NightBlogger

photo-Azrainman
Illargi reminds us that “If China’s economic growth goes down to 5%, the economy and the political system are going going gone and out of here. These newly built export economies are just too vulnerable, no resilience. Put Russia down as a close second, and reserve a space right behind for many developing countries. Other, more established, export powers to meet the hammer are for instance Germany, Holland, Brazil, Austria, Belgium and Australia. Job losses will be staggering, and I don’t see any of these places seriously preparing for it. It’s all blind growth religion. They should all take a good look at the Baltic Dry Shipping Index, which is approaching 600, from 200.000+ a few months ago. That, my friends, spells bleak and empty shelves coming to a place near you. Around January 20.”

Indeed. Iceland comes to mind and that’s more than frightening. Before this massive financial crises began spreading like the Plague, few people discussed or even knew what the Baltic Dry Shipping Index was. Let take a closer look — Nick DuBay claims the Baltic Dry Index has fallen 93% and wonders if we’re heading into a worldwide depression. As Nick explains it: “The Baltic Dry Index which is a direct indicator of the health of vital worldwide shipping and supply activity as well as the potential health of the global economy has recently slipped more than 93%. Its value has gone from over 11,000 to less than 800 with little except for a floor of zero to suggest the slide will stop in the near future. This means that worldwide, the demand for cargo ships and more importantly raw materials that go into producing the everyday items that consumers buy has come to a near standstill. This is an indicator of a massive worldwide slump and likely foreshadows more economic woes for not only the US, but also the entire globe.

“To understand the Baltic Dry index one has to approach this economic telltale from multiple angles. Basically, the index is set where the supply of raw materials meets the demand for ships to be booked to carry those materials from country to country or continent to continent. The index is broken down into different segments that take into account the size of the ship and the type of the cargo that is being shipped. It can be observed at the Investment Tools website.

“Generally, when the BDI is charting a gain, stocks will likely close up and countries’ whose currency are good market indicators of worldwide exchange, like the value of the Canadian and Australian Dollars are on their way up as well. When the BDI is performing badly, generally the US and worldwide stock markets are likely to also perform badly in the near future and the currencies of the countries previously mentioned, who are heavily affected by the foreign goods and raw materials exchange will also likely soon show losses. This is because the BDI shows exactly where the worldwide demand for raw goods and materials rests at any given period. When these raw goods and materials are not being moved around, production of almost everything imaginable slows due to the tightening supply of worldwide goods.” More

From Air Combat Command USAF website:
Angel Thunder is a combat search and rescue task force exercise designed to test theater spin-up capabilities and examine the integration of all Air Force assets in mission planning procedures and mission execution.

Arizona Daily Star
Foreign Troops Take Part in “Drill” at Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson
To troops downed in combat, few sights are sweeter than the approach of military rescuers. In a few weeks, Tucson will be at the center of efforts to speed up that lifesaving process.Personnel from around the globe will converge at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base from Dec. 1 to Dec. 12 for the largest rescue exercise of its kind. The effort, dubbed Angel Thunder, will involve the U.S. Army and Air Force, troops from Germany, Chile, Colombia and observers from Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Pakistan.

Several non-military U.S. agencies such as the State and Justice departments, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, also will take part in the drills, which aim to smooth interaction between military branches, allied nations and civilian agencies. With about 450 personnel involved, Angel Thunder “is the most complex and largest Department of Defense personnel- recovery exercise to date,” said a news release from Air Combat Command in Langley, Va. D-M will be at the hub of the effort, but most of the mock rescue action will take place elsewhere in Arizona and in New Mexico.

You can bet the statistics are far worse than those reported by Eurostat and I don’t believe for a New York Minute France’s economy is still growing. No one in the real world believes governments, banks and politicians any more. Things are even worse in eastern Europe.

Times Online
The eurozone has fallen into recession for the first time since the single currency was introduced in 1999, official figures show this morning. Eurostat, the European Union statistics agency, said third quarter GDP across the 15-nation eurozone shrank 0.2 per cent, following a 0.2 per cent fall in the previous quarter. A recession is defined as two quarters of negative growth. Yesterday, Germany, Europe’s largest country, fell into recession for the first time in four years but it emerged today that GDP in France is still growing, up 0.14%. However, Spain admitted today that growth shrank by 0.2 per cent. More

Jim Sinclair
I told you that you would see volatility in gold beyond your wildest imagination. That statement usually went along with my warning that by margining anything gold you were putting yourself in great financial risk. Today has to seal the veracity of that advice. Now get a hold of yourself. There is absolutely no way governments can make a problem of this size go away over a weekend. Those that question me on this issue are the same ones that laughed in 2000 when I said the growth of OTC derivatives was going to break the world. I told the lead director of Bear Stearns at the time that OTC derivatives were going to break his firm but the profits from them was simply too intoxicating for anyone to listen. Now I am asking you to listen.

