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By Darryl Mason

Investigations reveal that Dr Stanton ‘birthed’ his clone at his remote property and then fled Australia for twelve years exile in Thailand, where he grew his clone, after changing the sex, into the tall, healthy woman who is now experiencing government bureaucracy for the first time as she battles for that most basic piece of identification : a birth certificate.

The Full Story Is Here

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By Darryl Mason

One day, probably not too far away, depending on how many are killed or seriously injured in the tabloid predicted, hyped and hoped for riots at the G20 summit in London, this kind of information published by the UK Independent will be illegal to own, or share, or put into print :

One document, called “Guide to Public Order Situations”, explains how to breach lines of riot police using a “snow plough” human formation; throw rape alarms to make it hard for the police to give orders; resist baton and horse charges using nets; and “de-arrest” seized protesters.

The document in full is here, and the PDF is here.

It reads reasonable enough. They’re not advocating violence, but organised resistance. Still, there seems to be a growing number of ‘anarchists’ getting plenty of media coverage in England who are demanding urban warfare in the streets of London this week. How many of them are professional agent provocateurs?

The British government and its militiarised police force have a slew of new ‘anti-terror’ legislation they’re getting ready to introduce. A blood-soaked explosion of violence in London will provide the very excuse they need to justify a crackdown not on Islamic terrorists, but ‘urban extremists’, a descriptor which already appears to include anti-fascists, anti-globalisationists and animal rights activists.

Curiously, those fighting (non-violently for now) to stop global warming do not seem to be causing as much concern for the British government or its police as those who are opposed to global government, the bankrupting of a country and the maniacal propping up of fraudulent bankers and the mega-wealthy.

Scenes from the APEC protests in Sydney, in late 2007 :

Supposed anarchists (on the right) watch as the freshly geared-up ‘anti-riot and public order’
police units arrive at the back of the main APEC march.

The riot squad arrived, expecting to find chaos that needed to be contained, but the masked, supposed anarchist group were kept from joining the main body of the march by a human blockade formed by other protesters who suspected they were agent provocateurs. There was no riot, and few arrests (that stuck).

I am proud to say that I was one of those who stepped in to keep the supposed anarchists from getting in amongst the many elderly people and young families marching , and thereby giving the police a reason to wade into the crowd, and test our their brand spanking new water cannon.

The spectacularly tabloid-media hyped ‘APEC Riot!’ did not become reality, because of non-violent intervention. Bizarrely enough, police came over and demanded I and others get out of the way of the ski-masked anarchist group because “they have a right to march, too”. We refused to move out of the way, and mass arrests, property damage and injuries were avoided.

We also took the opportunity to tell the three dozen or so international media reporters and photographers who were hanging around, waiting for the promised riot that day, and the hundreds of tourists and passers-by watching on, that the group we refused to allow to join the march were suspected agent provocateurs, there to cause trouble, and that the police were demanding we allow the ski-masked, expensively dressed ‘anarchists’ to join the march. Surreal.

The public got very involved and started shouting questions at the police about why they would want ski-masked anarchists to join the peaceful march. Hundreds of people not involved with the march got a quick education in how peaceful marches can turn into horrific riots. When the riot squad turned up, in force, dozens of helmeted, baton-ready, body-padded police, with dogs, and the brand new water cannon, the ‘anarchists’ quickly packed up their very expensive, professionally printed signs and banners and left the scene. Even though they were still wearing ski-masks, not one police officer out of the many dozen standing around, followed the ‘anarchists’ to make sure they didn’t start trouble elsewhere in the city. Strange, don’t you think?

And you’d think at least one of the more than 40 mainstream media journalists there that day, who found the expected riot had been disabled, would find at least a few seconds of a story in such an unusual occurrence - protesters stopping ski-masked, suspiciously well-equipped anarchists from joining a peaceful march and the police demanding the human blockade be broken to let the anarchists through, right? Wrong.

Not one of the newspapers, current affairs shows or news wire agencies there that day even mentioned it.

Anti-anti-globalisation protesters at APEC.

