Democracy Now! | Bill Moyers asks: "Why will Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! never show up on 'Meet The Press?'" (watch video)

Democracy Now! | Bill Moyers asks: "Why will Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! never show up on 'Meet The Press?'" (watch video): "JAY ROSEN: You know what’s really striking to me about this, is Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Colin Powell, when he retired from the government, he said that the people in power: Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld especially, were, in his view, radicals. That the radicals were the people actually running the government.

And this idea that the people in power were kind of outside the sphere of normal government, never made its way into the establishment press at all. The idea that Wilkerson could have been right, that the real radicals were running the federal government, never really penetrated their narrative at all.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the fact that so many in the press, pundits and others as well, were saying Obama has to be bipartisan?

JAY ROSEN: I think that the ideology of the press is not so much liberal or conservative. They think themselves the keepers of realism, of savviness. I think the real religion of the American press is savviness. And in their view, it isn’t savvy to say you’re going to mobilize the anger and frustration of the American people and bring that power to Washington to change it."

Grow your own food!

California
California is facing its worst drought in recorded history . The drought is predicted to be the most severe in modern times, worse than those in 1977 and 1991. Thousands of acres of row crops already have been fallowed, with more to follow. The snowpack in the Northern Sierra, home to some of the state's most important reservoirs, proved to be just 49 percent of average. Water agencies throughout the state are scrambling to adopt conservation mandates.

Texas
The Texan drought is reaching historic proportion . Dry conditions near Austin and San Antonio have been exceeded only once before—the drought of 1917-18. 88 percent of Texas is experiencing abnormally dry conditions, and 18 percent of the state is in either extreme or exceptional drought conditions. The drought areas have been expanding almost every month. Conditions in Texas are so bad cattle are keeling over in parched pastures and dying. Lack of rainfall has left pastures barren, and cattle producers have resorted to feeding animals hay. Irreversible damage has been done to winter wheat crops in Texas. Both short and long-term forecasts don't call for much rain at all, which means the Texas drought is set to get worse.

Augusta Region (Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina)
The Augusta region has been suffering from a worsening two year drought. Augusta's rainfall deficit is already approaching 2 inches so far in 2009, with January being the driest since 1989.

Florida
Florida has been hard hit by winter drought, damaging crops, and half of state is in some level of a drought.

Evil Fucktards Defined-read the whole post

And they have done and are doing a bucket load of things to keep farmers and everyone else from having any access at all to buying, collecting, and saving of NORMAL seeds.

1. They've bought up the seed companies across the midwest.

2. They've written Monsanto seed laws and gotten legislators to put them through, that make cleaning, collecting and storing of seeds so onerous in terms of fees and paperwork and testing and tracking every variety and being subject to fines, that having normal seed becomes almost impossible (an NAIS approach to wiping out normal seeds). Does your state have such a seed law? Before they existed, farmers just collected the seeds and put them in sacks in the shed and used them the next year, sharing whatever they wished with friends and neighbors, selling some if they wanted. That's been killed.

In Illinois which has such a seed law, Madigan, the Speaker of the House, his staff is Monsanto lobbyists.

3. Monsanto is pushing anti-democracy laws (Vilsack's brainchild, actually) that remove community' control over their own counties so farmers and citizens can't block the planting of GMO crops even if they can contaminate other crops. So if you don't want a GM-crop that grows industrial chemicals or drugs or a rice growing with human DNA in it, in your area and mixing with your crops, tough luck.

Check the map of just where the Monsanto/Vilsack laws are and see if your state is still a democracy or is Monsanto's. A farmer in Illinois told me he heard that Bush had pushed through some regulation that made this true in every state. People need to check on that.

4. For sure there are Monsanto regulations buried in the FDA right now that make a farmer's seed cleaning equipment illegal (another way to leave nothing but GM-seeds) because it's now considered a "source of seed contamination." Farmer can still seed clean but the equipment now has to be certified and a farmer said it would require a million to a million and half dollar building and equipment ... for EACH line of seed. Seed storage facilities are also listed (another million?) and harvesting and transport equipment. And manure. Something that can contaminate seed. Notice that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are not mentioned.
   

Fantastic news people, friggin fantastic

Chinese earthquake may have been man-made, say scientists - Telegraph: "The 511ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicentre, of the Sichuan earthquake.

Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.

Fan Xiao, the chief engineer of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau in Chengdu, said it was 'very likely' that the construction and filling of the reservoir in 2004 had led to the disaster"

USA: Safety of Tasers questioned as death toll hits 334-mark | Amnesty International

USA: Safety of Tasers questioned as death toll hits 334-mark | Amnesty International: "The call came as the organization released one of the most detailed reports to date on the safety of the stun gun. The report “USA: Less than lethal?” is being published as the number of people who died after being struck by Tasers in the USA reached 334 between 2001 and August 2008.

“Tasers are not the ‘non-lethal’ weapons they are portrayed to be,” said Angela Wright, US researcher at Amnesty International and author of the report. “They can kill and should only be used as a last resort.”

“The problem with Tasers is that they are inherently open to abuse, as they are easy to carry and easy to use and can inflict severe pain at the push of a button, without leaving substantial marks,” said Angela Wright."

