mean anything to me at the time, but they had to suspend digging that day because they were running into heat pockets of huge temperatures. These fires kept burning for more than three months, the longest-burning structure blaze ever. And this was all due to jet fuel? We're talking molten metal more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Probably the most conclusive evidence about a controlled demolition is a research paper (two years, nine authors) published in the peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal, in April 2009. In studying dust samples from the site, these scientists found chips of nano-thermite, which is a high-tech incendiary/explosive. Here's what the paper's lead author, Dr. Niels Harrit of the University of Copenhagen's chemistry department, had to say about the explosive that he's convinced brought down the Twin Towers and the nearby Building 7: "Thermite itself dates back to 1893. It is a mixture of aluminum and rust-powder, which react to create intense heat. The reaction produces iron, heated to 2500 degrees Centigrade. This can be used to do welding. It can also be used to melt other iron. So in nano-thermite, this powder from 1893 is reduced to tiny particles, perfectly mixed. When these react, the intense heat develops much more quickly. Nano-thermite can be mixed with additives to give off intense heat, or serve as a very effective explosive. It contains more energy than dynamite, and can be used as rocket fuel."[i] Richard Gage is one of hundreds of credentialed architects and structural engineers who have put their careers on the line to point out the detailed anomalies and many implications of controlled demolition in the building collapses. As he puts it bluntly: "Once you get to the science, it's indisputable." From psalience at fastmail.fm Wed Mar 10 00:15:07 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:15:07 +0100 Subject: [THS] Karl Denninger: A Random Look at RMBS And The Economy Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100310001438.047052a0@spamarrest.com> http://market-ticker.denninger.net/ Tuesday, March 9. 2010 Posted by Karl Denninger in Editorial at 13:22 A Random Look at RMBS And The Economy >From The Forum: Bond Cusip 60+ ACCR 2007-1 M2 00438QAF1 35.8 CARR 2007-RFC1 M2 144526AF7 48.5 CMLTI 2006-WFH3 M1 17309QAE4 40.3 CWL 2006-10 MV2 12666PAW4 61.0 CWL 2006-18 M1 23243WAE8 60.5 CWL 2006-20 M2 12667HAG6 62.4 CWL 2006-22 M2 12666BAG0 60.2 CWL 2006-25 M2 12667TAG0 62.9 CWL 2006-26 M2 12668HAG5 60.0 CWL 2006-3 M1 126670WC8 57.4 CWL 2006-BC4 M1 12667NAE8 64.6 CWL 2007-1 M2 23245CAG5 64.4 CWL 2007-10 2M1 23246BAM3 56.6 CWL 2007-10 2M2 23246BAP6 56.6 CWL 2007-10 2M3 23246BAR2 56.6 CWL 2007-10 M5 23246BAT8 56.4 CWL 2007-11 2M3 23247LAK4 56.6 CWL 2007-11 M5 23247LAM0 56.3 CWL 2007-7 M1 12669VAF5 56.2 CWL 2007-8 M1 12669WAG1 57.0 CWL 2007-8 M5 12669WAL0 57.0 CWL 2007-9 M1 12670FAF7 57.9 CWL 2007-9 M2 12670FAG5 57.9 CWL 2007-9 M3 12670FAH3 57.9 CWL 2007-9 M5 12670FAK6 57.9 JPMAC 2006-CH1 M2 46629TAG5 37.6 JPMAC 2006-CH2 MV3 46629QAZ9 47.5 JPMAC 2006-CW2 MV2 46629BAU3 65.5 JPMAC 2007-CH2 MV2 46630MAY8 42.2 JPMAC 2007-CH2 MV4 46630MBA9 42.2 JPMAC 2007-CH3 M1 46630XAG3 46.5 JPMAC 2007-CH3 M2 46630XAH1 46.5 JPMAC 2007-CH3 M3 46630XAJ7 46.5 JPMAC 2007-CH4 M1 46630CAF1 42.9 JPMAC 2007-CH4 M2 46630CAG9 42.9 JPMAC 2007-CH4 M3 46630CAH7 42.9 JPMAC 2007-CH5 M2 46631KAG0 46.6 JPMAC 2007-CH5 M4 46631KAJ4 46.6 A random assortment of 2006 and 2007 securitizations from our friends at JP Morgan and Countrywide (mostly.) The last number is the 60+ delinquency percentage. A lot of this is Home Equity lines. Remember my Ticker yesterday and my rant on Blogtalk regarding Barney Frank and the outrageous hidden losses being carried by our banks? That none of this is being pursued, yet every week we see proof of it in FDIC bank seizures and the loss ratios? That this sort of book-cooking, were you or I to engage in it in a public company, would lead us to be criminally charged, and in fact this is exactly what Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were charged over doing? Folks, this is endemic through the financial system. The best performing issue in that list has a 60% delinquency rate of 35.8% and a material number of them have more than half the loans in hard default. Every home equity line behind an underwater first that is also not being paid is worth zero. There is no recovery. This is not like most bonds, where there is a meaningful recovery percentage after the default happens. This is subordinated debt that is worth exactly bupkis if the senior lien cannot be fully satisfied from a foreclosure on the property. These bonds are literally everywhere. They're in pension funds. They're on bank balance sheets. They're held by The Fed through the garbage Fannie and Freddie paper they bought. Foreign governments and foreign banks hold them. Yet we have banks that are carrying very similar portfolios of loans on their books - second liens, either home equity or "silent seconds" used to get around various ratio requirements such as PMI on loan origination, and essentially none of them are being carried at anywhere close to these levels of loss. There has been no - and I do mean no - recovery of balance sheets in the United States when it comes to financial companies, pension funds or anyone else holding this crap. Zero. Zip. Bupkis. Servicers have in some cases, it appears, even co-mingled funds in order to advance coupon payments, which has the effect of hiding these delinquency rates from investors. For a while. Cash flow always wins though folks. I continue to hear "look, the market has a year under its belt now from the low, this means that it's