More From The Orstrahyun On The APEC Protests And Police Tactics Here

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Australian economist, Alan Koehler :

….world manufacturing is now collapsing at three times the speed in did in the early 1930s — “the damage that occurred from late 1929 to early 1931 has been packed into six months”.Japan’s exports fell 49% in January, and its industrial output has fallen 31%, 24% in Spain, 19% in Germany, 17% in Brazil, 13% in Russia and by 11% in the UK and US. This has all happened since last September, when Lehman Brothers went under.

Everyone who has influence at the G20 summit seems to be betting on a fast fall leading to a fast recovery. It’s exactly the same kind of wild betting that began the global financial crisis.

Even before the bitter fighting to restructure the world economy and global trade really gets underway, one thing is most certainly clear : China Wins.

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A few months ago, noticing the weird and alarming frequency of decaptitations appearing in the news, I did a Google News Alert for stories that included that word. It was shocking to open Google Mail each morning to find two or three or sometimes seven or twelve stories about humans cutting each other’s heads off, all over the world.

I actually started to fear opening Gmail because I knew there would be Google Alerts in that box, and more fresh horrors of than I can handle before a fourth coffee. So I canned that Google Alert, and slept easier. Maybe I should do Google Alerts for “skipping in sunshine beams” and “happy puppies” instead…

But decapitation stories continue to hit the headlines, and few stories are more horrific than this one, from Boston :

A police officer who answered a 911 call to a suburban home in Boston watched on as a 23-year-old man decapitated his own five-year-old sister.

Kerby Revelus, 23, was shot dead after beheading his sister Bianca on her fifth birthday, fatally stabbing his 17-year-old sister Samantha and wounding his nine-year-old sister Sarafina.

Below is the face of a police officer at the scene of this horror. It’s a screen grab from a video still. Is this the face of a man who just witnessed the decapitation of a five year old girl, in his own Boston neighbourhood?

How can any cop, any person, be prepared to walk into such a terrible reality?

The Killing Of America continues, murder spree after walk-in massacre :

A lone gunman burst into a North Carolina nursing home Sunday morning and started “shooting everything,” barging into the rooms of terrified patients, sparing some from his rampage without explanation while killing seven residents….

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Tom Toles nails the moment when the War On Terror becomes the War On Us :

More Toles Cartoons And Videos Here

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……the horror…..

By Darryl Mason

Netflix (DVDs mailed to your home) is doing king hell business, mostly because so many Americans are realising they can no longer afford to go to the cinema. Some users, however, would be better of just buying discount DVDs in the first place.

But Netflix, like the bounty of very borrowable books to be found in libraries, also has its downside.

There are certain movies that become like certain books, you have a copy, it sits around in your eye line for months, but you can never muster the enthusiasm to get into it. And there it stays, taunting you, and you soon begin to hate it being there, anywhere in the house, reminding you of the fact that you once actually thought, ‘Yeah, I would love to get into this, what a great way to spend a Saturday night at home’.

Disgust and then shame usually follows the initial hatred of that book or DVD you can never bring yourself to read, or watch.

The couple in the following story are in well in tune with those emotions :

“I had ‘English Patient’ for more than six months,” Mr. Marino confessed. “It was an insane amount of time.” He recalled starting the same discussion with his wife, night after night, as they flipped among the five DVDs from their Netflix subscription. “Do you want to watch this? Do you want to watch this? Do you want to watch ‘English Patient?’ ”

“No,” was the response he got.

Soon, Mr. Marino could not even get the full title out of his mouth before it was shot out of the sky like the English Patient himself.

“It was like, ‘Eng — —’ ”

“No.”

“It just sat. My wife thought it would be too depressing. I’m like, ‘When are you going to be in the mood to watch it?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Eventually, it was returned unwatched.

The English Patient is the Ulysses of DVDs.

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If James Petras is right, and a global depression leads to hundreds of millions of workers becoming unemployed, what will the major nations do with all those “excess workers”?

Hundreds of millions of workers with nothing to do eventually get busy doing things like starting revolutions, until wars intervene. Well, that’s how it used to be.

