Starring Ron Paul, Ben Bernanke, Ross Perot and a globe of dropping stock markets!!

It is a very wide chart so to see all the pixels you'll need to go here:

http://www.hongpong.com/files/blackmonday.jpg

Enjoy!

We have just gotten back to Mpls in the wee hours. The Iowa trip was an interesting one.... the situation strange. The people, cold. The media, not coming back soon.

Massive rallies, cold scenes, media people. Pols. Really eager staffers. Security theater from Clinton's henchmen.

The plan to send out videos from the road fell apart. We got one out from the cafe, but we've had problems with the video formats and want to clean them up first.

We have seen all of the Dem candidates except Gravel and Kucinich and i think we have some level of video of each.

We used the latest in underpowered pocket video systems to record everything insane we could. This really freed up creative opportunities to place visual artifacts over everything and everyone.

After we sleep off the driving, there will be much furious video productions for the Interwebs! Our Ron Paul War on Drugs video has already passed 1200 viewers in 12 hours!!

We went demanding nothing (some of us). We achieved everything!

A kind of Zen.

Yes people i am in a hotel room in west des moines right now. We have been going around to all the events. Got up close to edwards at the Mellencamp thing. Hillary and Bill popped out in an SUV. Came down from mpls to see the scene.

I have been recording chunky videos on my phone the whole time. It is very postmodern.

Got a photo with Ron Paul. my friend The Captain is a big Paul fan. I am not big on anyone. Neither is Andy the renegade philosopher.

Already a priceless viral video was ruined. Ron Paul was shaking everyone's hand and getting photos with all. I asked him if he would 'reform the war on drugs' and pointed at my phone/camera. He looks right into it and says 'oh yes thats one i forgot to mention tonight. i'm not going to reform the war on drugs, i'm going to END the war on drugs!"

then of course we had to be on our way. And i discover, the phone/camera STOPPED RUNNING just seconds before. A priceless moment. The captain just wanted to hear the truth. I wanted a viral video. I didn't get it. THAT is 2008 people. The viral video that slipped thru yr fingers!

That's all right. Gotta let it go. The photos turned out really well. I can't get videos to upload from the camera. But within 6 hours we had netted BillClinton and three candidates.

Romney's people are all over this hotel. There are two secret service guys on every floor of every hotel in the chain, we were told.

a man who can't pay for his propane biked by at 1 AM. the captain's vehicle has ron paul stickers. he shouted over to use and said he supported a constitutionalist angle. we gave him some leftover sushi and propane money.

Give us a call @ 651-338-7661 or 6513387661@myhelio.com .

If anyone has any ideas about... um guerrilla ontology or such, send em along. We have no good agenda. there are a lot of weird factors. Joe Klein drifted by at the Edwards event looking pissed off. It's like your TV is exploding at you and its really cold.

A big adventure is at hand: I and two friends are going down to Iowa right now. We are going down there to see what is going on and wander around. I just figured out to upload videos directly from my phone, and we will have other tech items to capture the Iowa Caucus scene.

Videos will be posted to YouTube consistently under the username HongPong unless we get bored/and/or thrown out @ http://www.youtube.com/hongpong . We will also have some updates posted on http://www.hongpong.com .

My friend Bobby "the Captain" is a strong Ron Paul supporter. I, Dan Feidt, am suspicious of the whole scene, and Andy French is a renegade philosopher. With one Ron Paul and two agnostics in the mix, what will happen?

Anyone on the scene or having a tip for us, can send us a buzz at 6513387661@myhelio.com or 651-338 7661.

Thanks for your interest!

This, people, is from about four pages of One PDF file. Of which I have just gotten about 600 I think. Yes, 5 minutes into this stuff, we're already inside a huge all-encompassing grid of control run by Lockheed Martin. It's like Minority Report, see?

We'll cut our eyes out to escape the "prescence" provided along Interstate 35.

Wow that was quick eh?

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? MORE COMING SOON.

OMG

by the way: I bet hillary knows.

