November 24, 2006

Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Anyone else feeling it's all hitting the fan right about now, spinning so out of control our incompetent and clueless government will just have to move to the sidelines as Rome burns?

Militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and seven Sunni mosques came under attack as Shiites took revenge for the slaughter of at least 215 people in the Sadr City slum.

Home sales tumbled nationally by 12.7% in third quarter, 115,568 properties nationwide entered some stage of foreclosure during October, the most reported in any month so far this year and an increase of 42 percent from October 2005 ~ California reports highest number of foreclosures for second straight month ~ fasten your seat belts / Recession draws near

And thus I'm reminded today of Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

All I can say is, that's what you get for worshipping a God.

Anonymous said...

Agree - I said that this morning before reading your blog - dollar down, oil/gold up, foreclosures hit 1 million and up to records, and Iraq now in full scale civil war that even Bush can't deny. Wait until Iraq nuts start bombing their own oil pipelines again. . .I predicted here on HP way back that the DOW will tank to 9800 by Dec. 31, and I hold to that. We had an early false "Santa Clause Rally" and now the "Grinch that Stole Christmas" will appear. . .fund managers will catch the drift, and lock in their profits for the year, bringing down the market, and then it will feed upon itself. . .recession is now 99% sure for 2007.

Anonymous said...

BTW - I AM a fund manager - a small family trust fund of 5 million, but I have already locked in a lot of profits for the year, and am holding long in Gold, and bond funds, etc. . .a few well placed utilities with great dividends, and bought lots of Canadian Oil trusts a few weeks ago when they tanked because of the new tax proposals in Canada (have already booked a profit on those). . .out of ANY technology and consumer stocks!!!

Roccman said...

and the dollar is in a free fall...got gold?

http://quotes.ino.com/chart/?s=NYBOT_DX&v=w

Anonymous said...

Dude! I did the same thing with my meager holdings. Bought up a lot of Canadian Energy Trusts after they tanked (Cramer has gotten better lately) and GLD and SLV ETFS.

I bought a lot of puts on mortgage lenders and home builders but so far those have evaded justice.

I've hunkered down for the apocalypse.

Anonymous said...

Relax. It is the will of Allah.

Bill said...

Not only do i blame the Neo-con agenda for what we are about to recive IE:(recession) But I also blame the people for falling into the trap of more is good, and bigger is better..you would have thought we learned from that in the 80's but obviously not..oh well Ill watch..and hopfully learn something from this experiance..maybe others will follow and watch and learn...but i wont hold my breath, gota have things more things.

Anonymous said...

God you're stupid.

Anonymous said...

God is love, it's the people that can become evil.

Anonymous said...

Dollar Falls Sharply Against Euro and Pound
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By JEREMY W. PETERS and CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: November 25, 2006

Anonymous said...

To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time when the world was powered by the black fuel and the deserts sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.

Without fuel they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.

On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.

Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything and became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past. A man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here in this blighted place that he learned to live again.

Anonymous said...

Last year I quit my job and decided to take 2 weeks in Nepal before starting a new gig. My flight was from NY to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Singapore, then Singapore to Nepal. Well, I worked and worked all throught the last week to finish things up, and on the last day worked 12 hours before rushing to the airport with my bags. I was so busy, I don't think I had crapped in over 24 hours. Eight hours and many beers later, we touched down in Frankfurt and I had about 40 mins before my connection, I walked through the terminal to a mens room and quickly found a stall. Of course, like any airport shitter, I had to use a lot of paper to clean off the seat (god I wish people could just be decent to the seats and not piss on them). Anyhow, once I squatted, a horrendously foul stew of solid, liquid and gas began spewing forth from my sphincter. It's was piles and piles of bad news that wouldn't stop, and with every clump came an accompanying overture of hisses, dribbles, and pops. After 2 or 3 minutes of steady delivery, I began to hear German guys saying something about my performance. I couldn't understand their language but the tone wrang through. "Oh my god, what did he eat, oh the smell is lethal, phew, that is the worst shit I've ever heard," and so on. Then I could hear other languages chime in. French and Russians alike were suffering together under the wrath of my bowels. It was like a UN Security Council decrying my disgusting dukey. I was so proud! After that, I washed my hands and went to Nepal.

Anonymous said...

Mark in San Diego said...
Agree - I said that this morning before reading your blog - dollar down, oil/gold up, foreclosures hit 1 million and up to records, and Iraq now in full scale civil war that even Bush can't deny.
-----------

The only good thing is that we can now blaime the Democrats!

Anonymous said...

does any one have data on when these ARMs are comming due?

Keith?

Anonymous said...

Things are really bad Keith, you should barricade yourself inside your flat with a gallon of rum and drink yourself to death. The lucky ones will die first.

Anonymous said...

To the American Death Squad pooper:

I laughed so hard I nearly fell off my chair. Most excellent. It's a good thing we Americans can show the rest of the world a thing or two about laying down a number.

Anonymous said...

The Falling Men.

Who were they? Falling like stricken angels. Were they ghosts of the past or ghosts of the future? They're ghosts, though, to be sure, airbrushed out of the highly polished 9/11 myth.

But the first thing I thought when I saw them, plunging live on television, I instantly thought of the Great Depression.

Because it had phantom jumpers too. Men who'd watched their personal economy and those of the people who'd put their trust in them evaporate like so much spilled gasoline on a hot patch of Texas blacktop. And what became of them, these proto-Eichmanns? Their names, like the dollars they bled, became dust.

When those of us who are old enough to remember 9/11 talk about the event, if discussion turns to jumpers the programmed social response is to say "oh my god - can you imagine how horrible it must have been, for them to have decided to take their own lives?" As though this somehow makes the argument that the buildings were cut down with thermite less convincing. Any way you slice it, it was a terrible day for everybody.

But the jumpers in the Great Depression had no smoking ruin of a building quaking beneath them. The had no caustic deep-tissue burns from liquefied iron girders or blunt force trauma from exploding masonry. They had no smoke inhalation issues, just numbers on a piece of paper. And those numbers were so evil that they made the men jump.

And that's what the invisible jumpers of 9/11 portend. A coming terrible day where we will not see the spectacular public suicides of the corporate middle oligarchy because they'll die behind unbreakable corporate office tower windows, their corporate masters saved the embarrassment by our futuristic building codes. Because the numbers on our balance sheets are turning evil again, but we've learned to let ourselves feign ignorance of the gritty reality of our past.

Anonymous said...

Knock it off everyone. Can't you see I'm too busy shopping this weekend?

Big Screen TV, Elmo, Total CW diamond jewelry, this years new cell phones, Reality TV DVDs (so real it's amazing), and Lasik and Botox for wife #2.

I'll worry about making those catch up deposits to my 401K and 529 plans AFTER X-mass.

Anonymous said...

I just hope "mere anarchy" is indeed loosened upon the world. I'm hoping for civil war; we'll start by killing all Democrats and leftists. Old-school genocide is needed.