Unlike World War I & II, they cannot depopulate by sending us in the millions to die in some foreign field. Not this time. The jig is up. From 7 year olds to 70 year olds, we all know too much now about the fake realities of global conflict, and the mostly meaningless reasons why so many of our past generations lost their lives fighting other people who were just as poor as they were.

Now, in this generation of instant world communication and information exchange, finally, some - or at least enough - of the truth has escaped and the old tricks and japes simply do not work like they once (so very reliably) did.

James Petras :

All the idols of capitalism over the past three decades crashed. The assumptions and presumptions, paradigm and prognosis of indefinite progress under liberal free market capitalism have been tested and have failed.

We are living the end of an entire epoch.

Experts everywhere witness the collapse of the US and world financial system, the absence of credit for trade and the lack of financing for investment.

A world depression, in which upward of a quarter of the world’s labor force will be unemployed, is looming.

The biggest decline in trade in recent world history – down 40% year to year – defines the future.

The immanent bankruptcies of the biggest manufacturing companies in the capitalist world haunt Western political leaders.

The ‘market’ as a mechanism for allocating resources and the government of the US as the ‘leader’ of the global economy have been discredited. (Financial Times, March 9, 2009)

All the assumptions about ‘self-stabilizing markets’ are demonstrably false and outmoded. The rejection of public intervention in the market and the advocacy of supply-side economics have been discredited even in the eyes of their practitioners.

You can read the full, vastly comprehensive essay by James Petras here.

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Despite months of carefully focused disinformation, and outright lies, Israel now admits that its official figures for the world-shocking carnage they unleashed in Gaza are almost exactly the same as claims made by Palestinians throughout the three weeks of brutal massacres.

What Israel and Palestine disagree on is how many of the dead were civilians or militants. Basically, if you heard your neighbours getting shot dead by Israeli troops and you rushed out with a gun to defend your own family, then you were a ‘guerrilla’ or ‘militant’ :

IDF’s survey of the casualties in Gaza found that 1,370 Palestinians were killed in the campaign…,Of these, some 600 were guerrillas and another 320 were unidentified and designated simply as “unaffiliated”.

Palestinian estimates for total number of dead are broadly consistent with the IDF’s figures. But the two sides differ sharply over the number of civilian casualties, with Palestinian estimates suggesting that more than half of those who died were innocent bystanders.

There is a crucial difference in how the two sides classify casualties. The IDF defines anyone under the age of 15 as a child and admits that 189 were killed. The Palestinian authorities list anyone under the age of 18 as a child.

Another point of contention is over how to identify the 200 Palestinian policemen who were killed in the first day of the fighting during an Israeli air raid on a graduation ceremony in Gaza City. Israel categorises them as Hamas fighters on the grounds that Hamas governs Gaza and controls the police.

The strike on the police graduation ceremony was a purposeful slaughter of potential fighters against the invasion that followed. A pre-emptive strike conducted in the full knowledge of the bloodshed that was to follow.

The slaughter of so many children, some executed at point blank range, makes the whole horrorshow sound like some kind of demonic human sacrifice. Many Palestinians believe this is exactly what it was. How exactly would you go about convincing them otherwise?

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An actual outbreak of mass hysteria in Nicaragua. But what does it mean?

A total of 43 people have reportedly fallen ill with what is known locally as grisi siknis (”crazy sickness”). Doctors, anthropologists and sociologists who have studied previous cases of mass hysteria – also known as mass psychogenic illness – have so far failed to come up with any clear explanation for the phenomenon.

Not all mass hysteria is the same :

The first group can be summarised as anxiety symptoms: tremors, shaking, difficulty breathing and feelings of suffocation. The second type is referred to as a dissociative symptom: the person does not recognise where he or she is, seems to be in a trance, looks as if they are in a daze, etc.

Younger individuals, and females, are more likely to be affected.

The kind of mass hysteria that breaks out depends on location :

Dissociative symptoms seem to be more common in less industrialised societies, whereas the pure anxiety symptoms are more common in industrialised ones. The crucial point is that symptoms appear to be contagious. Usually, the sufferers have had a high level of communal stress.

No explanation, no proof of causes, and no known cure.

