All Hail The Peoples' Peaceful Revolution!

Amazing. I went to bed at 4a.m. last night with a terrible, ominous feeling, fully expecting to wake up to a full scale Mubarak blow-back in the form of some globally broadcast massacre. It's a testament to the collective will and temperament of the Egyptian people that they weren't, throughout the course of this uprising, baited into any kind of violent response. The demonstrators were resolute, the crowds got bigger, the class distinctions blurred, the working infrastructure ground to a halt, and finally, Mubarak had no alternative but to step down. The way in which Egyptian society handled this crisis was note perfect, and will be studied for years to come, both by advocates of non-violent resistance, and those wanting to crush those future movements.

In the coming weeks, the Egyptians(along with Israel, the rest of the Middle East, and the World) will have a host of issues to contend with, including fixing the damage done to the economy, how the Military will transition power , what form of government will emerge, and what the dynamics of the region will finally become.

But for the next few days, let the Egyptians celebrate what they have given themselves and the entire world: Hope upon hope for a happy ending under the most impossible of circumstances. The rest of us are indebted to your courage and strength. Thank you.

Egypt: Fluid And Flammable

Egypt protesters vow massive demonstrations Excerpts:

Egypt's people-power protesters, reeling with disillusion and anger after President Hosni Mubarak disappointed their hopes he was about to resign, planned massive new demonstrations on Friday that may test the army's loyalties.

The increasingly sour confrontation after 17 days of unrest has raised fears of violence in the most populous Arab nation, a key U.S. ally in an oil-rich region where the chance of disorder spreading to other repressive states has troubled world markets.
..
"My great fear is that if the demonstrations don't end that the military begins to split over this. You may have younger commanders who don't want to go down with the ship," said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. deputy national security adviser.

"If the demonstrations build ... then you once again face the army with the choice they have sought to avoid -- put the demonstrations down or get rid of Mubarak. They have managed so far not to make that choice, but if the people stay in the streets then they are going to have to make that choice."
..
Nobel Peace laureate and leading democracy advocate Mohamed ElBaradei predicted "Egypt will explode" and called on the military to intervene in response to Mubarak's refusal to step down.

"The Army must save the country now," he said in a Twitter post.

Mubarak's speech re-enforced the fact that he's mentally inflexible, and possibly suffering from dementia.. Or he's completely insane; either/or..

It looks like Obama is back on The People's side, but won't be doing too much about it, save a pronouncement here and there..

Egypt Strikes Continue As Doctors, Lawyers Join Protests Good news, especially if pro-Mubarak thugs attack the demonstrators.. The doctors can patch them up, and the lawyers can gather affidavits on the spot!

Meanwhile in Europe.. EU leaders call for government change in Egypt as Mubarak vows to stay

Egypt's economy is shaky as hell at the moment, and investors along with the Central Bank are getting a little freaked out.. But I guess losing 310 million dollars a day would cause some anxiety..

Omar Suleiman: Not nice.

The crowds are already gathering for today's protest. Everybody seems to be holding their breath: How big will this demonstration be, and can it remain peaceful?

Taco Bell Outdid Itself This Time..

I find their commercials to be baseline Godawful, but this new one featuring some singing douchebag in a faux supper club setting effects me at some crazy visceral level insipid commercials rarely achieve. Ads don't normally get under my skin, but this one makes me want to commit random acts of fast food related violence.. If I hadn't stopped eating Taco Bell years ago, I certainly would now..

Funny I'd take a stand regarding the commercial, but the whole 36% "beef" as beef wouldn't have been the final straw. Wow. Behold the power of advertising..

Icelandic volcano 'set to erupt'

First there was Eyjafjallajökull, now let's meet Bárdarbunga. Excerpts:

Scientists in Iceland are warning that another volcano looks set to erupt and threatening to spew-out a pall of dust that would dwarf last year's event.

Geologists detected the high risk of a new eruption after evaluating an increased swarm of earthquakes around the island's second largest volcano.

Pall Einarsson, a professor of geophysics at the University of Iceland, says the area around Bárdarbunga is showing signs of increased activity, which provides "good reason to worry".
And:
The last recorded eruption of Bárdarbunga was in 1910, although volcanologists believe its last major eruption occurred in 1477 when it produced a large ash and pumice fallout. It also produced the largest known lava flow during the past 10,000 years on earth.

It is the second largest volcano on Iceland and is directly above the mantle plume of molten rock.

By comparison, Bárdarbunga dwarves the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which shutdown most of Europe's airspace last year after its ash cloud drifted across the continent's skies.

Nothing happening with Katla, Iceland's most dangerous volcano, but this increased seismic activity is troubling..

Not Only Does Ron Paul Have A Bigger Set Than Any Other Politician, So Do His Supporters..

