The myopic shortsightedness of Washington never disappoints my affirmation. All the idioms of lunacy are appropriate; "Throwing gasoline on the fire.", "Tossing good money after bad.", "Foxes in charge of the henhouse.", you name it...
It is sorely the monumental shame of our nation we elect such empty sepulchres to preside over us, especially when our need is so great. At this juncture, our outcome is inevitable. No amount of money can redeem our country from its backsliding and foolishness. While our peril seems so blatantly obvious to me, it's hard to fathom the blindness of the majority. WE DON'T NEED STABILIZATION, WE REQUIRE REGENERATION!
There needs to be a spiritual reawakening in this land unlike we have ever seen!
Past national revivals of the late 19th & mid-20th centuries are forgotten by present Americans, and certainly not expounded upon in our public schools today. Where are the H.A. Ironsides, the Billy Sundays, the Billy Grahams, and others, YHWH used to bring our nation unto repentance in adulterous times? Where is the conviction of sin, and the sorrow for our iniquities? There is none, nor is there any joy.
"My zeal has undone me, because my adversaries have forgotten Thy words." Ps 119:139, "He who is not with me is against me: and he who does not gather with me, scatters." Luke 11:23 , "A kingdom (nation) divided against itself cannot stand." Mk 3:23
Unless our nation, AND ITS LEADERS, AND ITS PULPITS, proclaim GOD's Word in its fullness, and humble ourselves before Him, we are destined for destruction.
"The wicked shall be turned to Sheol, all the nations forgetting God. Arise, O YHWH! Do not let man have strength; let the nations be judged before Your face. O YHWH, put fear in them; let the nations know they are but men." Ps 9:17-20
By the time this world "crisis" reaches its apex, America may be a footnote in history.
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Breaking News
U.S. job losses worst since 1974 as recession bites
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employers axed payrolls by 533,000 jobs in November, the most in 34 years and far more than expected, government data on Friday showed, as the year-old recession hammered every corner of the U.S. economy.
Oil prices and the dollar weakened and U.S. Treasury bond prices rallied on the news that confirms the recession was now hitting activity across the board.
"You can't get much uglier than this. The economy has just collapsed, and has gone into a free fall," said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research in New York.
The Labor Department said the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent last month to the highest reading since 1993, compared with 6.5 percent in October.
"This is a clear employment blowout. Firms are reacting as dramatically as they can to make sure they have cost structures they can survive the recession we are in," said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, PA.
November's job losses were the steepest since December 1974, when 602,000 jobs were shed, and were much worse than forecast by analysts polled by Reuters who had predicted a reduction of 340,000 jobs.
In addition, job losses in recent months turned out to be worse than previously reported. October's loss was revised to show a cut of 320,000, originally given as a 240,000 loss, while September's drop was revised to 403,000 from 284,000.
That meant 199,000 more jobs were lost in September and October than previously thought and the total reduction in U.S. nonfarm payrolls for the last three months was 1.256 million, with almost 2 million shed in the year so far.
"It's just a disaster," said Stephen Stanley, chief U.S. economist at RBS Greenwich in Greenwich, Conn.
Service-providing businesses alone shed 370,000 jobs in November, or two-thirds of the overall job declines, following a loss of 153,000 jobs the month before.
That meant labor market weakness has now shifted over from the goods-producing sectors of the economy to the far more important services sector, which delivers almost 80 percent of U.S. output.
The length of the workweek slipped to 33.5 hours, the shortest since records began in 1964, a Labor Department official said.
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Our Bailout holdings lose $9 billion
By FRANK BASS, Associated Press
Stock intended to eventually earn taxpayers a profit as part of the Bush administration's massive bank bailout has lost a third of its value — about $9 billion — in barely one month, according to an Associated Press analysis. Shares in virtually every bank that received federal money have remained below the prices the government negotiated.
Most of the Treasury Department's investments since late October have been in preferred bank stocks, more than $180 billion worth, with investments in giants like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, and many small community banks. But the government also negotiated options to buy up to 1.2 billion shares of common bank stock that was valued at $27 billion.
The Treasury Department said it did not expect these common stock options to be profitable immediately and negotiated them so taxpayers could share in the wealth if the bank stocks recover.
Now, however, the value of that common stock is worth less than $18 billion. If the government exercised all its warrants to purchase the stock today, it would lose money on 51 of its 53 agreements. Taxpayers would be out $9.1 billion.
The government can exercise its options to buy the common stock anytime over the next decade, but the options were "immediately exercisable," according to banks' securities filings.
"The markets are saying this plan isn't going to work for the banks," said Ross Levine, Tisch professor of economics at Brown University. "They're asking where this plan is going."
Potential losses among these common stocks include more than $3 billion for the administration's biggest deal, a $45 billion injection into Citigroup Inc. The government gave the New York-based giant $25 billion on Oct. 28. In addition to preferred stock worth $1,000 per share, the deal included warrants to pick up 210 million shares of common stock at $17.85. In late November, the White House put together a plan to give Citibank another $20 billion. The deal also included warrants to pick up 254 million shares, with the price set at $10.61.