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Government posters telling Londoners they must spy on their friends and neighbours, and act pre-emptively by dobbing them into the cops for “suspicious behaviour”, have reached insane levels of fear-mongering :

A Bomb Won’t Go Off Here Because Weeks Before A Shopper Reported Someone Studying The CCTV Cameras….Don’t Rely On Others. If You Suspect It, Report It

Cory Doctorow :

Even worse, though, is the idea that you should report your neighbors to the police for looking at the creepy surveillance technology around them. This is the first step in making it illegal to debate whether the surveillance state is a good or bad thing.

The British authorities are bent on driving fear into the hearts of Britons: fear of terrorists, immigrants, pedophiles, children, knives… And once people are afraid enough, they’ll write government a blank check to expand its authority without sense or limit.

The mistake is to assume that a surveillance state actually cares what the public thinks. Debate is something to distract those few who want to express genuine concern about what is happening.

Doctorow asked Boing Boing to remix the poster and its message, and they delivered :

More remixes here

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Grand thinker, and global warming ideology critic, Freeman Dyson and his wife of six decades sit down to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Again :

There was a print of Einstein above the television. And then there was Al Gore below him, telling of the late Roger Revelle, a Harvard scientist who first alerted the undergraduate Gore to how severe the climate’s problems would become. Gore warned of the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the vanishing glaciers of Peru and “off the charts” carbon levels in the air. “The so-called skeptics” say this “seems perfectly O.K.,” Gore said, and Imme looked at her husband. She is even slighter than he is, a pretty wood sprite in running shoes. “How far do you allow the oceans to rise before you say, This is no good?” she asked Dyson.“When I see clear evidence of harm,” he said.

“Then it’s too late,” she replied. “Shouldn’t we not add to what nature’s doing?”

“The costs of what Gore tells us to do would be extremely large,” Dyson said. “By restricting CO2 you make life more expensive and hurt the poor. I’m concerned about the Chinese.”

“They’re the biggest polluters,” Imme replied.

“They’re also changing their standard of living the most, going from poor to middle class. To me that’s very precious.”

The film continued with Gore predicting violent hurricanes, typhoons and tornados. “How in God’s name could that happen here?” Gore said, talking about Hurricane Katrina. “Nature’s been going crazy.”“That is of course just nonsense,” Dyson said calmly. “With Katrina, all the damage was due to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to build adequate dikes. To point to Katrina and make any clear connection to global warming is very misleading.”

Now came Arctic scenes, with Gore telling of disappearing ice, drunken trees and drowning polar bears. “Most of the time in history the Arctic has been free of ice,” Dyson said. “A year ago when we went to Greenland where warming is the strongest, the people loved it.”

“They were so proud,” Imme agreed. “They could grow their own cabbage.”

The film ended. “I think Gore does a brilliant job,” Dyson said. “For most people I’d think this would be quite effective. But I knew Roger Revelle. He was definitely a skeptic. He’s not alive to defend himself.”

“All my friends say how smart and farsighted Al Gore is,” she said.

“He certainly is a good preacher,” Dyson replied. “Forty years ago it was fashionable to worry about the coming ice age. Better to attack the real problems like the extinction of species and overfishing. There are so many practical measures we could take.”

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Time magazine recently ran a comprehensive but mostly ignored special on The Future.

The array of writers and tech experts contributing was excellent. One of the many highlights was a piece by author William Gibson, explaining why widespread chipping of the human race will never become a reality :

….the chip is likely to shortly be as quaint an object as the vacuum tube or the slide rule.

From the viewpoint of bioengineering, a silicon chip is a large and rather complex shard of glass. Inserting a silicon chip into the human brain involves a certain irreducible inelegance of scale. It’s scarcely more elegant, relatively, than inserting a steam engine into the same tissue. It may be technically possible, but why should we even want to attempt such a thing?

I suspect that mainstream medicine and the military will both find reasons for attempting such a thing, at least in the short run, and that medicine’s reasons may at least serve to counter some disability, acquired or inherited. If I were to lose my eyes, I would quite eagerly submit to some sort of surgery that promised a video link to the optic nerves. (And once there, why not insist on full-channel cable and a Web browser?) The military’s reasons for chip insertion would probably have something to do with what I suspect is the increasingly archaic job description of “fighter pilot,” or with some other aspect of telepresent combat, in which weapons in the field are remotely controlled by distant operators. At least there’s still a certain macho frisson to be had in the idea of embedding a tactical shard of glass in your head, and crazier things, really, have been done in the name of king and country.