Whatever is done to resolve this global financial crisis is going to inject incomprehensible amounts of new money into the global financial system. Academics see the world as a ‘Picture In Time.” That means they are static thinkers who can’t perceive motion. Visionaries like Harry, Monty, Trader Dan & Tony are “Dynamic Thinkers.” At present, some academics are promoting the dumbest line I have ever heard. They say that all this new money going into the system is not monetary inflation because it is simply replacing all the money lost and therefore is a wash. That is part of the thinking pattern I am talking about and it’s dead wrong.

Dynamic thinkers know that the outflow of these losses has existed from the time of transaction and therefore prior to truer valuation as mandated by Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). The day the FASB mandated truer value had existed for years but was not recognized as such because it was generally accounted for off balance sheet. Just because financial institutions tried to hide their losses, those capital depletions were already a growing cancer inside their organizations.

You can be certain that a repetition of Germany’s Weimar crisis is coming soon. There is nothing that can be done to make matters better - even if done by governments unilaterally in a unified action. In fact, such action will only serve to make matters worse. The larger the financial action, the deeper the financial fall. The G7 still thinks they run the world. That should tell you something about the degree of what they can do. Gold is honest money that will push all crappy paper out of its way. Why do you think so much intervention took place in gold in US market hours today?

All I can tell you is to stay the course or jump directly into the fire! If the heat in the kitchen is too hot for you, there is nothing I can do for you.

Regards,
Jim Sinclair

Germany joined Ireland and Greece on Sunday in guaranteeing all private savings accounts, putting Europe’s biggest economy at odds with calls for a unified European response to the global financial meltdown. The decision came as governments across Europe scrambled to save failing banks, working largely on their own a day after leaders of the continent’s four biggest economies called for tighter regulation and a coordinated response. Their failure to agree an EU-wide plan showcased the divisions in Europe on how to deal with the crisis. France had suggested a multibillion-dollar EU-wide government bailout plan, but backed off after Germany said banks must find their own way out. More

Source: Herald Tribune
NATO warships entered the Black Sea on Thursday for what the alliance said were long-planned exercises and routine visits to ports in Romania and Bulgaria. The move is not linked to the tensions over Russia’s invasion of Georgia, which lies on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, about 900 kilometers (550 miles) from the Romanian coast, said officials at NATO’s military command in southern Belgium. Three warships — from Spain, Germany and Poland — sailed into the Black Sea on Thursday. They are due to be joined by a U.S. frigate, the USS Taylor, later this week. They are “conducting a pre-planned routine visit to the Black Sea region to interact and exercise with our NATO partners Romania and Bulgaria, which is an important feature of our routine planning,” said Vice-Adm. Pim Bedet, deputy commander at allied maritime headquarters in Northwood, England. However, the move risks increasing tensions with Russia which has deployed ships from its Black Sea fleet to the Georgian coast.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The twin missives more or less sum up the dramatic change in mood sweeping financial markets since it became evident that the entire bloc of rich OECD countries has succumbed to the delayed effects of the credit crisis. Japan contracted by 0.6pc in the second quarter, Germany by 0.5pc, France and Italy by 0.3pc. Spain recalled the cabinet last week for an emergency summit. New Zealand and Denmark are in recession. Iceland contracted at a catastrophic 3.7pc in the second quarter. “The whole decoupling thesis has started to come apart at the seams,” said David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC. “Canada is frozen over. We have Arctic conditions in Sweden, and the UK is falling off the white cliffs of Dover.” The US fiscal stimulus package that kept spending afloat in the second quarter is running out fast. There is nothing yet to replace it. The export boom cannot keep adding juice as the global crunch hits. My fear is that the US will tip into a second, deeper leg of the downturn, setting off a wave of savage job cuts. This will start to feel more like a real depression. More

Euro-zone growth braked sharply in the second quarter as major economies Germany, France and Italy shrank, EU statistics showed Thursday, with high fuel and food prices holding back consumer spending. Growth in the 15 economies that share the euro currency contracted by 0.2 percent from the first quarter, expanding just 1.5 percent from the same period a year ago, the EU statistical agency Eurostat said in a first estimate that it may change at a later date. More

Times Online
She robs, she injects herself with heroin, she seems to kill with almost professional precision – and, as far as German detectives are concerned, she has no identity. The hunt for the woman known as the Phantom of Heilbronn has been stepped up after the discovery of new traces of her DNA in a blood-stained white Ford Escort. “The noose is tightening,” Erwin Hetger, the chief of police in Baden-Württemberg, southwest Germany, said. For 15 years a mysterious woman has been leaving traces of her DNA at crime scenes across Europe, suggesting her involvement in at least six murders and scores of break-ins. Rarely are there witnesses. Instead, police in the countries where she has been roaming – Germany, France and Austria – have had to piece together a profile from saliva left on biscuits nibbled at the site of a murder, a discarded cigarette packet and a spot of blood. She may flit across borders like a ghost but she has been leaving a trail behind her. A human being loses on average four hairs in an hour and sheds a million dead cells in 40 minutes: that forensic scence harvest is all the police have to go on. More
Also See: Junkie’s needle may lead to woman serial killer they call the Phantom
Germany hunts phantom killer