I love Massachusetts

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

What Red Ink? Wall St. Paid Fat Bonuses - NYTimes.com

"Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year."

things

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather
stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the
treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the
terrible boredom of pain.

I have been in thinking mode again. raging, enormous, impatient and inherently
unsatisfying. I have thought too, about these periods where i think like this.

The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet
or disused tool room. In the room, a child is sitting. It could be a
boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is
feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become
imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose
and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits
hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is
afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it
knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and
nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes,
except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or
interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person,
or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the
child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at
it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug
are hastily filled, the door is locked; the eyes disappear. The people
at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always
lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother's
voice, sometimes speaks. "I will be good, " it says. "Please let me
out. I will be good!" They never answer. The child used to scream for
help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of
whining, "eh-haa, eh-haa," and it speaks less and less often. It is so
thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on
a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks
and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own
excrement continually.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have
come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They
all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and
some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty
of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of
their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their
makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of
their skies, depend wholly on this child's abominable misery.


I sometimes hope that the thought rages lead somewhere, let me develop a
truly more compelling understanding, but I hope I would choose to have them
even if they are no more than the unimaginative ramblings of a mediocre mind.

these times

I can say the sun
Burns much brighter today
I can see my path though

Clouds darken my way
Yeah I've got this feeling
It's something I find hard to explain
See I wasn't looking
But girl I'm glad I fell in your way

I don't get to watch the inauguration tomorrow because I will be working. I mean I will follow it on the sites who are made up of people who are as deeply invested in this moment as I am and that will help, but I will not get to watch it as it happens. I won't get to see for myself that the power structure has changed and death doesn't follow.

Maybe 2012 is the end of the world or maybe it is just the beginning of the age of Aquarius and I'll get to see it. These times, this life, the content of the story as it is written, are immense and deeply satisfying. I have seen more than I could have imagined and now feel capable of observing and grasping even more. Maybe for a moment I know that the abstract story with no obvious points of intersect is as fascinating as the story of those who get to execute to long known desires. I look forward to tomorrow with unabashed hope.

Fuck Yeah

When Bush came into office the US had a US$237 billion surplus. Three days after 9/11, on September 14, 2001, his approval rate was 86%. By mid-2004, the budget deficit was in excess of $400 billion - and growing. (Thanks in large part to a big bipartisan majority in Congress having happily passed his $1.35 trillion package of tax cuts to the rich in May 2001.)

By mid-December 2008, his popularity ratings had plunged to 23% - only one point from an all-time low in every poll taken since 1938. Still, at 30% this month, this means that almost one in three Americans still approve of his job. H L Mencken must be wallowing in horror in his grave.

Coming close to destroying a superpower and the global economy virtually single-handedly is not bad for someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth who never held a steady job until the age of 45 - until "turd blossom" Karl Rove, the little, fat, bald Machiavelli, engineered him as the ultimate, corporate-pleasing, Southern Strategy lethal weapon, and Bush family consigliere James Baker turned a massive electoral fraud, mostly in Florida and Ohio, into a hijacked mandate via the Supreme Court. (American corporate media, by the way, loved it.)

anywhere in the multi verse

my brother and I have many odd arguments. One of our more recent ones is what it means to be an outlier. My definition was that you had to think outside of not only what society defined but also what your family judged you on to be a true outlier. my brother leaves for what might be described as another universe from what we know soon. here's hoping that being an outlier can be a good thing.

assholes

So the world is going to hell and these assholes are still trying get away with it. I think we need to reinstate public shaming. Make them stand in stocks in front of the Wall Street bull.

Wow

Five days have passed since a BART police officer shot and killed an unarmed rider on a station platform, but the officer has not given a statement to investigators about what happened and the transit agency has apparently not forced him to do so.

• Muni catching 50 percent more fare evaders 01.07.09

The delay comes as witnesses emerge with their accounts of what happened, some with video footage of the incident recorded on cellular phones. The hold-up is one reason why BART officials - even in the face of public outcry - have said little publicly about the shooting, including whether they believe it was justified.

BART has not released the officer's name, but The Chronicle has learned that the officer is two-year BART police veteran Johannes Mehserle, who turned 27 on Monday and whose first child was born within a day or two of the shooting - an event that may be a contributing factor to why Mehserle has not yet explained the shooting to investigators.

Even though you knew, still really creepy to see it reported

An e-mail written by a senior FBI agent in Iraq in 2004 specifically stated that President George W. Bush had signed an Executive Order approving the use of military dogs, sleep deprivation and other tactics to intimidate Iraqi detainees.

The FBI e-mail--dated May 22, 2004--followed disclosures about abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and sought guidance on whether FBI agents in Iraq were obligated to report the U.S. military’s harsh interrogation of inmates when that treatment violated FBI standards but fit within the guidelines of a presidential Executive Order.

The FBI e-mail was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The White House had emphatically denied that any such presidential Executive Order existed, calling the unnamed FBI official who wrote the e-mail “mistaken.”

The ACLU has called on Congress to demand that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate whether the President and other officials broke federal and international laws, “including the War Crimes Act, the federal Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws.”