But if we do it at all, I doubt we’ll be doing it for very long, as various models of biological and nanomolecular computing are looming rapidly in view. Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain’s supposed to. Get all the functions and features you want, without that clunky-junky 20th century hardware thing. You really don’t need complicated glass to crunch numbers, and computing goo probably won’t be all that difficult to build. (The trickier aspect here may be turning data into something brain cells can understand. If you knew how to get brain cells to manage pull-down menus, you’d probably know everything you needed to know about brain cells.)

Our hardware, I think, is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware. Our hardware is evolving at the speed of light, while we are still the product, for the most part, of unskilled labor.

Gibson continues his argument here against a future where human chipping is either desirable or mandatory. It’s a solid enough argument. Chipping is vastly impractical, and the age when we view computers as something separate from our physical bodies - mechanical versus flesh - or even something outside our constant daily reality is quickly coming to an end.

Some of the other articles from the Time magazine special on The Future :

Bill Gates: Will Frankenfood Feed the World?

Bruce Sterling: Will Cybercriminals Run the World?

Will Cybersex Be Better Than Real Sex?

Will I Still Be Addicted To Video Games?

Will My PC Be Smarter Than I Am?

Will Robots Rise Up and Demand Their Rights?

What Will Replace The Internet?

Is Technology Moving Too Fast?

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The full quotes and writers’ names can be read here, but these words are enough to remind you why your local library, as long as it stays open, remains a central and vital part of your community, and continuing education :

“In my school library nobody spoke above a whisper and there was an open ?re, can you believe it. I used to sit toasting my toes and resting the back of my head on the collected novels of DH Lawrence. Libraries are sort of semi-sacred places really, I respect the life-giving opportunities that they o?er.”

“Everything about libraries is perfect in theory: they are a visible embodiment of the importance of books. Many of them look fabulous and loom over their surrounding locations, as if to say, ‘This is what really matters.’ Inside, they smell terri?c, the ?nest sort of perfume comes o? collections of old books, especially on a warm summer’s day. They are great places for daydreaming too – you can discover books you didn’t even know you needed and waste time under the cover of being productive.”
“…the discovery of my local library at eight years old was like opening the portal to a secret garden. I spent most of my summer holidays there – my mum just dropped me o? with a packed lunch on the way to work – and being the only brown kid in the area it was also a shelter from the boots and the brickbats.”

“I think the idea of a rigidly silent library is dying out, which is a shame. If there is nowhere you can go where silence is imposed, the psychological e?ect on our generation will be serious. There’s something damaging about living in an environment that has constant background noise.”

“I grew up in a small Scottish mining town called Cardenden that had a library but no dedicated book shop so as a boy I haunted the place. Aged 12, I couldn’t go and see the ?lm of The Godfather but nobody stopped me borrowing the book, so books to me were like forbidden knowledge, stu? that the grown-ups didn’t want me to have.”

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Director James Cameron on why you shouldn’t get your hopes up for a real-life Humans Vs Robots waar, and why he stopped making Terminator movies :

It was….born out of the science fiction movies and literature I grew up with. For the most part, they were warnings—about technology, about science, about the military and the government. You couldn’t escape those themes or the fear of nuclear holocaust.
The idea of a hit man from the future trying to change past events was certainly not new. What I thought was cutting-edge was deciding to not have the Terminator be a guy in a robot suit. That’s how it was typically done. But a flesh-covered endoskeleton? That was new.

I don’t think anything resembling The Terminator is really going to happen. There certainly aren’t going to be genocidal wars waged by machines a few generations from now.

The stories function more on a symbolic level, and that’s why people key into them. They’re about us fighting our own tendency toward dehumanization. When a cop has no compassion, when a shrink has no empathy, they’ve become machines in human form. Technology is changing the whole fabric of social interaction. We’re absorbing our machines in a symbiotic way, evolving to become one with our own devices, and that’s going to continue indefinitely.

