blatant green bias

[click image]

.

I thought for purposes of steadying our nerves over the determined effort to downplay the nukequake effects that I would focus in a jot on Christopher Busby, since he seems to be the only one out there with a willingness to sound lucid and keep it up.

And in any case, this external irradiation is not the problem. The problem is internal irradiation. The Iodine-131 is not in the whole body, it is in the thyroid gland and attached to the blood cells: hence the thyroid cancer and the leukaemia. And there is a whole list of internal radioactive elements that bind chemically to DNA, from Strontium-90 to Uranium. These give massive local doses to the DNA and to the tissues where they end up. The human body is not a piece of wire that you can apply physics to. The concept of dose which Wade uses cannot be used for internal exposures. This has been conceded by the ICRP itself in its publications. And in an interview with me in Stockholm in 2009, Dr Jack Valentin, the ex-Scientific Secretary of the ICRP conceded this, and also made the statement that the ICRP risk model, the one used by all governments to assess the outcome of accidents like Fukushima, was unsafe and could not be used.

The guy is obviously a shill for Gaia, and something of a maniac for plain speech....

.
love, 99
.

got brains?

[click image]

.

I could just edit the snot outta this piece and you'd die laughing.

There is no health risk from consuming milk with extremely low levels of radiation, like those found in Washington state and California, experts said Thursday, echoing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"When we have a disaster like we've had with a nuclear power plant in Japan, we're probably going to find things that are truly not a public health risk [right along with those that truly are], but I think it's very difficult for the public to assimilate this information and understand the risks [so please don't explain them in public]," said Dr. Wally Curran, a radiation oncologist and head of Emory University's Winship Cancer Center.

The federal agency said Wednesday it was increasing its nationwide monitoring of radiation in milk, precipitation, drinking water, and other outlets. It already tracks radiation in those potential exposure routes through an existing network of stations across the country.

Results from screening samples of milk taken in the past week in Spokane, Washington, and in San Luis Obispo County, California, detected radioactive iodine, or iodine-131, at a level 5,000 times lower than the limit set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, officials said.

At that level, a person would have to drink 1,000 liters of milk to receive the same amount of radiation as a chest X-ray, said Dr. James Cox, radiation oncologist at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center. [Except the radiation from the milk stays in the body well over a thousand times longer than that from a chest X-ray and they stopped giving regular chest X-rays decades ago because the accumulation was very hazardous to your health.]

The I-131 isotope has a very short half-life of about eight days, the EPA said, so the level detected in milk and milk products is expected to drop relatively quickly. [Except if nobody caps it off in Japan, otherwise it just keeps coming.]

"The good news about iodine is, it has a short half-life," said Curran. "It doesn't dwell in any biologic system [except if you want to nitpick about your thyroid], be it an adult, a child, a cow, for any significant period of time, and at those levels there's no evidence that there's any medical significance."

Radiation gets into the milk because it falls on grass eaten by cows. The milk does not itself absorb radiation. [So when we measure the iodine in it, we go measure it in the cow paddies on that glowing green grass and extrapolate from that.]

FDA senior scientist Patricia Hansen also said the findings are "minuscule" compared to what people experience every day.

Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said tests confirmed the milk is safe to drink.

"This morning I spoke with the chief advisers for both the EPA and the FDA and they confirmed that these levels are minuscule and are far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children," Gregoire said in a statement.

"According to them, a pint of milk at these levels would expose an individual to less radiation than would a five-hour airplane flight." [And yer kid rides in airplanes for five hours radically more often than he drinks milk, right?]

Similarly, the California Department of Public Health reassured residents that the levels do not pose a threat. [Go back to sleep.]

"When radioactive material is spread through the atmosphere, it drops to the ground and gets in the environment. When cows consume grass, hay, feed, and water, radioactivity will be processed and become part of the milk we drink. However, the amounts are so small they pose no threat to public health," the department said. [We checked the paddies.]

At least 15 states have reported radioisotopes from Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in air or water or both. No states have recommended that residents take potassium iodide, a salt that protects the thyroid gland from radioactive iodine.