President Bush and his representatives have denied repeatedly that the administration condones “torture,” although senior administration officials have acknowledged subjecting “high-value” terror suspects to aggressive interrogation techniques, including the “waterboarding” — or simulated drowning — of three al-Qaeda detainees.

moments

I'm in Logan airport about to go through security...on my way to Omaha. I have the gear, noise canceling ear phones, kindle books and comfy outfit and slip off shoes. Still I wish the decision I made didn't mean I have to be here pretending that it doesn't really sadden me that sitting in an airport watching planes take off meant potential for adventure and magic instead of the overwhelming sense of whatever the opposite of that is. I thought I left that behind me in Phoenix. Instead I managed to recreate it or I am really just fundamentally lacking in optimism and the story I am in is irrelevant because my point of view has failed to improve.

Are we human?

Pay my respects to grace and virtue
Send my condolences to good
Give my regards to soul and romance,
They always did the best they could
And so long to devotion
You taught me everything I know
Wave goodbye
Wish me well..
You've got to let me go

Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see better | Society | The Guardian

Inventor's 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world's poorest see better | Society | The Guardian: "Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device's tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.

The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

Silver calls his flash of insight a 'tremendous glimpse of the obvious' - namely that opticians weren't necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000."

Time in a bottle

Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery. In 1994, Schmidt was working on his own survey of prehistoric sites in the region. After reading a brief mention of the stone-littered hilltop in the University of Chicago researchers' report, he decided to go there himself. From the moment he first saw it, he knew the place was extraordinary.

Massachusetts rocks!

BOSTON – His repeated warnings that Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff was running a giant Ponzi scheme have cast Harry Markopolos as an unheeded prophet.

But people who know or worked with Markopolos say it wasn't prescience that helped him foresee the collapse of Madoff's alleged $50 billion fraud. Instead, they say diligence and a strong moral sense drove his quixotic, nine-year quest to alert regulators about Madoff.

"He followed through on everything he ever did. He never let up," said his mother, Georgia Markopolos, in an interview Thursday. "Some kids just let it go if it's too hard, but he wouldn't do that."

"He feels very sorry for these people that got taken," she added. "It wouldn't have happened if they would have listened to him long ago."

Markopolos waged a remarkable battle to uncover fraud at Madoff's operation, sounding the alarm back in 1999 and continuing with his warnings all through this decade. The government never acted, Madoff continued his ways, and people lost billions.

Markopolos reached his conclusion with the help of mathematicians like Dan diBartolomeo, whose analysis of the Madoff's methods in 1999 helped fuel Markopolos' suspicions.

"People should have seen the writing on the wall," diBartolomeo said.

Markopolos did not respond to multiple e-mail or phone requests for an interview.

The 52-year-old resident of Whitman, about 20 miles south of Boston, grew up in Erie, Pa., the oldest of three siblings.

Women's rights activist beheaded in Iraq - CNN.com

Women's rights activist beheaded in Iraq - CNN.com: "BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Gunmen broke into the house of a women's rights activist in the volatile northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk on Thursday and beheaded her, police said."

Thoughts on singlehood

Nobody wants to go it on their own And everyone wants to know they´re not alone. Somebody else that feels the same somewhere?
There `s gotta be somebody for me out there.
Nobody wants to be the last one there And everyone wants to feel like someone cares. Somebody else that feels the same somewhere? There's gotta be somebody for me out there.

One could rightfully fault me for using Nickleback lyrics as the kick off to this post, but as redundant as their melodies maybe, I do find their lyrics to often be quite succinct and poignant. I am sure that reflects poorly on my level of sophistication but so be it. So this Christmas marks 5 years of essentially being single. I mean there have been dates and even some follow on dates and a couple of possibly more than just dates, but for the most part I have not had a romantic reference point for 5 years. In that 5 years, many of my peers have married and had multiple children. So I have spent some amount of time wondering about the difference inherent in living your life single and living your life with a partner and especially with children.

Some things are surprising to me. I expected to feel envy, absence or some level of something missing as I see my peers raise their families. So far that has not been the case. Part of that I know is my deep ambivalence about being a mother that existed even when I had the boy and the ring and the path to the house in some hip urban neighborhood in the plan. I get to know personally that I saw that path and it did not ignite rainbows and unicorns in my heart of hearts. It mostly ignited resignation to predictable obligation that I felt already far too familiar with. But part of it, is also the reality that even with partners and children, me and my friends aren't all that different. Our day to day struggles aren't very comparable. I can't for the life of me imagine how one keeps functioning when all the children have the flu and unpleasant fluids are pouring unceremoniously out of multiple orifices, but I am sure that my life of basically being a nomad and dealing with stuff sometimes I don't even understand seems very odd to them. Yet, still we are friends on a level that I dare say challenges most of my romantic interactions for support, honesty, complexity and fun.

But with all that, there is the inherent difference that being single means going through life without the context offered by those domestic relationships. It means that even if I were to meet a great companion and go forward in companionship, that these years are only mine. That is both a good and bad thing and I don't know if I will think well of how I have spent them. I hope that the lack of external markers of progress won't mean that I forget the internal and external battles fought and either won or lost. I hope I will value the time without a reference point, but it is the thing about singlehood. Only you know if you are making any progress.

Where we should be aiming for!