I kind of turned my back on the Terminator world when there was early talk about a third film. I’d evolved beyond it. I don’t regret that, but I have to live with the consequence, which is that I keep seeing it resurrected.

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Ways of weaponising YouTube and SMS have probably already been roundtabled and workshopped by those whose job it is is to dream up new ways to kill and disable human beings, and they probably came up with nothing outside of variations of a strobing screen that would only deal with epileptics and former hardcore Ecstasy users.

But the case of the killer mobile phone text message, of brain exploding death, will no doubt inspire weapons makers to all the possibilities of Assassination By SMS.

If only it were possible :

The Egyptian Government has sought to dispel rumours that a mobile phone text message “from unknown foreign quarters” is spreading around the country and killing those who receive it.

The extraordinary move by Egypt’s health and interior ministries follows press reports that an SMS containing a special combination of numbers killed a man in the town of Mallawi south of Cairo.

“He died vomiting blood, followed by stroke, shortly after he received a message from an unknown phone number,” the Egyptian Gazette reported.

“The number begins with the symbol (+) and ends with (111),” it said.

An “official security source” was quoted by the official MENA news agency as denying that those who receive the SMS “get splitting headaches followed by brain haemorrhage that leads to death.”

It’s a hoax, apparently. For now at least.

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In a national park outside Sydney, cockatoos gather informally to contemplate world domination.

More Photos Here

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By Darryl Mason

A games reviewer explains why scoring a “level up” in a fictional reality is better, and more satisfying, than achieving a minor success in the real one (excerpts) :

The reason anyone plays videogames is because they give you crisp, identifiable progress. Games are the only way you can level up….levelling up is a computer’s way of saying “I like you - you’re all right”. It’s a warm justification for all your sunken hours, and a winking invitation from the television to bring the duvet downstairs.

Life is slow, in comparison. You can spend seven years of your life studying for a qualification. And even if you get the top grade, there’s no immediate benefit - it’s not like you can jump higher, or store more ghosts in your vacuum cleaner.

It’s not all about having a numbered level. There are other ways to level up: getting a new high score, boosting your car’s top speed, inventing Buddhism, or injecting yourself with a red liquid that allows you to fire bees at your enemies - all tried and tested methods of keeping you interested.

And life, well, it just doesn’t bother.

…these unthinking advocates of real life are fighting a losing battle.

What happens to reality when reality can no longer compete with beyond realistic games that are wii-ed into our physical bodies for delivering comforting satisfaction, adrenalin rushes and assured feelings of accomplishment?

How much longer can reality compete, and still win?

As long as love cannot be artificially replicated.

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Supposedly one of the primary discussions for the coming G20 conference of world leaders will be the introduction of a world currency. Winding down, eliminating, the US Dollar as the reserve currency for global trading will be the first priority of that process.

Headlines from the Wall Street Journal :

Foreign Capital Flees the U.S.

Outflow Hits Record $148.9 Billion as China
Foreigners withdrew funds from U.S. assets in record amounts in January, but China continued to add to its stockpile of U.S. government debt.

Already the largest foreign creditor to the U.S. government, China raised its Treasury holdings another $12.2 billion in January, taking its total holdings to $739.6 billion, according to the latest data from the Treasury Department released Monday. China held $492 billion in Treasurys in January 2008.

Foreigners sold a net $60.9 billion in long-dated U.S. securities in January….

China isn’t happy. They don’t want to be stuck with almost a trillion in US dollars that are quickly losing value. And they’re worried about the safety of their “American assets”.

How long before the US Dollar hits runaway inflation? 2010? Or June this year?

Nature Of Capitalism Will Be Altered By Long, Deep World Recession

45% Of World’s Wealth Evaporates

Global Manufacturing Hit By Monumental, Rapid Plunge

US Trade Exports Smashed By Staggering 49% Drop

UN Considers Push To Remove US Dollar As World’s Reserve Currency

The Urban World War : Military Forces In UK, US, Canada Train To Battle Citizens In City Streets

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