Image source DeesIllustration.com / Rense.com :

Play to the Base! You gotta hand it to the Ron Paul campaign, they are cashing in directly on Guy Fawkes and 'V for Vendetta'! Paul blew away the GOP single-day fundraising record, and now he's sitting pretty.

Meanwhile, it is quite likely that New Hampshire independents will wander into the Republican primary and vote for Ron Paul. This is also the plan in Minnesota, I have been told by a top MN-Ron Paul organizer. New York Times:

Candidate’s Pleased to Remember This Fifth of November

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

Historians and British schoolchildren remember Guy Fawkes as the Roman Catholic, anti-Protestant rebel who on Nov. 5, 1605, tried to assassinate King James I by blowing up the Parliament. Supporters of the Republican primary campaign of the libertarian Representative Ron Paul may remember Fawkes as a wildly successful fund-raising gimmick.

On Monday, a group of Paul supporters helped raised more than $4.07 million in one day — approaching what the campaign raised in the entire last quarter — through a Web site called ThisNovember5th.com, a reference to the day the British commemorate the thwarted bombing.

Many fans of Mr. Paul know of the day primarily through a movie based on the futuristic graphic novel “V for Vendetta,” by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, in which a terrorist modeled after Fawkes battles a fascist government that has taken over Britain.

The Paul campaign has raised more than $6.84 million in the first five weeks of this quarter, more than the $5 million it raised from July 1 to Oct. 1. Many of the contributions appeared to come through the independent Fawkes effort, but how much was unclear.

On Monday alone, the campaign signed up more than 21,000 new donors, said Jesse Benton, a campaign spokesman.

Among 2008 presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York holds the record for raising the most in a single day: $6.2 million on June 30. But Mr. Paul has surpassed the best day of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, who raised $3.14 million on Jan. 8.

ThisNovember5th.com includes video clips and the text of a speech by Mr. Paul, a 10-term Texas congressman. In it, Mr. Paul declares, “The true patriot challenges the state when the state embarks on enhancing its power at the expense of the individual.”

Mr. Paul has stood out from the Republican field for his opposition to the war in Iraq. In the speech he argues that the fight against terrorism is threatening American democracy.

“The American Republic is in remnant status,” he says. “The stage is set for our country eventually devolving into military dictatorship, and few seem to care.”

Mr. Benton clarified that Mr. Paul did not support blowing up government buildings. “He wants to demolish things like the Department of Education,” Mr. Benton said, “but we can do that very peacefully, in a constructive manner.”

Ron Paul's web traffic continues to zoom away from the pack, the Alex Jones conspiracy guys note with glee:

Regardless of whether it's possible to be polite about it, the reality of contemporary America is that the legal trappings of total tyranny have already been set up. Weird, subjective parameters for declaring you and me 'terrorists' beyond the reach of the Magna Carta have already been drafted into law with little attention.

On the upside, this has inspired $4 million in donations to the Ron Paul campaign yesterday! While I differ with Dr. Paul on many policies, his whole message is anti-police state, and its good to have messaging in that direction today.

Scooter Libby & Paris Hilton prove that important people are above the law. Classic pardon fallouts of the past. Keith Olbermann pounds away for impeachment - not bad!



Lead off with the weird news: S&P, Moody's Mask $200 Billion of Subprime Bond Risk:

Bloomberg - Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are masking burgeoning losses in the market for subprime mortgage bonds by failing to cut the credit ratings on about $200 billion of securities backed by home loans.

The highest default rates on home loans in a decade have reduced prices of some bonds backed by mortgages to people with poor or limited credit by more than 50 cents on the dollar and forced New York-based Bear Stearns Cos. to offer $3.2 billion to bail out a money-losing hedge fund. Almost 65 percent of the bonds in indexes that track subprime mortgage debt don't meet the ratings criteria in place when they were sold, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

That may just be the beginning. Downgrades by S&P, Moody's and Fitch would force hundreds of investors to sell holdings, roiling the $800 billion market for securities backed by subprime mortgages and $1 trillion of collateralized debt obligations, the fastest growing part of the financial markets.