‘War criminal!’: Ron Paul backers crash Cheney-Rumsfeld reunion Friggin' awesome(!) excerpts:
Supporters of libertarian Republican Ron Paul shouted down(!!-me) former Vice President Dick Cheney at a conservative conference Thursday, in a sign of a growing foreign policy rift on the American right.

Cheney had appeared on the first day of the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference to introduce Donald Rumsfeld, the former Bush-era defense secretary who was scheduled to receive this year's "Defender of the Constitution Award."

That didn't sit well with "Team Paul," supporters of Rep. Ron Paul who have long called for an end to the US's foreign wars.

"Where's bin Laden?" one heckler shouted as Cheney stood at the podium to introduce Rumsfeld.

"War criminal!" another shouted out, prompting a heated reaction from the crowd. (Ya think?)

The specter of a Republican vice president being called a "war criminal" at a conservative conference was so unexpected that it prompted TalkingPointsMemo's Evan McMorris-Santoro to describe it as "what a Cheney-Rumsfeld hug at the Netroots Nation convention might look like."
..
Rumsfeld's "Defender of the Constitution" award has been ridiculed by liberal anti-war activists and libertarians alike, who argue that Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials were among the most dismissive of constitutional rights.

Because Libertarian/Conservatives said it, I'm sure the other Conservatives didn't try to beat them up. The essence of a collective "pants-shitting moment," to be sure.. And you thought the last two political cycles were hot..
Paul/Kucinich '12!

Egypt Update: February 10, 2011

The People aren't intimidated: The Protests are getting larger..

The demonstrators are pissed about Mubarak and family's 70 billion dollar fortune and workers country wide are going Norma Rae in response, and the Really Poor started burning stuff. Excerpts:

Strikes erupted in a breadth of sectors _ among railway and bus workers, state electricity staff and service technicians at the Suez Canal, in factories manufacturing textiles, steel and beverages and at least one hospital.

In one of the flashpoints of unrest Wednesday, some 8,000 protesters, mainly farmers, set barricades of flaming palm trees in the southern province of Assiut. They blocked the main highway and railway to Cairo to complain of bread shortages. They then drove off the governor by pelting his van with stones.

Hundreds of slum dwellers in the Suez Canal city of Port Said set fire to part of the governor's headquarters in anger over lack of housing.
..

Egyptians have been infuriated by newspaper reports that the Mubarak family has amassed billions, and perhaps tens of billions of dollars in wealth while, according to the World Bank, about 40 percent of the country's 80 million people live below or near the poverty line of $2 a day. The family's true net worth is not known.

And yet, The Regime refuses to budge.. That will only work against them, later..

The Obama administration's response sucks, as it seems to be returning to how the U.S. normally deals with the fall of a dictatorship: Replace it with another. No Change, there.. Really disappointing excerpts:

After a good start, the Obama administration's response to the democratic revolution in Egypt has begun to exude the odor of betrayal. Now distancing itself from the essential demand of the protesters that the dictator must go, the administration has fallen back on the sordid option of backing a new and improved dictatorship. Predictably, it is one guided by a local strongman long entrusted by the CIA, Vice President Omar Suleiman, described by U.S. officials in the WikiLeaks cables as a "Mubarak consigliere." The script is out of an all-too-familiar playbook: Pick this longtime chief of Egyptian intelligence who has consistently done our bidding in matters of torture and retrofit him as a modern democratic leader. But this time the Egyptian street will not meekly go along.

Anyone else perplexed that the new hero of Egypt is a Google executive?



Not too much follow up on this one, but I'm guessing it has something to do with Egypt or the Middle East..

Mass Animal Deaths Continue. The Government Can't Be Poisioning Them All, Can They?

The cavalcade of whimsy continues, as about a million jellyfish and hundreds of thousands of fish all over the world all decided to go off-planet this week. Clustered as a two month event from mid-December to mid-February(or the three weeks from New Year's Day until January 21), millions of birds and fish died under a variety of circumstances, some mysterious or controversial. While some observers/ blogger/ scientifical types continue to state(quite correctly) that mass animal deaths aren't uncommon, a cursory Bing search of "mass animal deaths biggest" turned up no Master List of this type of phenomena within the parameters of "biggest" for any kind of comparison.

A list, though, of Creepiest Casualties of mass animal deaths show only one event to be bigger in scope: The comet or asteroid impact on earth 65 million years ago. Granted, this isn't enough to make a solid assertion about the severity of these death clusters as a warning to some future apocalypse(again, based on Internet information availability..), but it also makes these recent events harder to dismiss. While there surely have been bigger specific-event animal die-offs in the past, this cluster-event continues to grow. Due to global conditions facilitating more of these events(extemes in cold and heat, along with the Gulf oil spill and Corexit poisoning, seems likely to continue. Again, die offs occur; but the scope of these combined events are disturbing when viewed as a whole.

