Chinese Collapse

The idea that China is in a bubble economy has been a back sheet story for some time.  I could go back and dig out an amazing number of very details stories.  Although it is hard to remember it now, Japan also seemed like very much the same type of juggernaut back in the 1980s.  The dystopian movie Blade Runner (trailer) had Los Angelos covered with Japanese signs and people.  Today with and aging and shrinking population they might consider borrowing some of our Latin American emigres.

Although it is not clear that this is the exact dynamic here, the boom and bust cycles are likely to start coming at a much more rapid pace as the multiplier of world populating and consumption intersects with available remaining resources (per capita usage x total population versus existing resources + newly found resources).

Chinese Collapse NYT

For nearly two years, China’s turbocharged economy has raced ahead with the aid of a huge government stimulus program and aggressive lending by state-run banks.

But a growing number of economists now worry that China — the world’s fastest growing economy and a pillar of strength during the global financial crisis — could be stalled next year by soaring inflation, mounting government debt and asset bubbles.

Chinese Unemployed Graduates NYT

BEIJING — Liu Yang, a coal miner’s daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.

Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.

Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.

More Unemployed Graduates World Socialist Web

China has a huge number of unemployed college graduates. In July, China’s ministry of education revealed that over 25 percent, or roughly 1.5 million of the 6.3 million students who had graduated this year, were unemployed. Of those who graduated last year, 800,000 remained unemployed.

These jobless graduates are part of a wider employment crisis. China’s first-ever “White Paper” on employment statistics was released on September 7. Entitled China’s Human Resources, it reported that the number of registered unemployed is 9.2 million or 4.3 percent of the urban labour force.

One example below:

China's High Tech Graduate's Ant Colony

The Chinese Ant Colony Newsweek (Picture Montage):

The UFO Menace

In Richard G. Mitchell Jr.’s Dancing at Armageddon (2002):  Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times, he took a survey of as many survivalist as possible and asked them what Future Crises were most on their mind- participants could answer with more than one item. After nuclear war (50.4%), and economic collapse, came alien Invasion (14.1%).  This fear even coming ahead of the dreaded take over by world forces.

To get some ideas of what some people might you might try this link to a home crown periodical: The Phoenix Project.  Granted their current concerns seem a little more open ended than mine, but they do share my interest in historical research. 

So while the alien’s in our midst was not the dominant concern of most, it certainly had its adherents.  Although many associate the rise in UFO-ology to Molder and Scully of X-files fame, it has a much longer and deeper history than that.

FLYING SAUCER CULTS  by John Shirley

Everyone's trying to see past the boundaries. They want to see past the edges of mortality; or past the frontiers of perception; they want to see past the barriers of time and space, which really means past the barriers between themselves and people around them. They try to see into the future; they try to peer into the dust-trailed past. They don't spend much time in the present. They crowd along the fences of the fringes of the consensus reality. They're motivated by fear and hope and sometimes by something profounder than those and deeper than curiosity. Step into the fringes, and you see a suggestive chaos. If you don't erect a skeptical filter, the Rorschach effect will take hold; the chaos wills Rorschach-twitch itself into whatever you came there hoping to see...

The impulse to explore the fringe of consensus reality is, in many people, and unknown to them, something more: an underlying spiritual hunger. In those people, it is something sacred. This sacred impulse for seeking has been desecrated and violated by cults and cult leaders and false prophets and false gurus. The most recent manifestation of this violation of the sacred impulse to seek comes from the new crop of FLYING SAUCER CULTS.

The UFO field, if field it can be called, is an exemplar of a thesis beloved to me; that many things are true and untrue at once; that yes and no can be said in answer to the same question, accurately, for many, if not most, situations…

It's true that the UFO field is bogus and largely inflated with credulity and deception and that this makes flying saucers improbable; it's simultaneously true that it's founded in a reality, and that there is good reason to believe that flying saucers are real.

The saucer cults push us toward incredulity.

he saucer cults go back a ways, even before the saucers (which entered public awareness chiefly in 1947 with Kenneth Arnold's sighting and his coining of the term) to the pseudo-Theosophical I AM cult of the 1930s, which had regular psychic congress with Venusians. According to Peter Jordan in UFO Magazine, the sect was founded by Guy and Edna Ballard who were the Earthbound intermediaries of a Venusian named Sananda, also known, on our world, as Jesus Christ.

Among the thousands of I AM followers were those "absorbed from American fascist William Dudley Peley's Silver Shirts -- the influence was conveyed strongly by I AM's staunch paramilitary character." The fascist, and racist strain in UFO cults crops up frequently.

Steeped in the literature of the I AM cult was Marion Keech, a 1950s housewife who "contacted" aliens from the planet Clarion. Keech passed on warnings and advice from her alien chums; a group of her followers gathered at her home on a fateful night when the Western USA was ET-predicted to be engulfed in a sort of re-enactment of Noah's deluge; there the saucers were to come, Marion calmly explained, to carry the faithful to safety. Of course, neither flood nor saucers came, but followers who need to believe despite the obvious contradictions will concoct outrageous rationales for failures of proofs. As psychologist Leon Festinger had it, in studying this group, "...new cognitions or rationalizations are created in order that the belief system can be preserved..." in the mind of the devotee. (Hence Scientology too survives every damning accusation against Hubbard and his "org").

Christmas UFO

Obviously part of Santa's logistical team

Strange Times: Masked Robbers

Costumed stickup men and women have delivered a twisted trick-or-treat over the last few months, pulling off a series of unrelated robberies that experts say are as rare as they have been unprofitable.

There was the robber in the "Scream" mask and the one dressed as Catwoman; the football player and Darth Vader, helmet, cape and all; and two people in gorilla suits accompanied by another dressed as a chicken.

A 15-year-old was riding his bicycle in front of a strip mall on Route 25A in Rocky Point on Long Island when he was approached by two men wearing gorilla suites and another dressed in a chicken costume. One of the gorillas punched him in the head, knocking him off his bicycle. The chicken then grabbed the bike and pedaled off with the two gorillas running behind him, police said.

Robbers Show a Creative Side, SEAN GARDINER, The Wall Street Journal link

Most criminals try to avoid standing out in the crowd.  Although masks will hide your immediate identity, the attention they bring tends to work against the perpetrator in the long run. The spectacular nature of the crime gets people talking.  There are 55 people being robbed in New York City and Long Island every day.  According to FBI statistics of the four major violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, assault), robbery has by far the lowest closure rate:  28% versus 41% for rape and 57% for assault.

Why the unusual outfits?  Amateurs with little previous association with the crime world culture.  They are making very large efforts for often very little money.  The Gorillas and Chickens after all got away with a bicycle, and the Catwomen got $86.

The catwoman further illustrates the amature nature of these robberies.  She is reported to be Shanna Spalding, 28 years old, she is reported to be the lead singer of the death metal band “Divine Infamy”. 

On the other hand she was caught when she pulled off a robbery and didn’t bring her mask.

The Catwoman: Shanna Spalding