``You'll see massive losses from banks, insurance companies and pension managers,'' said Joshua Rosner, a managing director at investment research firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York and co-author of a study last month that said S&P, Moody's and Fitch understate the risks of subprime mortgage bonds. ``The longer they wait, the worse it's going to be.''

So the big indexes are pretending these bad debts are better, because if they get downgraded all the index funds and everyone else will dump this shit, and its heavily leveraged value will accelerate the system's imminent (and immanent) ruptures. Another fine example of how the market can't self-regulate by downgrading batches of shitty securities. See also: London fund latest subprime victim.

I am putting together a grand index of Minnesota political blogs for the day job so I had the opportunity to cruise the vast rambling digital wasteland (for pay) while everyone else enjoys this nice weather. Here's a good aggregator for your convenience and also MN leftyblogs! Working with Drupal? Read this!

I also went on a wild-goose chase, as the State Department has been unable to get my dad his passport for a good 13-14 weeks. They sent it to a street address in Minneapolis, which I visited (and attempted to find the other three SW / NE / NW quadrant equivalents as well). No luck all around. I am going here in a week.

Catching up with Scott: The Grand Dean of academic conspiracy research is Peter Dale Scott, who has doggedly checked out the 'deep politics' of America, the secret stuff from JFK to Watergate and now 9/11 and Iraq-related matters. He comes from the same cadre as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and the other classic leftie critics. He's saying here that he is not really part of the left anymore, and how the ongoing political battles among nasty factions like the oil lobby are sort of invisible to the Chomsky-style 'structuralists' who apply outdated concepts of the Ruling Class vs. the Oppressed &etc. Here's an 8-minute clip about 9/11, 'left gatekeepers' and Scott's general approach to 9/11 after researching JFK and Iran-Contra for decades.

Scott is one of those guys who insists on looking at individual personalities and all that kind of thing, not just the dull economic structures that old lefties dwell on. Here's another 9 minute clip about Cheney and 9/11, how Cheney sort of seized control of the 'shadow government' on that day. He's connecting 9/11 actions with Oliver North's old weird schemes in the 1980s - FEMA, the National Programs Office, going into the Patriot Act, etc.

Global schemes to divide ethnicities: One interesting neoconservative angle is how you can combine "freedom for small ethnic groups" and "ethnic groups are pawns we play against each other." The dissolution of Yugoslavia & the application of Albanians & the KLA as an (al-Qaeda-linked) anti-Russian proxy force is a pretty good example. Some similar stuff happens around Africa near Rwanda and the Congo. Clearly Elliot "the original pardoned henchman" Abrams' efforts to get the Palestinians fighting amongst each other have gone forth, if somewhat backfired. Many around the mideast suspect that dividing up Iraq was the plan all along. Now the think-tank geniuses are floating plans to partition Iraq, and not surprisingly the Conspiracy Front sees a conspiracy. I accept most of the articles they cite as examples of this policy in Iraq though.

Global schemes to erase North American borders: On the flip side the same guys are crowing about an elite plan called the North American Union, basically an EU + NAFTA style plan including foreign-bank-owned super-tollways. Sounds like a bad idea but I haven't yet discovered where the I-35/Minnesota angle lies. There is also a bunch of paranoia about radical Mexicans trying to dissolve the United States. The mayor of Oklahoma City wants to make Interstate 35 into an instrument of the global scheme. See the video! Along similar lines, the EU inspires nervousness about sovereignty in the UK.

Govt eyes bullet trains for Russia. Trans-Siberian bullet train?

More about the Chinese quality control problem.

Everyone is supposed to dwell on the wisdom of former terrorists working on TV but that's kinda dumb. Yep.

4 4th of July links: from a Canuck, bob someone, Chinese flags, and some more.

Recent Brit terror plotters "known to police and MI5" aka domestic intelligence services. A typical but generally suppressed angle to many, many stories about "terrorists" in the West.

Google gets tied up in SiCKO - definitely a big story this week. More on this later.

iPhone cracked by DVDJon: some work accomplished on unlocking standard iPhone features. Google for more info on that, his blog is called 'so sue me'. Appropriate for the guy that originally came up with key parts of the DVD encryption crack, a great defeater of the DMCA worthy of top accolades.

