> Nadeau: 01.06

Monday, January 16, 2006

One way of making it to end of the world

Dan:

Here’s a way we can scare up some cash to bring LToBS up to our original standards and maybe even realize my lifelong hope of living until the end of the world.

What we do, see, is create a mythical animal, one certain to capture the interest of all the gullible 12 year-olds out there with unrestricted access to the family laptop and guaranteed to be interested in extinct monsters, alien goblins and video games with sound tracks supposedly larded with filthy jokes recorded backwards.

All we’d have to do is get up a pay-per-click website showing a hazy photo of the supposed monster, maybe a mammal with a fish tail, or a captured example of the thing the Greeks called the Medusa. The 39.5-second digitally-recorded news clip obtained from an amateur camraman who would only identify himself as "qU33ny." It would have grim music oozing in the background.

We’d open the site up early in a Friday a.m., score what we could by midnight Sunday, shut it down before FBI offices open on Monday and slip away.

See example:
Finally, on the new Cryptomundo.com blog site, launched in October 2005, the biggest interest so far, across other media, was stimulated by the debate over the identity of the animal shown in the Name the Mystery Fishposting. Over 90,000 hits occurred in less than a day at the blog, and continued to cause a minor cryptozoology media event of its own through the end of the year.
As I understand it, PPC sites earn something like $5 per hit. Ninety thousand visits -- as the mystery fish site got – would net us some $450,000 in no time at all.

That would give us enough walkin'-around money to set up a legit operation of some sort somewhere (Finland, maybe) – or permanently emigrate to Argentina, whichever seemed wisest in the immediate aftermath.

I don’t know about you, but my $225,000 share would carry me through to at least the expected end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012. Maybe longer.

Who could ask for anything more?

Tom

posted by Tom Nadeau at 7:41 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 13, 2006

US economy, housing market

America's so-called first world superpower economy was only able to create in December a measly 12,000 jobs in goods producing industries, of which 77% are accounted for by wood products and fabricated metal products--the furniture and roofing metal of the housing boom that has now come to an end. (Emphasis added) US employment declined in machinery, electronic instruments, and motor vehicles and parts.

2,600 jobs were created in computer systems design and related services, depressing news for the several hundred thousand unemployed American computer and software engineers.

When manufacturing leaves a country, engineering, R&D, and innovation rapidly follow. Now that outsourcing has killed employment opportunities for US citizens and even General Motors and Ford are failing, US economic growth depends on how much longer the rest of the world will absorb our debt and finance our consumption.

Will the US Need an IMF Bail Out?
Paul Craig Robert
Counterpunch
January 10, 2006

posted by Tom Nadeau at 10:19 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Predictions always dicey proposisition

After cautioning Internet readers that making news predictions for 2006 is a mug’s game, BBC World Affairs editor John Simpson made news predictions for 2006. Here are some:
-- Osama bin Laden will be captured, but not alive.

-- The American press will finally be forced into a serious examination of the Bush administration's business links. Pressure on Vice-President Cheney will grow a good deal heavier and more embarrassing. As a result Bush’s polls will fall even lower. But the US economy will continue to do well.

-- Saddam Hussein will be convicted of whatever he is charged with, but will appeal, He’llll go on trial for another set of allegations, but he’ll never see the end of that proceeding. Be’lll be executed 30 days after his appeal on the first set of convictions is rejected.

-- This time next year we may still be talking about forming an Iraqi government. No surprises there.

posted by Tom Nadeau at 9:27 PM 0 comments

Sunday, January 01, 2006

Bush-Press: the thrill is gone

Bush in person always strikes me as the kind of guy who would ask a woman for a hand job at the end of a first date. He has days where he looks like she said yes, and days where the answer was no.

Today was one of his no days. He frowned, looking wronged, and grabbed the microphone. I pulled out my notebook . . .

A few minutes later, I felt like a hooker who's just blinked under a blanket with a prep-school virgin. Was that it? Is it over? It seemed to be; Bush was off the podium and slipping down the first line of the crowd, pumping hands for a minute and then promptly Snagglepussing toward the left exit.

Mike Tiabbi
Rolling Stone via Truthout
The Magical Victory Tour
December 16, 200

posted by Tom Nadeau at 1:58 PM 0 comments

A Bird Street potpourri

Mom was right: you are what you eat.

Read Sam Smith’s open letterr to the CIA

Michigan justice: LWOP’dUTETK

Why Pamela A. liked Agatha Christie mysteries.

Judge chucks Charbucks suit.

SLAPP suits, and more SLAPP suits.

And I’m not letting the Pentagon have my $.93, either! ... Hello? Hello?? What do you mean this line's been disconnected? If it's not connected, how's the NSA going to monitor my private conversations?

posted by Tom Nadeau at 11:41 AM 0 comments

God-fearing globalization

Invented in Japan by a Christian Baptist missionary in Japan and souped up by a Catholic Jesuit priest in China, rickshaws would now be banned as immoral in Calcutta, India by a communist politician who calls himself “Buddha” and wants to copy the successful image of the high tech capitalists in Bangalore.

The only losers are the 18,000 aging, alcoholic, homeless rickshaw “wallas” who must pay the rig-owners much of the maybe $2.65, tops, they pull in each day and piece off the corrupt cops with part of the rest of what they earn as the only providers of transportation to the desperately sick and poor have of reaching a hospital in the “City of Joy.”

Der Spiegel
The Bengali Buddha and the Rickshaw
December 30, 2005

posted by Tom Nadeau at 9:15 AM 0 comments