Iodine-131 has been found in Eastern states from Florida to Massachusetts as well as in Western states like Oregon, Colorado, and California, according to sensors and officials in those states.

None of the levels poses a risk to public health, they said.

At high levels [at ANY levels], the isotope focuses on and accumulates in a person's thyroid gland, Curran said. A medical test for thyroid health involves a person ingesting iodine-131 and undergoing a nuclear scan to examine the gland. [Congratulations! You no longer have to drink the iodine first!]

The Japanese plant has been leaking radiation since it was damaged in a tsunami that followed a massive earthquake March 11 [and so has been here sliming Californians for approximately two weeks and yer still not dead so shaddap.]

I could.

.
love, 99
.

it's just a ride

[click image]

.

And a choice...

Six of the Environmental Protection Agency's 12 California sensors — including the three closest to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo — are sending data with "anomalies" to the agency's laboratory in Montgomery, Ala., said Mike Bandrowski, manager of the EPA's radiation program.

The problem delays from 30 minutes to several hours the updating of a database that would be critical for warning the public in case of a sudden radiation danger from air wafting to the United States from a foreign country, for example, or from a radiation leak at a domestic nuclear facility.

The lag has not been a concern during the Japanese nuclear crisis because the minuscule amounts of radiation that have reached California have posed no threat to human health, and the plume of irradiated air from Japan is so widespread that other equipment from Washington to Los Angeles has been able to monitor it in real time, Bandrowski said.

...

Without immediate information from RadNet, state and local emergency managers would be dependent on the private owners of nuclear power facilities to alert them in the first hours of a dangerous radiation leak from a domestic source.

"I believe the utilities monitor the sensors; they're good about reporting things," said David McIntyre, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees nuclear reactors in the U.S. He added that federal regulations require nuclear plant operators to report small problems that could lead to a release of radiation, so it's unlikely such an event would come as a surprise.

Right now.

.
love, 99
.

it's going to be a long time gone

[click image]

.

Evidence for a diversified sea-based economy among North American inhabitants dating from 12,200 to 11,400 years ago is emerging from three sites on California's Channel Islands.

Reporting in the March 4 issue of Science, a 15-member team led by University of Oregon and Smithsonian Institution scholars describes the discovery of scores of stemmed projectile points and crescents dating to that time period. The artifacts are associated with the remains of shellfish, seals, geese, cormorants and fish.

Funded primarily by grants from the National Science Foundation, the team also found thousands of artifacts made from chert, a flint-like rock used to make projectile points and other stone tools.

Some of the intact projectiles are so delicate that their only practical use would have been for hunting on the water, said Jon Erlandson, professor of anthropology and director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History at the University of Oregon. He has been conducting research on the islands for more than 30 years.

"This is among the earliest evidence of seafaring and maritime adaptations in the Americas, and another extension of the diversity of Paleoindian economies," Erlandson said. "The points we are finding are extraordinary, the workmanship amazing. They are ultra thin, serrated and have incredible barbs on them. It's a very sophisticated chipped-stone technology." He also noted that the stemmed points are much different than the iconic fluted points left throughout North America by Clovis and Folsom peoples who hunted big game on land.

The artifacts were recovered from three sites that date to the end of the Pleistocene epoch on Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands, which in those days were connected as one island off the California coast. Sea levels then were 50 to 60 meters (about 160-200 feet) below modern levels. Rising seas have since flooded the shorelines and coastal lowlands where early populations would have spent most of their time.

Erlandson and his colleagues have focused their search on upland features such as springs, caves, and chert outcrops that would have drawn early maritime peoples into the interior. Rising seas also may have submerged evidence of even older human habitation of the islands.

The newly released study focuses on the artifacts and animal remains recovered, but the implications for understanding the peopling of the Americas may run deeper.

The technologies involved suggest that these early islanders were not members of the land-based Clovis culture, Erlandson said. No fluted points have been found on the islands. Instead, the points and crescents are similar to artifacts found in the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau areas, including pre-Clovis levels at Paisley Caves in eastern Oregon that are being studied by another UO archaeologist, Dennis Jenkins.