In Iraq private contractors collect intelligence which of course will tend to create self-sustaining cash&doom loops. Faked evidence of Iranian munitions in Iraq?

The mutually fatal attraction between Israel & the United States. Hard to argue with this. More blather from the establishment. Here's how the Elliot Abrams plan fell apart - thanks McClatchy for "truth to power" (is that a new slogan?)

The WaPo Cheney article series is weird. Authoritarian rhetoric over Cheney.

2008 campaign notes: Peace activist / 2008 Prez candidate Dal Lamagna went to Jordan to talk with the insurgents. A dicey move, but i wonder why it's considered an 'evil' gesture to try to communicate? Paging Habermas... Ron Paul outdraws the regular candidates in Iowa and of course has more cash-on-hand than McCain now. Check out Paul on recapturing independence for the 4th.

Somalia intervention by the U.S. and Ethiopia has backfired - basically another hopeless disaster.

Norm Coleman Stonergate hits the internets all over the place. The Norm Weasel Meter at mnblue.com. More here. The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics has a listing of how marijuana trouble can fuck up your life in different states. Minnesota's in the middle.

Jonathon Sharkey AKA the vampire just filed to run for Prez.

Corn is really a big deal, more than you'd think.

OverheardInMinneapolis.com . Simple eh?

Lifeblogging = people in your head: This Pittsburgh Mac user named Justine elected to basically wear a webcam all day & put her life online via video at tastyblogsnack.com and ijustine.com. Somehow thru this process she gets to fly around and visited Minneapolis for the iPhone release. I am not sure if it is a promotional gig or what. The whole thing is strange but very modern eh? Everyone stumbles into the panopticon - i.e. Little Brother.

How to make some money outta the Internets: This is some stuff I've been looking at for work. It's helpful to anyone though. Check out DoshDosh.com: 7 blogging strategies, 4 reasons to write sweet articles, lazy ways to get content, social proof optimization, direct ad sales, long-tail keywords and search traffic. Google Keyword tool, SEObook keywords, blog niches, Google Suggest, SEOdigger. This page about dealing with Drupal Views and home pages is pretty good stuff.

That's all for now, should provide some interesting material for next few days anywhoo...

This is worthy of its own post all around. While I am not some Libertarian with a capital L, I appreciate Dr. Paul's lonely stance against the total Orwellian surveillance state &etc. So it's fantastic news that Paul has more money on hand than the troubled McCain effort, which has a high 'burn rate' due to the typical concourse of salaried consultants and hangers-on.

Unexpectedly, Ron Paul's dogged efforts - and a thin campaign staff - have put him ahead of McCain in current cash on hand. McCain has only $2 million, while Paul has $2.4 million. Giuliani has $18 million and Romney $12 million, so it's not like Paul has pulled ahead. However, it does indicate he's really on the up-tick in the way it really counts! ABC News blogs:

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos Reports: Though often regarded as a longshot candidate for president, Republican Ron Paul tells ABC News that he has an impressive $2.4 million in cash on hand after raising an equal amount during the second quarter, putting him ahead of one-time Republican frontrunner John McCain, who reported this week he has only $2 million in the bank.

In an exclusive interview taped Friday and airing Sunday on "This Week," Paul said his campaign is on a better trajectory than McCain's.

"I think some of the candidates are on the down-slope, and we're on the up-slope," said Paul.

Paul's cash on hand puts him in third place in the Republican field in that important metric, although he is well behind leader Rudy Giuliani, who has $18 million in the bank, and Mitt Romney, with $12 million.

Paul, who polls show with support in the low single digits, said his surprisingly strong fundraising is the best measure of his support.

"I think people have underestimated the number of people in this country who are interested in a freedom message," says the Republican congressman from Texas, who has strong libertarian leanings.

Click HERE to watch a clip from the interview.