Citigroup stock has since fallen below $8.
The government would only earn a profit if the share price eventually exceeds the negotiated warrant price. Under the bailout plan, the common stock warrants — effectively treated as stock options for non-employees — would allow taxpayers to share the wealth as banks recover.
"We're not exercising the warrants today," Treasury spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin said. "We have 10 years to exercise the warrants, so it's more accurate to look at what the market believes are the 10-year prospects for these banks."
The Treasury Department projects that the $180 billion in preferred stock will generate roughly $9 billion per year during the first five years and $16.2 billion per year afterward, assuming the banks remain solvent.
The preferred stock has a fixed value of $1,000 per share, and a 5 percent annual dividend for the first five years of the investment.
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. describes the cash infusion as "an investment, not an expenditure."
So far, however, only two of the 53 banks can be considered a good investment.
The AP's analysis found that only HF Financial Corp. of Sioux Falls, S.D., and First Niagara Financial Group of Lockport, N.Y., would make money for taxpayers if the common stock options were exercised today. According to records filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, both are small banks, far removed from the wheeling and dealing of federally insured giants that ravaged the global economy by making bad bets on subprime mortgages.
The South Dakota bank, for example, has a market value of $54 million, a fraction of the size of JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest. The Treasury Department gave $25 million to HF Financial on Nov. 21 in exchange for 25,000 shares of preferred stock and warrants that allow taxpayers to buy 302,000 shares at $12.40 within the next decade. For now, it's a good deal; the bank's stock is trading around $13. If the government exercised its option to buy HF stock today, taxpayers would collect $63,500.
More companies would be in the black, but the government used a 20-day stock price average to set the warrant price, meaning it willingly negotiated to pay roughly 25 percent more than the stock was worth on the day it signed the deals on behalf of taxpayers.
Nara Bancorp, created in 1989 to serve Southern California's growing Korean-American community, borrowed $67 million from taxpayers on Nov. 21, when its stock was trading at $7.50 per share. But the government negotiated the option to buy 1 million shares of Nara common stock at $9.64, higher than its stock is currently trading.
"It's a complete mistake to think this is a good investment for us," said Paola Sapienza, a finance associate professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, who spearheaded a September protest of the bailout by more than 200 of the nation's leading economists. "It's a gamble. It's like going to Las Vegas."
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Universe's dark matter mix is 'just right' for life
IT'S not just the nature of dark matter that's a mystery - even its abundance is inexplicable. But if our universe is just one of many possible universes, at least this conundrum can be explained.
The total amount of dark matter - the unseen stuff thought to make up most of the mass of the universe - is five to six times that of normal matter. This difference sounds pretty significant, but it could have been much greater, because the two types of matter probably formed via radically different processes shortly after the big bang. The fact that the ratio is so conducive to a life-bearing universe "looks like a tremendous coincidence", says Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ben Freivogel, also at UCB, wondered if the ratio can be explained using the anthropic principle which, loosely stated, says that the properties of the universe must be suitable for the emergence of life, otherwise we wouldn't be here asking questions about it. In order to avoid questions about how these properties became so finely tuned, the anthropic principle is combined with the idea that our universe is part of a multiverse, in which each universe has randomly determined properties.
Freivogel focused on one of the favoured candidate-particles for dark matter, the axion. Axions have the right characteristics to be dark matter, but for one problem: a certain property called its "misalignment angle", which would have affected the amount of dark matter produced in the early universe. If this property is randomly determined, in most cases it would result in a severe overabundance of dark matter, leading to a universe without the large-scale structure of clusters of galaxies. To result in our universe, it has to be just the right value.
In a multiverse, each universe will have a random value for the axion's misalignment angle, giving some universes the right amount of dark matter needed to give rise to galaxies, stars, planets and life as we know it.
Freivogel combined the cosmological models of large-scale structure formation with the physics of axions to predict the most likely value for the ratio of dark matter to normal matter that would allow observers like us to emerge. He assumed that the number of observers in a universe is proportional to the number of galaxies within it.
In Freivogel's model, changing the ratio of matter type impacts the formation of galaxies, and hence observers; for example, too little dark matter would prevent the formation of galaxies and stars. His calculations show that of all the observers that might exist across the many universes, most would live in a universe with the dark matter abundance found in ours. In other words, we would be less likely to be here if our abundance of dark matter were different (www.arxiv.org/abs/0810.0703).
Of all the observers across many universes, most would live in a universe with the dark matter abundance found in ours
Bousso is impressed by the analysis. "It is another piece that fits nicely into the puzzle, and it didn't have to fit nicely," he says. Leonard Susskind of Stanford University adds: "It is not the first anthropic explanation [for dark matter], but it is more compelling than the others" because it explains the axion's overabundance problem.
It's so ironic that it's more convenient (and absurd) to believe our world, & the universe all happened by chance than to accept the Holy Creator God who spoke all things into existence.
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