Japan as ground zero for no-waste lifestyle - Yahoo! News: "At Toyota's Tsutsumi assembly plant in Nagoya, Japan's answer to Detroit, evidence of a more environmentally sensitive car industry is on display before you even walk through a door. What was once a vast, gray expanse of industrial might has come to life – literally.

Large trees – 50,000 were planted in May – dot the visitor parking lot to offer a soothing greeting, says the plant's 'sustainable initiative' manager. Insulating vines wend their way up the outside of an employee locker building. Some 22,000 square meters of ex-terior walls are coated with photocatalytic paint that, Toyota says, mirrors the ability of 2,000 poplars to absorb nitrous oxide and process oxygen.

The roof of the visitor center is a mat of grass, designed to reduce waves of heat by 3 degrees C. Solar lights dot the streets and 800-kilowatt solar panels blanket the tops of buildings. Even the red roadside flowers were genetically engineered to absorb noxious emissions and help evaporate water."

Breathtaking

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Oh yeah, this is really happening

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States, which prides itself on being the breadbasket of the world, will see its agricultural exports drop 10 percent next year and, for the first time since the late 1950s, will cease to be a net exporter of food, according to a government projection.

The forecast, released by the Department of Agriculture, said overseas sales of US agricultural products were expected to slide to 56 billion dollars in fiscal 2005, down from 62.3 billion the previous year, due to depressed world prices for grains, oilseeds and cotton, "and increased foreign competition."

Racism is breathtaking

Many people made it clear that they were deeply apprehensive about Mr. Obama, though some said they were hoping for the best.

“I think any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things,” George W. Newman, a director at a local bank and the former owner of a trucking business, said over lunch at Yellow Creek Fish and Steak.

Don Dollar, the administrative assistant at City Hall, said bitterly that anyone not upset with Mr. Obama’s victory should seek religious forgiveness.

“This is a community that’s supposed to be filled with a bunch of Christian folks,” he said. “If they’re not disappointed, they need to be at the altar.”

Customers of Bill Pennington, a barber whose downtown shop is decorated with hunting and fishing trophies, were “scared because they heard he had a Muslim background,” Mr. Pennington said over the country music on the radio. “Over and over again I heard that.”

Mr. Obama remains an unknown quantity in this corner of the South, and there are deep worries about the changes he will bring.

“I am concerned,” Gail McDaniel, who owns a cosmetics business, said in the parking lot of the Shop and Save. “The abortion thing bothers me. Same-sex marriage.”

“I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks,” she added. “From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.”

Amazing

Sing Fat Lady, Sing loud!

Police continue search for missing pregnant girl - NC Wanted

Police continue search for missing pregnant girl - NC Wanted: "Durham, N.C. — Durham police continued this week to search for a missing 12-year-old girl who is pregnant.

Investigators believe that Tekenya Wooten ran away from her home at 3529 Manford Drive on Saturday, Oct. 18. Tekenya is eight months pregnant.

Police Chief Jose Lopez said that Tekenya's disapperance does not meet the requirements for an Amber Alert, but police are 'very concerned about her welfare, and we are actively looking for her.'"

Because those assholes are wealthy enough?

Editorial - So Little Time, So Much Damage - NYTimes.com:

"The administration has taken other disturbing steps in recent weeks. In late September, the I.R.S. restored tax breaks for banks that take big losses on bad loans inherited through acquisitions. Now we learn that JPMorgan Chase and others are planning to use their bailout funds for mergers and acquisitions, transactions that will be greatly enhanced by the new tax subsidy."

WTF?

Mercenary Firm Offers to 'Detain Troublemakers' on Election Day (Updated) | Danger Room from Wired.com: "CIA-linked private military contractor Evergreen Defense & Security Services offered to post sentries at Oregon election offices on Tuesday, 'detaining troublemakers' and making sure voters 'do not get out of control.'"

I love me some science!

Leukaemia drug can halt, reverse MS - Yahoo! News: "LONDON (AFP) – Researchers at the University of Cambridge said Thursday they have found that a drug originally developed to treat leukaemia can halt and even reverse the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis (MS).

In trials, alemtuzumab reduced the number of attacks in sufferers and also helped them recover lost functions, apparently allowing damaged brain tissue to repair so that individuals were less disabled than at the start of the study.

'The ability of an MS drug to promote brain repair is unprecedented,' said Dr Alasdair Coles, a lecturer at Cambridge university's department of clinical neurosciences, who coordinated many aspects of the study."

Let it burn baby, Let it burn.

Truthdig - Reports - The Idiots Who Rule America: "Andrew Lahde, the Santa Monica, Calif., hedge fund manager who made an 870 percent gain last year by betting on the subprime mortgage collapse, has abruptly shut down his fund, citing the risk of trading with faltering banks. In his farewell letter to his investors he excoriated the elites who run our investment houses, banks and government.

“The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking,” he said of our oligarchic class. “These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.”"

I feel so much safer, you?

The Atlantic Online | November 2008 | The Things He Carried | Jeffrey Goldberg: "We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schnei­er took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled “saline solution.”

“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.

“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”

“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”

They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schnei­er held up the bottle and said to the nearest security officer, “This is okay, right?” “Yep,” the officer said. “Just have to put it in the tray.”