Last year, Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones, archaeologists at New York's Hamilton College who study sites in the Great Basin, argued that stemmed and Clovis point technologies were separate, with the stemmed points originating from Pacific Coast populations and not, as conventional wisdom holds, from the Clovis people who moved westward from the Great Plains. Erlandson and colleagues noted that the Channel Island points are also broadly similar to stemmed points found early sites around the Pacific Rim, from Japan to South America.

Six years ago, Erlandson proposed that Late Pleistocene sea-going people may have followed a "kelp highway" stretching from Japan to Kamchatka, along the south coast of Beringia and Alaska, then southward down the Northwest Coast to California. Kelp forests are rich in seals, sea otters, fish, seabirds, and shellfish such as abalones and sea urchins.

"The technology and seafaring implications of what we've found on the Channel Islands are magnificent," said study co-author Torben C. Rick, curator of North American Archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution. "Some of the paleo-ecological and subsistence implications are also very important. These sites indicate very early and distinct coastal and island subsistence strategies, including harvest of red abalones and other shellfish and fish dependent on kelp forests, but also the exploitation of larger pinnipeds and waterfowl, including an extinct flightless duck.

"This combination of unique hunting technologies found with marine mammal and migratory waterfowl bones provides a very different picture of the Channel Islands than what we know today, and indicates very early and diverse maritime life ways and foraging practices," Rick said. "What is so interesting is that not only do the data we have document some of the earliest marine mammal and bird exploitation in North America, but they show that very early on New World coastal peoples were hunting such animals and birds with sophisticated technologies that appear to have been refined for life in coastal and aquatic habitats."

The stemmed points found on the Channel Islands range from tiny to large, probably indicating that they were used for hunting a variety of animals.

"We think the crescents were used as transverse projectile points, probably for hunting birds. Their broad stone tips, when attached to a dart shaft provided a stone age shotgun-approach to hunting birds in flight," Erlandson said. "These are very distinctive artifacts, hundreds of which have been found on the Channel Islands over the years, but rarely in a stratified context, he added. Often considered to be between 8,000 and 10,000 years old in California, "we now have crescents between 11,000 and 12,000 years old, some of them associated with thousands of bird bones."

The next challenge, Erlandson and Rick noted, is to find even older archaeological sites on the Channel Islands, which might prove that a coastal migration contributed to the initial peopling of the Americas, now thought to have occurred two to three millennia earlier.

.
love, 99
.

were the birds going for them?

[click image]

.

That's an indication right there.

Millions of dead fish were found Tuesday floating in a Southern California marina. Boaters awakened to find a carpet of small silvery fish surrounding their vessels, said Staci Gabrielli, marine coordinator for King Harbor Marina on the Los Angeles County coast.

California Fish and Game officials believe the fish are anchovies and sardines.

Experts had yet to determine what happened, but Gabrielli said the fish appeared to have moved into the harbor to escape a red tide, a naturally occurring bloom of toxic algae that can poison fish or starve them of oxygen.

High winds overnight might then have trapped the fish in the harbor, crushing them against a wall where they used up the oxygen and suffocated, she said.

The dead fish were so thick in some places that Garbrielli said boats can't get out of the harbor.

When I lived in Stinson, whenever the sardines were running it was Wagnerian out on the lagoon. Amazing.

.
love, 99
.

i'd so hoped that if i stayed quiet this just wouldn't happen

[click image]

.

Of course, that's just dreaming, just being superstitious, just dumb.

.

And, while I'm on the subject, I become exasperated with Max Keiser over this stuff... this gold stuff. I'd've been vexed over the big Buy Silver gig, too, except for the notion of there being a chance to tap dance on JPMorgue's grave, which outweighed my concerns over heavy mining activity anywhere. I know we need it for lots of things beside money, but money is the most of it, and we DON'T need that. We only agree to THINK we need that. HUGE difference.

He and Stacy carry on like they're environmentally-concerned, but also push gold so hard even I start groping around for what remnants of jewelry I have tucked away somewhere. You can't push gold that hard and not know that moonscaping vast tracks of pristine planet is the desired result. Yes, yes, you think it is the preservation or enhancement of your security. And you might well think that, because it obscures the ugly truth.

