I'll say it again, Jesse's Cafe Americain while not always the easiest site to digest, continues to be among the most informative and usefull sites anywhere on the net.

After a week of nonsense within the halls of Congress, The Whitehouse and especially on your TV, here's Jesse with one timely chart that explains it all.

Buy Gold!!!!!

From Congressional Quarterly via Seeking Alpha.

The following video was created somewhere around the middle 1980's and can be purchased, if you wish, along with an accompanying book at The Money Masters.com

It is both good history and remarkably prescient as we are very definitely living in the world it predicted for us 25 years ago.

It is also 3 hours and 35 minutes long.

I know.

The first 3 hours and 10 minutes provide you with a very complete telling of banking practices throughout history.

They're all there, Jesus, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, Joe Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, FDR, a couple Popes, you name it.

In the last 20 or so minutes it also provides a solution for reducing our debt to ..... wait for it ..... zero ....... in a couple years time.

Seriously.

And what's really bizarre, is that it makes perfect sense.

I've watched it now three times, the last two googling quotes and issues presented as facts.

I could find very little to quibble with (and everyone here knows how much I love to quibble).

You know how to eat an elephant right?

One bite at a time.

Take it in 10 - 15 minute bites, which provides the additional benefit of forcing you to hit and re-hit our site. 

You know your Uncle Roany wouldn't lead you astray, despite my obvious self interest.

This is the primo stuff.

You might want to click the Google logo at the bottom right hand corner for a much larger view or to go directly to the vid's home at Google.

We don't need the hits all that much.

From Vision of Humanity here's a nicely done interactive of their Global Peace Index.

They also offer a US Peace Index interactive.

You can drill down from each country and compare the criteria they use to establish their comparisons.

As always, click on the map to access this very well done interactive.

Check out Uruguay you silly, silly naysayers.

Here's an article published March 1, 2011 at Weblog's 2011 science blog of the the year Watts Up With That?. 

A distinction they could have never earned prior to "Climategate".

That last part was an editorial comment.

As always, click the photo below to link up with the entire post.

Big-Time La Nina Tornado and Spring Flood Season Possible?

Tornado season kicks off in February most years, and yesterday’s storm had tornadoes, and other severe weather and with heavy rains after a snowy winter, major flooding. The tornado seasons tend to be more severe in La Ninas with larger outbreaks and stronger tornadoes.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, because the original photo that appears with the above post at Watt's Up With That? is a bit long and skinny for the format we use here, we went out looking for a different tornado photo to use as substitute.

So we googled for an image search of tornadoes, and got this.

Now, if you click the photo above, it will as usual link you up with the story about La Nina and El Nino weather patterns at Watts Up With That?.

But if you click it at the page that results from the google image search, you get this, Mother Nature Network's list of the top ten tornado videos of all time of which the following vid is number three.

Thanks to Kenneth S. over at our facebook page for the idea,

Hopefully, that'll do it for the tornadoes for a good long while.

From the NOAA Satellite and Information Service.

Click on the chart for the entire story.

Tornadoes

The period through the end of May, 2011 was marked by numerous large severe weather outbreaks, causing a record-breaking tornado year for the year-to-date period. Approximately 1,400 preliminary tornado reports were received by the National Weather Service during the January–May period, and 875 of those tornado reports were during the month of April alone.

Terrible and beautiful at the same time.

About the last thing I did before entering the process of repeatedly tearing apart and putting together my office was to get into an argument with a guy over at Nolle Astro about just what exactly is the best form of government.

This guy when pressed a little, whipped out the Aristotle on me in the hope that I'd acknowledge his clear intellectual superiority and go away.

Like that might even happen.

Having read Aristotle some because I actually wanted to ..... I'm not lying here, I would not lie about Aristotle, I was in the hospital and had time on my hands ..... I began wading in looking to place a left hook when out of nowhere comes a guy who actually knows his Aristotle, as opposed to the two of us posers who mostly only know about Aristotle.

So anyway I offer the question to Ammericanu I., " What is the best form of government?" 

And he says something like "Small city-states, or that proposed by Peter Kropotkin in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Sigh!!!

Not only does this guy know Aristotle, he knows guys I've never even heard of.

I hate when that happens!!!

So being me I order the book, only this time because I'm already on the mission and my computers are down, I actually go to reading it.

It's not for everybody, and that's for sure, but it does offer a very different and well thought out approach to having a society from a guy who is clearly beyond brilliant.

Click the quote below from the books conclusion to go to the Wikipedia site about Kropotkin and his life.

It's good stuff.

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

– Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.

As an aside, I used to have a beard just like that ..... before the operation.

We've been bombed with this one over the past two days.

It's everywhere someone is bemoaning inflation/promoting gold or silver/hating the FED and/or the government in general.

Lew Rockwell's blog provides the best commentary here, or click on the photo.

If you give it just a little thought, it's revealing in the extreme.

Unfortunately, it ain't those greedy oil companies after all.

Gas would still be the same 20 cents a gallon it was in the 60's were it not for your government having destroyed the value of your money.

Ok then, first of all be warned that the guy doing this video is going to try to sell you some silver at the end of this thing.

He doesn't try very hard.

He doesn't even give you his telephone number just in case straight out of left field you happen to be a buyer.

So as far as I'm concerned the guy is harmless.

Except .....

This is some seriously scary stuff being promoted here.

I'm not kidding.

What's going on here is that Mike is manipulating a model published by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the orbit of the comet Elenin/dwarf brown star, take your pick.

When I use the word manipulate in this conversation it's not a bad thing as he is simply setting the model for the following series of dates:

September 4, 2010, date of the Christchurch, New Zealand 7.2 magnitude earthquake.

February 27, 2010, date of the Santiago, Chile 8.8 magnitude earthquake

February 11, 2011, date of the Christchurch, New Zealand, 6.3 magnitude earthquake

March, 11, 2011 date of the Fukushima Japan, 9.1 magnitude earthquake. 

And then the following dates:

September 27, 2011 ?????

October 17, 2011 ?????

November 5, 2011 ?????

His conclusion?

You ain't gonna like it.

Now being me, I had to check it out for myself.

It all works exactly like the video.

If you click the photo of the model below it will take you to the exact NASA model used in the video.

Try it for yourself.

Go ahead I dare ya, scare the crap right out of your own self.

Sissy!

 Now NASA, right here explains very patiently that all of the above is simply a very large nothingburger.

For NASA to be more right about this particular issue than they have been on let's say ... ummmmmm ... that global warming thing, would in my mind be a very good thing.

Only time will tell.

We have deemed our project to spruce up the site to have been a glorious success, as not one of you including even the most irascible among you, has contacted us to tell us how much they hate our every idea ..... at least as it applies to the decorating ..... yet.

And since we're practicing avoidance with regards to a couple of posts that either we have promised and have not yet completed, most notably a post on health care reform we promised Madelyn M. and ..... somebody else, or posts that are finished but are in truth so ugly to contemplate we'd just rather not for a while longer.

Here's a little more art to brighten your day.

The following are some photo's of the Court of Industry at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

In 1932-33, that well known mexican, marxist, muralist, Diego Rivera with the unbending support of that well known capitalist, industrialist and rich white guy, Edsel Ford, painted one of the greatest works of the 20th century on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

And while the caca did indeed hit the fan, fortunately none of it got on the mural.

Click each image for the DIA's wonderful interactive on each of the four walls holding the 27 panels that comprise this treasure. 

We'll get serious tomorrow.

Maybe.