With a little bit of luck, Paul will become prez, cancel the IRS and the military-industrial complex, the DC lobbyists, and we will go into a free (if unexpectedly weird) future. Hehehe...

In other news, Ron Paul supporters had security after them at a Florida Marlins game! Alex Jones & the Internet conspiracy gang are pretty big fans of his...

As per the last couple posts, I've been talking about the effects of a Ron Paul candidacy on the scene as a whole. I'm hardly some hardcore libertarian (they're a disparate strand in America today) but I do want to see Paul's ideas get some more exposure, because he's really a lot more decent, and interesting, than the other GOP candidates.

So let's get a bit into where Paul is coming from. His column at Antiwar.com is a good one. The most recent story makes sense about how the Homeland Security department was a terrible idea.

To understand the guy, this is where you gotta start:

Congressman Ron Paul Reiterates Danger Of Foreign Troops Being Used For Martial Law

Speaks out on phony UN-US dog and pony show, EPA testing pesticides on children

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones | November 24 2005

Republican Congressman Ron Paul recently appeared on nationally syndicated radio and again reiterated his deep concern that foreign troops are mobilizing outside and inside America to be used as assets in a martial law takeover by the Bush administration. "It's a horrible precedent and it's all part of the NAFTA scheme and globalization and world government," Paul told the Alex Jones Show.

"Obviously they shouldn't be permitted. What I'd like to see is that we don't have our troops in foreign countries and if we needed a national guard that they were back here at home, that's the bigger problem. Then if there were foreign troops on our soil maybe our state officials could deal with that with their own national guard."

Paul elaborated on his fear that after the next crisis the government, in line with their own public statements, will use military assets to police Americans on a regular basis. "They're putting their back up against the wall and saying, if need be we're going to have martial law."

"We've heard all these statements by the President, by the administration, why they need more militarism at the federal government to keep people in check so nobody knows how this will turn out but I do know that the only thing we can do about it is try to alert the American people to what's going on so they can be prepared.

......On the subject of his drive to get the US out of the UN, Paul pointed out the staged good cop, bad cop nature of the US-UN relationship.

"The Bush administration started bashing the UN and threatening the UN with cutting some of the funding but it was all a game they were playing because they literally gave the UN more power in the name of a reform."

"Who do we have at the UN, Bolton, the arch Neo-Con warmonger and actually what they've done is taken the Neo-Con position on intervening on the internal affairs of other nations and regime change and they've institutionalized that in the United Nations, now the UN is in the business of regime change."

Well you gotta start with the paranoia basics: Alex Jones and the UN schemes!!! Not surprisingly, this is the kind of candidate Jones supports.

Pissed off conservatives are finding stuff to like about Paul. Andrew Sullivan, who long ago had to eat his hat over Iraq, is just one of the new Paul fans. The National Review crowd also had to give him due credit. A CNN commentator defends Paul's view of 9/11 and Blowback.

A right-wing talk show banned talk of Ron Paul. Interesting example of spontaneous censorship. Libertarian Reason Magazine is checking him out. U.S. News reports on his "online rise."

Anywho now we gotta get to the skeletons in the closet, the traditional instruments to discredit a political candidate. In Lyndon Johnson's first 1948 race for Congress, he told his campaign adviser to put out a rumor his opponent was having sex with livestock. Hunter Thompson's telling of the "ancient and honorable" tale of how LBJ defeated a wealthy pig farmer goes like so:

'Lyndon was running about 10 points behind, with only nine days to go... He was sunk in despair. He was desperate... he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference at two or two-thirty ( just after lunch on a slow news day) and accuse his high-riding opponent (the pig farmer) of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children... His campaign manager was shocked. 'We can't say that, Lyndon,' he said. 'It's not true.' 'Of course it's not,' Johnson barked at him, 'but let's make the bastard deny it.'

Ah, good times. LBJ went on to join forces with Brown & Root, one of his biggest financial patrons, helping them along to build military bases all over Vietnam. Profits for all except the taxpayers and families of dead soldiers. Gotta keep the wheel turning!

More below the fold - we'll lay out the major method to discredit Dr. Paul!