Right now I'm listening to him discuss how America is exporting inflation with Catherine Austin Fitts, who is a pretty damn cool lady. Maybe you'd like to join me?

.
love, 99
.

a holdout from when we counted

[click image]

.

And SCOTUS will take care of it.

The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that merchants can no longer ask for the ZIP codes of customers who make purchases with credit cards because such requests violate a state consumer-protection law.

The high court's unanimous decision, which says a ZIP code can be used as "personal identification information," overturned two lower court decisions tossing out the lawsuit. It delivered retailers in California a setback that an attorney for one national chain said would likely lead to additional lawsuits.

The decision Thursday came in a lawsuit filed against Williams-Sonoma Inc., whose clerk asked Jessica Pineda for her ZIP code several years ago. Pineda sued the home retailer in June 2008, saying it violated the credit card law and her privacy.

Don't you even begin to doubt it.

.
love, 99
.

people who clear under $900 a month have to pay $100 to do it

[click image]

.

And that's IF they can get it together to pay the FasTrak fees in a lump every month. Otherwise it's $120.

When drivers in Greece began refusing to pay road tolls it was seen as a bit of good-natured defiance, born of economy necessity.

When Apostolos Gletsos, mayor of Stylida, took control of a municipal bulldozer and broke his way through the barriers of a toll booth, civil disobedience took on an altogether different hue.

"What I did was within the realm of my duties to defend the legal rights of citizens. I don't regret it and would do it again," said the mayor, who was arrested and charged.

"Locals in Stylida are country people and they should be able to bypass tolls for free."

Until now Gletsos was better known for his roles in seamy TV soap operas.

But his antics on the main highway 130 miles north of Athens have turned him into a national hero as Greeks protesting against unprecedented austerity measures take "social justice" into their own hands.

Supermarkets are also being confronted by shoppers refusing to pay bills as cuts bite, recession deepens and unemployment worsens in a country that narrowly averted bankruptcy thanks to a £110bn bailout from the EU and IMF.

As many as 600,000 motorists refused to pay at toll stations over the Christmas period.

Resistance is expected to mount in the coming weeks following a landmark meeting by anti-toll campaigners in the central Greek town of Lamia tomorrow.

"Our roads should be controlled by the state, not private companies that demand exorbitant fees," said Dimitris Kodellas, a shopowner.

He regularly gets out of his car, lifts the barriers at toll booths and drives through them when he drives from Argos, his hometown in the Peloponnese, to Athens.

"At first toll station staff made a great fuss and demanded that we fill in forms, but the wave is too big for them now ... doing this saves me €14 each way.

"At a time when a lot of us are forced to get by on €600 a month that's a lot of money."

Rents in either San Francisco or Marin take up the REST of the paycheck.

So, again, maybe you want to meditate on the probity of accusing the righties stumping for this stuff to go away of being evil selfish bastards... because when they scream about "taxes", this IS part of it. They do not fall for the part where if it's called a fine or a fee or a toll that doesn't count as a tax. They don't seem to be as deceived by word games as, say, "intellectuals" who whine about only making four times more than this and start pleading for donations so they can keep their sites running....

.
love, 99
.

i can't believe my eyes

[click image]

.

Does that say what I think it says?

.
love, 99
.

fine idea

[click image — looking spookily more like Ronnie every day... wish he'd knock off the hair dye... looks stupid....]

.

I think this is one area where he has been good, actually did some good governating. Lort knows they could use someone with some GONADS over there.

Schwarzenegger could see himself in Washington
December 17, 2010 | 4:25 pm

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told The Times on Friday that he hadn’t had time to think about his next move. But he certainly sounded like someone with a job description in mind.

Gov.-elect Jerry Brown will be inaugurated in less than three weeks. Still, when Schwarzenegger was asked in a meeting with Times editors and editorial writers what he planned to do once his term ends, he initially said, "There’s no rush.... It’s not like I have something in my mind."

