#3231: I have too much to do today.

As the drone rises above the treeline, though, the quiet buzz from the drones engines is interrupted by much louder bursts of sound from the nearby fields.

“Are they shootin’ at it?” asks one of the SHARK volunteers incredulously in a video taken at the time of the launch.

No. No. …it cannot be. Could it be that people armed with guns in preparation to shoot and kill flying birds might brazenly shoot at an expensive aircraft paid for by animal rights activists and equipped with video equipment intended to gather data with the intent of putting an end to their prized activity?!? No! It most certainly is not possible.

Then, as the drone staggers and begins to fall, the same SHARK [SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness] volunteer is heard saying, “Oh, dang it.”

…and with that stoic admission – and a collective gasp worldwide – we are left to conclude that, yes. Yes. …perhaps, it is possible.

A police report was filed by SHARK members in hopes that the hunters who shot down their survellance drone will be identified and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. On the video, the founder of SHARK expressed his lack of faith that local police will be working hard to identify the perpetrators. How odd his view… given the unconditional support that southern law enforcement has typically afforded animal rights groups.

As soon as we crossed the street, just two blocks from my house as the crow flies, the police car that just passed us hit its lights and wheeled around, with five others appearing almost immediately, all with lights flashing. The officers got out with tasers drawn demanding I raise my hands and step away from the child. I complied, and they roughly cuffed me, jerking my arms up behind me needlessly. Meanwhile, Ty edged up the hill away from the officers, crying. One of them called out in a comforting tone that they weren't there to hurt her, but another officer blew up any good will that might have garnered by brusquely snatching her up and scuttling her off to the back seat of one of the police cars.

Since raising those income taxes in January 2011, Illinois’ unemployment rate rose to 9.8% from 9% … at the same time when the unemployment rate dropped in 46 states.

And at the end of the day, Illinois has failed to solve the problem it originally intended to solve: its budget crisis. Now with higher unemployment and businesses leaving the state, Illinois has managed to increase its debt by $2 billion and now has a deficit of $7 billion.

...[T]he European Central Bank has just arbitrarily changed the terms of all of its Greek bonds with zero engagement with the market or any judicial review. They just changed the terms of their Greek bonds with the wave of their hand. In doing this, they have utterly SCREWED everyone else holding Greek paper, essentially making all other Greek bonds worthless with zero salvage value.

I am not going to speculate about anything this morning. No guesses about what the Finance Ministers might do on Monday, no simple addition or subtraction that the data used to forecast Greece’s return to a 120% debt to GDP ratio is a falsification of the numbers, no mention that only nineteen cents of any bailout for Greece would actually go to the country; I am not going to discuss anything except what the European Central Bank has actually done and what we now know with a one hundred percent (100%) certainty and the horrifying implications of their actions.

The ECB, on its own and without judicial or parliamentary review, has swapped their Greek debt for new Greek debt that is not subject to any “collective action clause.” They did this unilaterally and without the consent of any other sovereign debt bond owners of Greek debt. They did this without objection of any nation in Europe. They have retroactively changed the indenture, the contract made by Greece with all of the buyers of their bonds, when the debt was issued. There is no speculation involved in these statements, there is no longer any guesswork on what might be; the ECB swapped their bonds for new Greek bonds with the assent of the Greek government and it is now a done deal.

It is the “collective action clause” today but tomorrow it could be the maturity or the coupon or any other terms and conditions in an indenture. It is Greece today but tomorrow it could be France or Portugal or Italy. The “Rule of Law” has been abrogated and tossed aside in the name of political contrivance.

European sovereign debt must now be examined with a new set of metrics. How much yield would investors demand if an IBM indenture, as an example, had language that stated “This indenture is subject, at any time during the life of the bond, to any changes mandated by the Federal Reserve Bank.” Stated another way, what yields would be acceptable to bond investors if there was a Federal statute that said “All indentures in the United States may be changed at will by the Federal Reserve Bank upon their sole discretion.” No “Rule of Law,” no judicial appeal and a fait accompli whenever desired. This is, in terrifying fact, exactly what the European Central Bank has done and if we no longer know what we are buying and if the terms and conditions of an investment can be altered retroactively at will without the consent of bond holders and to the advantage of the ECB then either we should not buy these credits, as in Atlas shrugged, or yields should be in the mid-range of junk bonds because European sovereign bond indentures now are worth no more than the paper on which they are printed.