“Maybe if you lit it on fire, he’d pay attention,” I said, risking arrest for making a joke at airport security. (Later, Schnei­er would carry two bottles labeled saline solution—24 ounces in total—through security. An officer asked him why he needed two bottles. “Two eyes,” he said. He was allowed to keep the bottles.)"

Random thoughts

It has been nearly a year since i started my quest to live mindfully in response to a deep bout of cynicism.

Mindfulness is concentrated awareness of one's thoughts, actions or motivations.

I will say outright that the effort has in fact made a significant difference in how I interact with life. It has made me appreciate and be aware of dynamics that before were mostly appreciated in theory and in brief glimpses. As I delve more deeply into this life, I am frustrated with the fact that it seems to only grow in complexity and in some ways opacity. Things I thought I knew, I no longer know. Universal truths I believed in have proven to be illusions. The one universal has been the desire for home. To define and create a home and have a space where I exist symbiotically with the space around me. That has been the goal maybe always even when I didn't know what it was or why it was true. So that is the real question, has this awareness gotten me closer to home? dunno.

PROGRESS WORTH CELEBRATING!

Ugandan community outlaws female circumcision - Yahoo! News: "KAMPALA (AFP) – A community in eastern Uganda that has practiced female genital mutilation 'since time immemorial' has banned the ritual, a local official told AFP on Wednesday.

'The community decided that it was not useful, that women were not getting anything out of it, so the district council decided to establish an ordinance banning it,' said Nelson Chelimo, chairman of Kapchorwa district."

Sex really is bad for you.....

ABC News: The Oral Sex Cancer Connection: "The virus is transmitted by direct contact. You only get HPV in the location it attaches to, so it never travels through the bloodstream.

So just exactly how it gets in the mouth may stun you.

'There is absolutely a link between oral sex and oral cancer,' said Dr. Ellen Rome, of the Cleveland Clinic.

Although no proof exists yet, there is a chance that HPV can be transmitted mouth to mouth.

'We can't rule out the virus could be transmitted in saliva by other types of contact — like for instance sharing a drink or sharing a spoon,' said Dr. Maura Gillison, of Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center."

Zack Exley: The New Organizers, Part 1: What's really behind Obama's ground game

Zack Exley: The New Organizers, Part 1: What's really behind Obama's ground game: "We saw glimpses of the potential for this kind of organizing campaign in MoveOn's 2004 and 2006 volunteer operations, the Dean Campaign and even the Bush and Kerry campaigns. And there are great examples of this kind of organizing if you go back to the social movements of several decades ago. But the Obama campaign is the first in the Internet era to realize the dream of a disciplined, volunteer-driven, bottom-up-AND-top-down, distributed and massively scaleable organizing campaign. For anyone who knows how many times this has failed to happen, this is practically an apocryphal event. Marashal Ganz, who is an advisor to the national field campaign, and one of the main architects of the team model, said he's been waiting 40 years for it.

A well-run organizing campaign is the most beautiful thing in the world: people know what they're working for; they have little successes everyday; they prepare for problems ahead of time and have great fun attacking them when they happen. Everyone is in a state of constant euphoria. In the end, win or lose, you have built something that gives you hope for the future—hope that humanity can, as it turns out, work cooperatively towards a better future and succeed."

Are the times begining to change?

RAFAEL LARA GRAJALES, Mexico – An angry crowd in central Mexico attacked police and helped nearly three dozen illegal Central American immigrants escape from custody after hearing that officers had allegedly sold the migrants to human smugglers, officials said Monday.

Hundreds of people attacked police as they were trying to load the 34 immigrants into a van Sunday in the farming town of Rafael Lara Grajales, Puebla, state prosecutor Rodolfo Igor Archundia said.

The migrants fled in the chaos, but 21 were quickly caught. Police were searching for the other 13.

After being detained initially, the Central American migrants were allegedly handed over by police to human smugglers who held them for four days at a house. They escaped Sunday with the help of neighbors.

The neighbors then took the migrants to the mayor's office, where they waited outside in the plaza. Hundreds more townsfolk gathered to show support.

The violence erupted when a van arrived to take the migrants away. Members of the crowd shouted "Don't get in!" One woman yelled, "They've already suffered a lot! Let them leave!"

The van sped out of the plaza with only 20 of the migrants on board. The protesters chased the vehicle and hurled rocks at it, and police responded with tear gas.

Some of the migrants jumped out of the van windows. The rioters set fire to a patrol car, two motorcycles and a truck. Eight rioters were arrested.

State Interior Secretary Mario Montero Serrano said five police officers are under investigation for allegedly selling the migrants for $100 each.

Evis Casco, a native of Honduras, said the smugglers stabbed him in the hands until he gave them a phone number of relatives in the United States. He said they were hoping the relatives would send money.

"They tortured me until I gave it to them, but it won't do them much good. My family is poor," said Casco, whose hands were bandaged.

Central American immigrants often suffer abuse and extortion while crossing Mexico on the way to the United States. It is rare for Mexicans to come to their defense.

Love her!