Then, asked if he would consider a post in the Obama administration, he said yes and began to riff on his credentials. "I’m a very big believer in environmental issues," said the governor, who considers legislation to combat global warming one of his major achievements in office. "I’ve traveled the world.... I’m very familiar with the world."

The governor went on to say that he would like to work on public policy issues in which he could have an impact "with my celebrity power, and also my knowledge and experience."

Once out of office, he said, he "has plans to go back to Washington with Secretary [George] Schultz and others" to push for a new approach to energy policy. He said the country needs to bring Democrats and Republicans together on energy policies that both sides can agree on in order to reduce dependence on foreign oil and become competitive, "rather than always talking about global warming, which turns some people off."

Schwarzenegger said he has credibility on that issue, and "people are very receptive when I talk about these things because I’m a Hummer driver … not a tree hugger."

Anyone need an energy czar?

—David Lauter in Los Angeles

I mean, we already know it won't be perfect, but, heck, the bar is SO low, all he'd have to do is ONE good thing and, pft, King Arthur Reincarnate... but... well... I wish he'd go back to making stupid movies....

.

No. Really.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Hoping other states will follow suit, California regulators overwhelmingly approved the nation's most extensive system giving owners of power plants, refineries and other major polluters financial incentives to emit fewer greenhouse gases.

The Governator has been visibly, tangibly, in favor of our home planet.

.

Right, right, frickin' fascist-friendly R-word, blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda, blah, blah... pfeh. I know it ain't gonna be much, okay? It's just liable to be actually a step up from the performance of our frickin' fascist-friendly D-words. Don't be a jackass.

.

And Moonbeam is just around the corner. For you youngsters who weren't around when he was governor before, he did a good job. The farmers got pissed as hell over him being a pansy about pesticides and pitched a purple polkadotted hissy, yelled and screamed and hopped up and down and called him that goddam hippie "Governor Moonbeam" — you really, really don't want to piss off the California Farm Bureau guys, noosirreebob, you don't — not healthy — but he was a good governor. I think he will be again. I don't even think it's possible to be good enough in public office anywhere in America anymore, but Moonbeam will do it if it's humanly possible.

.
love, 99
.

it ought to be a good thing, but that would be too lucid

[click image]

.

They're wearing us down... just when we need our strength the most.

.

UPDATE....

.

And, loosely related.... I think somebody's pulling a prank on incoming and former Governor Moonbeam. Last time his tenure was dogged by pesticide hassles. I just don't think it's a coincidence. It's a taunt.

.
love, 99
.

california dreaming

[click image]

.

I am thinking I'm up for finding out what the world thinks of us.

.
love, 99
.

i have no wish to come off as paranoid but

[click image]

.

THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN HERE!

“They’re not unheard of,” Stroz said, “but not very common.”

Yes. We HEAR of them happening in the GULF. Sheesh.

Okay? Before you default to shrugging about the global weirding, be advised that there is a whole zone of the ocean due West of us, continuing on up most of the Oregon coast, reserved for war games.

.

This is almost as out there as the mystery missile... and, in case you really need it pointed out, there is absolutely NO way a launch of anything in or near the United States could be a "mystery" this long.

.
love, 99
.

government by litigation?

[click image]

.

Or just another failed attempt to hold oligarchs accountable?

Mortgage database's murky legal status adds another wrinkle to foreclosure mess

The Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, which tracks ownership changes on millions of home loans, is accused by borrowers of wrongly filing home-seizure actions against them.

October 21, 2010 | By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Washington — Major banks and mortgage lenders are coming down with another legal headache in their efforts to seize properties from homeowners in default.

A little-known electronic database formed by them 15 years ago to track ownership changes on millions of mortgages is being challenged in court by desperate borrowers alleging it wrongly filed foreclosure actions against them.

The cases against Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc., known in the industry as MERS, highlight the shortcuts taken by the financial industry during the housing bubble.

The suits also could further complicate efforts by major lenders to move quickly to correct botched paperwork that has led some of them to suspend foreclosures temporarily.

"MERS is just one more boulder in the gears," said independent banking analyst Bert Ely.