Theories? Good post here detailing some possibilities, but it omits one of the strongest contenders, at least for the southern U.S. events: Corexit. I'm curious as to whether any alternative news organizations are tracking these events for a comprehensive piece detailing events, locations, connections, and possibilities that can fit all these disparate puzzle pieces into perspective. I'm leaning towards geomagnetic distortion/ pole shift, New Madrid activity, and Corexit, with the answer somehow involving them all, but in what ratio, and including other factors, I have no idea. This doesn't seem to be going away..

WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices

Oh Snap! And just like that, the Peak Oil debate comes roaring back to life.. Excerpts:

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn barrels – nearly 40%.
..
According to the cables, which date between 2007-09, Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12m barrels a day in 10 years but before then – possibly as early as 2012 – global oil production would have hit its highest point. This crunch point is known as "peak oil".

Thanks to WikiLeaks, Peak Oil visibility should skyrocket within the next month or so, lead first by the "I told you so" crowd.. And this time, they're not going to let the issue drop.

A Rather Unexpected M-Class Flare Just Popped Off..

From Solar Cycle 24 Excerpts:

02/09/2011 by Kevin VE3EN at 02:30Comment on Message Board
Solar Update - Solar activity has increased within the past 24 hours with C-Class flares and an M1.9 Solar Flare around growing Sunspot 1153. Unfortunately this region has picked the wrong time to get active. It will soon rotate onto the western limb and out of direct earth view. (This is unclear, as it would be good news if this active region rotated away from us, so I'm guessing "out of" should be "into." I'm also assuming the M-Class flare didn't effect us, as no mention was made to that effect.)

Several new sunspot groups have formed on the visible solar disk and were numbered 1154, 1155, 1156 and 1157. These regions are not yet capable of producing strong solar flares, but that could change.

These sunspot seem to have caught everyone off guard. It's development was sudden, and very quickly, an M-Class flare was produced. There are four active regions that are in the early stages of development, and rotating toward us(If I'm interpreting correctly..), so we could get some interesting solar activity activity coming up..

Egypt Today, February 8, 2011

Egypt Talks Start on Sidelining Mubarak With Protest in Day 12
Bad sign: U.S. supports gradual reform in Egypt
Egypt's new cabinet meets as protests continue
Greater impacts: Mideast change: The scenarios is less about Egypt and more about Israel.
Change "partly" to "mostly," and you're on-track.. Egypt's unrest tied partly to high food prices
Hezbollah leader says Egypt protests will transform Mideast by pulling nation away from Israel

Curious As To How Birds Might Behave In A 2012/ Armageddon Situation? Well Wonder No More!

Something's got these birds Freaked Out.. Notice the hysteria and confusion among the birds, but no aggression within the flock towards each other. This isn't some kind of avian war, it's an event, however small the duration. I can't remember ever seeing birds behave in this manner. It'll be interesting to determine if this was isolated, or part of a cluster of similar events.
Possible causes:
Mass poisoning.
Unusual ambient/environmental noise.
Electrical/radio frequency disturbances.
Magnetic/Solar frequency disturbances.
Low frequency earth/crustal disturbances.
Antichrist lives in Melbourne apartment complex.

Other.

Disturbing.

Another Example Of How We Don't Understand What's Destroying Us..

Two Views on The Bernank Gonzalo Lira points out the different reporting of Fed Chief Bernanke's speech last week. The American version of what happened is quite a bit different than, well, everyone else's..

..The American media is focusing on an obvious political nonstarter: The idea that the budget ceiling will not be raised.
..
The foreign media, on the other hand, is focusing on something that really matters: How the U.S. is exporting inflation, especially food price inflation, which is leading to social unrest.
..
Compare:
The New York Times reports in the lead of its story,

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, warned Congressional
Republicans on Thursday not to “play around with” a coming vote to raise the government’s legal borrowing limit or use it as a bargaining chip for spending cuts.
..
Contrast those lead paragraphs with these from the UK’s Telegraph (not
exactly a bastion of Lefty thinking):Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has dismissed the idea that the central bank’s policies are to blame for the rise in global food prices to a record high that helped trigger political unrest in Egypt.

..
The Times and the rest of the American mainstream media is focused on a non-issue—while the rest of the world is focusing on something that matters: Food price rises, and the perception that America is exporting inflation.

The American financial media’s thing about the Federal government debt ceiling is sort of silly—everyone knows that the debt ceiling will be raised.

But food price inflation is real. The riots in Egypt are real—and they have nothing to do with “Muslim extremists”, or even Mubarak’s dictatorship: They’re about food prices, plain and simple, which have been steadily rising ever since the Federal Reserve’s loose money policies and various versions of QE have driven commodity prices to the moon.

Lira's right: Theatrics aside, the debt ceiling will be raised. Journalistically; not a big deal at all. Rising food costs triggering global, social unrest.. Of course that's the bigger story. And the bigger question? Why is there such a disconnect between American media's coverage/perspective and the World's? Yes, it was rhetorical.