a long-term bull market and will go higher for years to come." Ok, let me ask you one question, and I will not provide the answer: You will, by doing your own work, because if you don't, then you won't take responsibility for your own outcomes - and if you're in that camp then stop reading The Ticker right now and start watching Jim Cramer on CNBS. In every previous recession and market swoon post WWII by the time we have gotten a year from the bottom whatever it was that ailed the economy going in had been resolved. Let's go through a few of them: The S&L crisis, at this point, was under control - the S&Ls were under FDIC control, people were being sent to prison by William Black (and others), and we had a dimension on the losses and who had done what to whom (those loss estimates turned out to be way low, but at least we knew where they were.) In the 1970s by this time oil prices had relaxed and the risk of the embargo was over. Post-1981 recession interest rates were on their way down; the back of inflation had been broken. Post early-1990s the California military bubble had popped and was mostly mopped up. By the end of 2003, most of the Internet companies that had no business being in business were gone and buried; their bogus claims had led to their demise, and they had filed bankruptcy. Now let's contrast this with today: The credit default swap monster has not been caged. In fact, there has been no change whatsoever in how these are traded and written. Nor has anyone in the banks been indicted even when there is evidence of blatant bribery (as in the case of Jefferson County Alabama.) All of the large banks, and a lot of mid-sized banks have enough second line exposure on their balance sheets written in the bubble states, carried at or near full value, to severely damage their capitalization ratios if not outright force them into receivership. Not one of these institutions is marking their second line exposure anywhere near what the delinquency rates in these securities implies about their recovery values. Yet these losses are both real and the overwhelming evidence says that impairment is permanent. Existing home sales numbers have flattened at an extremely low level, even with the $8,000 tax credit. This implies that the value of this credit has been reached in the marketplace, and that no actual recovery in housing is or will take place in the near term. Yet the entirety of the premise that the economy has turned the corner - some 20% of GDP is housing related - rests on the belief that it has. We are told that the auto industry has "recovered" with an estimated annual sales rate of 11 million cars. The peak of the auto production cycle was seventeen million. Even if half of that is recovered it will leave some 17% of that capacity idle and those people who used to man it unemployed. Where are they going to go for jobs? The labor employment rate (of all employable adults) is back to levels last seen when we had less than half the consumer and industrial debt in the system we have today as a percentage of income. This sort of job loss into ramping debt has never happened before in the post-Depression era. How are the interest payments going to be made? The lockup in credit markets and economic malaise that followed occurred as a direct result of fraudulent balance sheets - that is, claims that firms had liquidity and assets that in fact were false. When that falsehood was unmasked they failed instantly, as occurred with ENRON and MCI. Do we, today, have balance sheets that accurate reflect the valuation of all assets by firms across the economy - not only in banks, but also in firms like GE and CISCO? The government is literally providing 9% of GDP via deficit spending that exceeds the records set during the 2003-2007 years. That is, they've replaced a full nine percent of the economy's final demand since 2007, and despite the claim that the economy is recovering the amount of replacement activity they're supplying has increased since the spring of 2009 and continues to do so. If the government is going to supply this replacement for the indefinite future and that is necessary to avoid the recognition of an instantaneous economic Depression (defined as a 10% contraction in GDP) can the government continue to do so on an indefinite forward basis? The entirety of the market rally from March of 2009 to today, and its sustainability on a forward basis, is dependent on the above - especially the government being able (and willing) to continue in its new role of providing 9% or more of GDP (beyond what it used to provide!) along with the continuing ability to mark assets that are worth little or nothing well above their actual market prices. DO YOU BELIEVE that this can and will occur on an indefinite forward basis? If you do, then you should be fully invested here and now, because indeed, profits will continue to advance, revenues will continue to advance, and the market will continue to advance. We have a new bull market predicated on The Government legalizing balance sheet fraud and indefinite forward support of nearly half of GDP all-in (add up State and Federal spending - its close to 50% of GDP), with the additional 9% added for the last two years continuing into the indefinite future (and likely expanding too, especially with "health care" reform.) If you do not then you should be hiding under the desk, because just as occurred in 2000 and 2008 when the breakpoint comes it will occur without warning, without recourse, and without the ability for you to get to the exit in time, and since the amount of the fraud and bogosity exceeds both the 2000 and 2007 levels by far so will the reaction - when it occurs.