Webster G. Tarpley
…the United States and NATO now escalating the hopeless and unwinnable Afghan war, and is preparing to send US and NATO forces on the ground to seize parts of Pakistan, a country which is almost 3 times more populous than Iran, and possesses a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver it. The Bush-Cheney-neocon era in foreign policy is over, and the Brzezinski-Trilateral-Rockefeller-Soros phase of aggression has begun; the US hit list now features Chinese allies like Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Pakistan. Brzezinski is striving to put together some huge provocation for the Beijing Olympics, to make the Chinese government lose face and begin disintegrating. The ultimate targets of the new Obama-Brzezinski foreign policy are Russia, China, and the other members and friends of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the main pole of resistance in the world to the designs of Washington and London. The stakes are now much higher than a mere conventional clash in the Persian Gulf. Brzezinski’s adventurism goes far beyond that of the neocons, and objectively places the danger of a thermonuclear exchange on the world agenda. Watch for the Polish-Czech-Lithuanian missile crisis, a Balkan crisis, and a crisis between Georgia and Russia to point the world in this ominous new direction.

The US government is now being run by the Principals’ Committee, an interagency cabal that includes Defense Secretary Gates, Secretary Of State Rice, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson, and other operatives of the Trilateral Wall Street financier faction. It is clear that under the new policy, Iran will be able to continue to process uranium: ‘The Bush administration’s decision to send a senior American official to participate in international talks with “More news and information about Iran.” Iran this weekend reflects a double policy shift in the struggle to resolve the impasse over the country’s nuclear program. First, the Bush administration has decided to abandon its longstanding position that it would meet face to face with Iran only after that country suspended its uranium enrichment, as demanded by the “More articles about Security Council, U.N.” United Nations Security Council. Second, an American partner at the table injects new importance to the negotiating track of the six global powers confronting Iran - France, Britain, Germany, Russia, China and the United States - even though their official stance is that no substantive talks can begin until uranium enrichment stops. The increased engagement raised questions of whether the Bush administration would alter its stance toward Iran as radically as it did with North Korea, risking a fresh schism with conservatives who have accused the White House of granting concessions to so-called rogue states without extracting enough in return.’ (New York Times, July 17, 2008) This gambit of appeasing Iran is being done in the hopes of turning Iran against Russia and China ­ a project of incalculable folly. Brzezinski is glad to see the Iranians have nukes, because he thinks he can keep them, pointed at Moscow. More

Germany has so far been spared a bloody Islamist terror attack. But it only took two planned attacks in Germany to persuade a majority of the population to support a massive dismantling of civil rights. Read More

Idiot!
MESEBERG, Germany (AP) — President Bush on Wednesday raised unprompted the possibility of a military strike against Tehran’s presumed nuclear weapons ambitions, speaking bullishly on Iran even as he admitted having been unwise to do so previously about Iraq.

Bush’s host in two days of meetings at a baroque castle, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, made clear her views on the saber-rattling - however subtle - without directly countering her guest. “I very clearly pin my hopes on diplomatic efforts,” Merkel said, reflecting the deeply held European opinion that military action against Iran is nearly unthinkable.

Iran’s leader weighed in, too. Speaking before thousands in the central Iranian city of Shahr-e-Kord, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Bush “won’t be able to harm even one centimeter of the sacred land of Iran” and promised continued defiance over Iran’s nuclear activities. Iran says it is enriching uranium to generate electricity, not build a bomb - a claim the West doubts is true. More

This is how insane the world’s become. It’s mass insanity. I don’t know how anyone could write this story with a straight face. It’s Newspeak and right of of Orwell’s 1984.

Charles Q. Choi
LiveScience.com
To make safer, more environmentally friendly explosives, scientists in Germany turned to a recently explored class of materials called tetrazoles. These derive most of their explosive energy from nitrogen instead of carbon as TNT and others do. Tiny bombs were made from two promising tetrazoles with the alphabet-soup names of HBT and G2ZT.

These materials proved less apt to explode accidentally than conventional explosives. After the bombs were detonated in the laboratory, G2ZT also proved as powerful than TNT, and HBT more powerful than TNT and comparable to RDX, said researcher Thomas Klapötke, a chemist at the University of Munich in Germany. More

Photo david.nikonvscanon
Alison Benjamin
Germany has banned a family of pesticides that are blamed for the deaths of millions of honeybees. The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) has suspended the registration for eight pesticide seed treatment products used in rapeseed oil and sweetcorn.

The move follows reports from German beekeepers in the Baden-Württemberg region that two thirds of their bees died earlier this month following the application of a pesticide called clothianidin. “It’s a real bee emergency,” said Manfred Hederer, president of the German Professional Beekeepers’ Association. “50-60% of the bees have died on average and some beekeepers have lost all their hives.”

Tests on dead bees showed that 99% of those examined had a build-up of clothianidin. The chemical, produced by Bayer CropScience, a subsidiary of the German chemical giant Bayer, is sold in Europe under the trade name Poncho. It was applied to the seeds of sweetcorn planted along the Rhine this spring. The seeds are treated in advance of being planted or are sprayed while in the field. More