Her Highness, Queen Latifah, Still Rules - NYTimes.com: "With or without makeup, Latifah’s face is at the center of her fortune. With her almond-shaped eyes and sweeping cheekbones, she could have been painted by Gauguin, though her beauty is recognizably her own, animated by a warmth, humor and innate self-confidence most women would kill for. Her stardom, in movies and television, has come from her gifts at playing the underdog or the outsider, the thick girl in body only, whose heart and brain are her best defense against the villainously rich, skinny and cutthroat. You can’t help rooting for her."

ha ha ha hah

God I love a crisis. This shit is great. You can't make it up. Thinking of protesting? Don't. GO see a movie, hang out with friends, listen to some music. There is nothing you can do now, but grab some popcorn and hoard some spam.

yup, start really panicking like right now

EYKJAVIK, Iceland – This volcanic island near the Arctic Circle is on the brink of becoming the first "national bankruptcy" of the global financial meltdown.

Home to just 320,000 people on a territory the size of Kentucky, Iceland has formidable international reach because of an outsized banking sector that set out with Viking confidence to conquer swaths of the British economy — from fashion retailers to top soccer teams.

The strategy gave Icelanders one of the world's highest per capita incomes. But now they are watching helplessly as their economy implodes — their currency losing almost half its value, and their heavily exposed banks collapsing under the weight of debts incurred by lending in the boom times.

"Everything is closed. We couldn't sell our stock or take money from the bank," said Johann Sigurdsson as he left a branch of Landsbanki in downtown Reykjavik.

The government had earlier announced it had nationalized the bank under emergency laws enacted to deal with the crisis.

"We have been forced to take decisive action to save the country," Prime Minister Geir H. Haarde said of those sweeping new powers that allow the government to take over companies, limit the authority of boards, and call shareholder meetings.

A full-blown collapse of Iceland's financial system would send shock waves across Europe, given the heavy investment by Icelandic banks and companies across the continent.

Chemical irritant empties Islamic Society of Greater Dayton's mosque

Chemical irritant empties Islamic Society of Greater Dayton's mosque: "DAYTON — Baboucarr Njie was preparing for his prayer session Friday night, Sept. 26, when he heard children in the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton coughing. Soon, Njie himself was overcome with fits of coughing and, like the rest of those in the building, headed for the doors.

'I would stay outside for a minute, then go back in, there were a lot of kids,' Njie said. 'My throat is still itchy, I need to get some milk.'

Njie was one of several affected when a suspected chemical irritant was sprayed into the mosque at 26 Josie St., bringing Dayton police, fire and hazardous material personnel to the building at 9:48 p.m."

Being aware in the present moment

I spent a lot of time trying to employ the principles layed out in Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are in hopes of handling a stressful period in my life in a more productive way. It was very effective and I continue to strive to be aware in my daily life.

That is until this shit started raining down like a fucking deluge. I would like to go back to the world inside my head. It's much more pleasant there.thanks.

God I love DailyKos

So for those of you trying to understand how this happened, their is a brilliant post walking though the history on DailyKos. Here are the numbers. Tell me the bastards haven't known far ages this shit was going to explode and make everyone really really smelly.

How big did this market become? Here's business correspondent Bob Moon and host Kai Ryssdal on American Public Media's Marketplace from back in the spring.

BOB MOON: OK, I'm about to unload some numbers on you here, so I'll speak slowly so you can follow this.

The value of the entire U.S. Treasuries market: $4.5 trillion.

The value of the entire mortgage market: $7 trillion.

The size of the U.S. stock market: $22 trillion.

OK, you ready?

The size of the credit default swap market last year: $45 trillion.

KAI RYSSDAL: That's a lot of money, Bob.

Thievery explained

"Paulson, Bernanke, and Congress are conspiring to make the US taxpayer the fall guy for financial stupidity by banks and brokers. Congress is now willing to ram through legislation at the last moment, even though Senate Majority Leader Reid Says 'No One Knows What to Do'.

Please consider Paulson, Bernanke Push New Proposal to Cleanse Balance Sheets (at taxpayer expense)."

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke proposed moving troubled assets from the balance sheets of American financial companies into a new institution.

Options under consideration include establishing an $800 billion fund to purchase so-called failed assets and a separate $400 billion pool at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to insure investors in money-market funds, said two people briefed by congressional staff who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans may change.

Mish's Comment: I too would want to be anonymous for forever and a day if I was sponsoring a $1.2 trillion bailout of US corporations at taxpayer expense.

Another possibility is using Fannie and Freddie, the federally chartered mortgage-finance companies seized by the government last week, to buy assets, one of the people said.

"We will try to put a bill together and do it fairly quickly," House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, said after the meeting. "We are not in a position to give you any specifics right now" on the proposals, he said when asked about the potential cost.

Mish's Comment: Now there's "good thinking"! There is no time to act, so let's act quickly by passing a $1.2 trillion bailout quick enough so Congressional recess can happen on schedule.

Regardless of your party affiliation, and with the exception of Ron Paul, I urge everyone to vote against the incumbent in every race.

Professor Bennet Sedacca

The Pain Trade

The Federal Government just declared war on short sellers.
Will it help the real economy? No sir.
Will it help the value of my house? Nope.
Will it blow up hedge funds? Yep.
Is it a selling opportunity? You betcha.
Will the rally last ? No.
Will earnings increase? Actually I think they will fall.