The high courts in at least three states have ruled that MERS, listed on about 20 million home loans as the mortgage owner, standing in for lenders and investors, is not the true owner because it only maintains the database.

That has called into question the right of MERS to foreclose on homes, causing some cases to be refiled — and, in at least a few instances, thrown out.

On Wednesday, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said the Obama administration is looking into concerns about foreclosures by MERS.

"There are both questions about whether the MERS process, if followed correctly, is valid and also questions about whether entities are following that process correctly," he said.

So far, administration officials have not found "any evidence of underlying structural issues" with the MERS process, Donovan said.

The company's murky legal status as owner of the mortgages has led to class-action suits in California, Nevada, Arizona and Kentucky challenging its right to foreclose on delinquent loans.

One suit, filed by a whistleblower on behalf of California communities, struck at a key reason for MERS acting as the owner — to avoid filing fees for recording documents at counties nationwide.

The lawsuit, filed in Lassen County, accused MERS of costing California's counties $60 billion to $120 billion in property recording fees since it began operations.

"What we see is a systematic, industrywide fraudulent scheme in which the true owners of the loan do not participate in the foreclosure," said Robert Hager, a Reno lawyer for borrowers.

MERS countered that it has the right to foreclose because borrowers, as part of a property closing, sign documents agreeing to give the company legal title as a representative of the true owner of the loan. MERS said its legal right to foreclose has been upheld by courts in Arizona and Missouri, among others.

The company — whose shareholders include Bank of America Corp., CitiMortgage, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Wells Fargo & Co. — has 65 million loans registered in its database.

MERS, based in Reston, Va., was created in 1995 to speed up legal recordkeeping of mortgages. It keeps track of repeated sales of mortgages as they go through the process of being turned into packages of loans and the basis for securities sold on Wall Street.

MERS also allowed banks to avoid the trouble — and the recording fee of up to $50 — of filing deeds and other documents at county registrars' offices every time ownership of a mortgage changed hands.

It did that by listing itself as the owner of the mortgages on official property documents, even though it was simply a stand-in, or nominee, for the real owner listed in its database.

Those documents say MERS holds the lien on the property until the mortgage is paid off. When mortgages went into default, MERS often was the one that pursued a foreclosure.

But recent court rulings have thrown a wrench into that foreclosure process by finding that MERS had no right to take any action. State supreme courts in Arkansas, Kansas and Maine have ruled that MERS is not the owner of record because it only maintains the database.

"It's not like this is some minor loophole or technicality," said Christopher Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah who has studied MERS and has consulted on some lawsuits against the company.

MERS neither received payments from the borrower nor the proceeds from a foreclosure, he said, so it was "silly" for it to say it was the owner of the loan.

"In the American mortgage lending industry, MERS has become the veiled man wielding the foreclosure ax," Peterson wrote this summer in the University of Cincinnati Law Review.

MERS Chief Executive R.K. Arnold defended his company, saying it was "an important component" of the housing finance system and was committed to following state and local laws.

"What we're seeing now is that the foreclosure process itself was not designed to withstand the extraordinary volume of foreclosures that the mortgage industry and local governments must now handle," he said in a statement this month.

But MERS is facing growing criticism as more attention is focused on it. Local officials have long been concerned about the loss of fees caused by putting mortgages in MERS' name, essentially privatizing property ownership records, said Mark Monacelli, the St. Louis County, Minn., recorder, who has been active on the issue since MERS was created.

"Today our county is in serious financial trouble, and we could really use the revenue," said Monacelli, who estimated MERS has cost his 200,000-resident county about $350,000 annually in recording fees.

In Orange County, for example, there have been about 8,000 MERS mortgage filings since 1997, although officials there did not estimate the fees lost from the company's internal transfer of ownerships.

Consumers Union is worried about the legal questions surrounding the MERS database, including the ability of lenders to produce documents showing they are the owner of a property being foreclosed, said Gail Hillebrand, senior lawyer for the nonprofit advocacy group.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders, said last week it stopped doing foreclosures in MERS' name in 2007.

"We take the title out of the MERS name before we start foreclosure proceedings because some local courts don't accept foreclosures in the MERS name," spokesman Tom Kelly said.