My conclusion? The pain trade, after this burst, is a crash in October. Yes, a crash. I am not talking my book as my firm is delta neutral.

What makes me ill is that folks in the media are the mouth pieces of irresponsible Government officials.

I am sick to my stomach watching Socialism take over. And with that, I head to the Ryder Cup.

They say Village Idiots, I say Crooks who should be shot

Don't let them tell you this economic meltdown is a complicated mess. It's not. Our national financial crisis is readily understood by anyone who has seen greed and hypocrisy. But we are now witnessing them on a profound, monumental scale.

Conservative Republicans always want the government to stay out of business and avoid regulation as long as they are making lots of money. When their greed, however, gets them into a fix, they are the first to cry out for rules and laws and taxpayer money to bail out their businesses. Obviously, Republicans are socialists. The Bush administration has decided to socialize the debt of the big Wall Street Firms. Taxpayers didn't get to enjoy any of the big money profits on the phony financial instruments like derivatives or bundled sub-prime paper, but we get the privilege of paying for their debt and failures.

Let's just consider the money. The public bailout of insurance giant (becoming a dwarf) AIG is estimated at $85 billion. According to one report, that's more than the Bush administration spent on Aid to Families with Dependent Children during his entire time in office. That amount of money would also pay for health care for every man, woman, and child in America for at least six months.

a couch and its meaning in life

So I had notions of a time in my life where I would have a great job, a great apartment and I would get to create my own space in the world. Well in January 2007, I got the job and a loft apartment with 18 ft windows, dry cleaning, gym and 24 hr front desk coverage. Now here it is September 2008 and it looks like I have to sell my awesome couch to people who will not appreciate it because the notion was not what made me happy. I would like to think of this as a learning experience. A relatively painless way to discover that what makes a person happy can be far different than that person might have envisioned. Instead, I sit here staring at the couch deeply confused as to what the next notion/vision is supposed to be. I spent a lot of time getting to that apartment. Now I am supposed to create a new vision with no confidence that a new vision won't result in a similar result? Life is a pain in my ass. And Oprah doesn't know the goddamn answer either. That is all

We are so fucked

Now, I have been predicting this economic collapse along with others for awhile, but I am completely flabbergasted with the absolute lack of sanity and that is going along with it. These people are nuts. Oh and so much for their free market principles. assholes.

3 Hours a FCUKING day?

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong:

"Somehow I Think I Knew This Already...

From Gordon's Notes:

Exercise cannot control obesity gene associated weight gain: The title on this SciAm summary is silly...

Do I look fat in these genes? Exercise can cancel out effects of 'heavy-weight' DNA: Scientific American Blog: ... Physically active people who carry gene mutations linked to obesity are no more likely to be overweight than those without the variants -- as long as they exercise at least three hours a day...

Exercising 3+ hours a day is not compatible with life in a post-industrial world. If these results turned out be generalizable to a reasonable portion of the obese population (big if), then we'd know that exercise won't control our expanding (sorry) obesity problem. We already know diet doesn't work, so here's hoping for great drugs ...

Either that, or we get rid of our cars ..."

BBC NEWS | Africa | Sudan 'kills refugees in Darfur'

BBC NEWS | Africa | Sudan 'kills refugees in Darfur': "Sudanese troops have opened fire inside a Darfur refugee camp, leaving 27 people dead, a rebel group has said.

Some 100 government trucks surrounded the Kalma camp, home to some 90,000 people who have fled their homes in Darfur, a rebel spokesman told the BBC.

There is no independent confirmation of the reports but international sources have been told that Sudan wants to disarm the camp's residents.

More than two million people have fled five years of conflict in Darfur.

Ahmed Abdel Shafie, who heads a faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army, told the BBC that the government wants to force people to leave the camp."

Another rebel leader puts the number of those killed higher. Abdel Wahed Mohamed al-Nur, said that 50 people had been killed.

"This really is a catastrophe. People are being killed while the world just watches," he said.

Seriously, maybe we are little less stupid?

CHURCH AND STATE.... About a week ago, at the candidate forum at Saddleback Church, the Rev. Rick Warren kicked off the event with a fairly straightforward message: "We believe in the separation of church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics."

As it turns out, a growing number of Americans disagree.

For the first time in more than a decade, a narrow majority of Americans say churches should stay out of politics, according to a poll released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The results suggest a potentially significant shift among conservative voters in particular. In 2004, 30% of conservatives said the church should stay out of politics while today 50% of conservatives today express that view.

Conservatives are now more in line with moderates and liberals when it comes to their views on mixing religion and politics. "Similarly, the sharp divisions between Republicans and Democrats that previously existed on this issue have disappeared," Pew reports.

The results are encouraging, and more than a little surprising. In the decade between 1996 and 2006, Pew Forum surveys showed a stable trend -- a narrow majority of Americans wanted houses of worship to be publicly engaged in policy debates. Now, the numbers have reversed, and a narrow majority wants ministries to "stay out."

There's bound to be debate as to how this trend developed, but my best guess would be a combination of public disgust for the religious right movement and the unpopularity of George W. Bush, who has been enthusiastic in mixing religion and politics.