MERS said banks have the option to foreclose on their own and Chase "has chosen to foreclose in their own name, which is a common decision that is allowed under the structure of MERS."

But Ely said MERS' problems are an example of "a lot of shortcuts taken, a lot of the I's not dotted properly and Ts not crossed properly."

Still, in most cases, he said, the homeowner is in default on the loan, and that fact will take precedence over paperwork issues.

"Some cases are going to get thrown out, but I think in most cases substance is going to trump form," Ely said.

But Max Gardner, a North Carolina consumer bankruptcy lawyer and expert on foreclosures, disagreed.

"It's not a simple … we-can-fix-it-in-two-weeks issue," Gardner said. "This is a structural problem with the legal model that the industry decided to use."

Too bad our AG is running for governor... or is his office on this anyway?

.
love, 99
.

rent-to-own governator

[click image]

.

I was just saying that I don't see "fascist" so much when I look at Ahnuld. I mostly see big oaf who hasn't been AS awful as I thought he was going to be... which... admittedly, was not a high bar.

He's in Russia right now. This started to make me happy until:

The California Governor is hosting prospective investors from Silicon Valley looking for opportunities at the country's potential flagship technology hub. They need to know their investments are secure and not at the risk of political manipulation and financial opportunism. ...

... California is open to new ideas and energetic business developers. With the Governor are some of these men; men like, Dixon Doll of DCM, Donald Dixon of Trident Capital, Mark Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Dick Kramlich and Scott Sandell of New Enterprise Associates, Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Faysal Sohail of CMEA Capital.

All public officials are here for the sole purpose of making the world safe for plutocrats.

.
love, 99
.

explosion at home

[click image]

.

Things just keep going boom all over the world. Even here.

.

12 September: Death toll rises to seven and six people are still missing....

.
love, 99
.

trouble at home

[click image]

.

I was born in Marin General Hospital. I grew up in Marin. I didn't get away for very long any of the many times I tried until the last fifteen years. I know every inch of the place. Watched this world-famous civic center being built. I watched the old courthouse in downtown San Rafael burning down from bankster arsonists who wanted that prime city block. I lived there when every cop in the county hated one officious twit cop in San Anselmo who was endlessly trying to throw his weight around. The cops were always helpful and respectful and never ordered you around. NEVER came in to escalate anything, even for real criminals. They did their jobs. The worst that ever happened in front of me was when they came to nab a really tall perp and picked the wrong really tall man to nail. The perp was laughing as he sauntered down the street and the cops were all quaking over Randy's size and jumped him in unison to keep him from getting away. They made a big show, hauled him off to the Blue Roof Inn and gave him back to me a few hours later, with apologies. I saw a really mean dyke jail keeper talking scary to a drunk woman while I was there.

Times have changed. And someone should taser the hairdo at the news desk, and a bunch of guys should go after every cop that pulls that shit, order him/her around with absolutely NO right, and then start tasing away for the power trip of it all, see how he/she likes it... then go tase their bosses for good measure. The jackasses swagger around like traffic stops are Miami Vice episodes, every citizen is a goddam murderating drug kingpin or terrorist. Scare the pee out of everyone with that twisted-sissy crap. Worsen everything. Packs of defenestrated castrati, cruising America for people to take it out on.

This isn't going to improve until we MAKE it improve. Groups should visit local cop shops and remind them of what is and isn't their place. Whenever the cops show up anywhere people should come out to make sure they don't maltreat their victims, and if they do, people should scream bloody murder, take them to court, demand their arrest, MAKE IT STOP... or sit back and wait for their own numbers to be up.

.
love, 99
.

here we go again

[click image]

.

It's not only California. Russia is suffering too.

.

And British Columbia. Fuck.

.

[click image]

.

No more dams... or private water... and dismantle the shit we've got now... PARTICULARLY the aqueduct running to Southern California from Northern California now. Put it back the way it's supposed to go. No more millions of people on land that can only support a very few.

LEARN.

.

things are darn psychedelic on the home front

[click image]

.
And NOT, by any stretch, in a good way.
.