That said, I suppose the next politically salient question is how this might affect the 2008 race. The conventional wisdom suggests Barack Obama has been more proactive in adding a religious component to his campaign than John McCain, which might help the Democrat connect with the faithful.

But what if, after eight years of Bush, voters are moving in the other direction?

Hell yes we need this!

Friends with benefits

They're there for you in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad -- and yet where the law is concerned, your friends don't mean squat. According to The Boston Globe, however, some scholars think this should change: They think that friendship should be granted legal recognition, with some of the rights and privileges restricted to family expanded to include designated friends.

"These could be invoked on a case-by-case basis," explains the Globe, "eligibility to take time off to care for a sick friend under an equivalent of the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. Or they could take the form of an official legal arrangement between two friends, designating a bundle of mutual rights and privileges ... One scholar even suggests giving friends standing in the tax code, allowing taxpayers to write off certain 'friend expenditures.'" The result would be, as Laura Rosenbury, a law professor at Washington University, put it, legally recognized "friends with benefits."

I think some aspects of the idea would be more of a bureaucratic hassle than they'd be worth, like the idea of adapting the tax code to allow for "friend expenditures." But others make good sense; as Jane Gross points out in a related article in the New York Times, having a legal arrangement with a friend would be very beneficial for single, childless people worried about who might care for them in old age. As the Globe points out, "If a person is incapacitated and has no functional familial relationships, friends are not typically permitted to make medical decisions, unless designated in advance. Hospitals often restrict visitors to kin, or allow family members to vet visitors, which can cause anguish when friends and families come into conflict."

That's why David Chambers, a law professor at the University of Michigan, suggests "permitting people to register as 'designated friends' with mutual benefits and obligations. The friends would have the right (and duty) to make financial and medical decisions on each other's behalf in case of incapacitation; they'd have the same medical leave and testimonial privileges as spouses; and if one died without a will, the other would be entitled to a share of the estate."

So what do you think? In an age where more and more Americans are single and childless, does it make sense to grant legal rights to their friends? Or are there certain rights and privileges that should be reserved for family members and spouses?

― Catherine Price

55 men netted in 8-month Calif. child porn probe - Yahoo! News

55 men netted in 8-month Calif. child porn probe - Yahoo! News: "LOS ANGELES - Authorities say a California sheriff's deputy and an attorney were among 55 men charged with possessing child pornography after an eight-month investigation.
ADVERTISEMENT

The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles says the suspects used peer-to-peer networks to exchange graphic images and videos, then stored the files.

U.S. attorney's office spokesman Thom Mrozek (tom MROH'-zek) says San Luis Obispo County Deputy Bryan Jon Goossens and attorney Thomas Merdzinski of San Bernardino are among those charged."

NC man dies after waiting 22 hours at hospital - Yahoo! News

"RALEIGH, N.C. - A mental patient died after workers at a North Carolina hospital left him in a chair for 22 hours without feeding him or helping him use the bathroom, said federal officials who have threatened to cut off the facility's funding.


The state sent a team Tuesday to help Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro draft new procedures to ensure patients receive proper care."

Career women are their own worst enemies: study - Yahoo! News

"Women did not create the glass ceiling, the invisible barrier blamed for limiting their ability to earn what they're worth, but they help maintain it," Goodson said.

"Being able to draw attention to your contributions and competencies at work has become an important part of modern career management, and it is something most women are still unwilling or unable to do as consistently as their male counterparts," she added.

Goodson's research found that while most men had no qualms about touting their contributions, and even sometimes lying about them, women still cling to the myth that self-promotion is "socially unacceptable," "unlady-like" and "morally suspect."

The world might suck, but Boston rocks!

Daily Kos: Two Boston Sheet Metal Workers Put Selves In Harm's Way to Rescue Commuter: "The story of the Labor Movement is filled with millions of stories, many of which are never reported.

This week, one of those stories was.

Yesterday, two members of Sheet Metal Workers Local 17 in Boston were honored for rescuing a commuter who had fallen onto the train tracks at Boston's North Station.


The commuter, a man in his mid 50's, had stumbled off the platform and fallen five feet onto the tracks with his arms resting inches away from the 600 volt third rail.

The two sheet metal workers, A.J. Pugliese, Jr. and Robert Johnson, Jr. heard the shouts for help from several commuters standing on the platform. In a video released by the MBTA, the two men are seen springing into action while risking their own safety by crossing the electrified third rail and dragging the unconscious commuter to safety."

The world continues to suck....

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A man barged into the Arkansas Democratic headquarters and opened fire Wednesday, fatally shooting the state party chairman before speeding off in his pickup. Police later shot and killed the suspect after a 30-mile chase

LAVONIA, Ga. - When police finally searched the squat white mobile home where they say a man held his family captive for three years, the place was so filthy and bug-infested that one officer had to wear a gas mask and another refused to continue.

Finally, a real time thought: Beyond credit card loans, when you are raising senior debt at 6.5%, as Citigroup (C) did yesterday with it's $3 billion senior debt issue, I am not sure what you can finance with a positive spread in today's market. Regrettably, the days of capital destructive debt issuance have begun.

Bastards

Intel Shows You How a QSERP Works

In just one year (2005) Intel Corp. moved $200 million of deferred IOU obligations from their high-income executives’ non-qualified deferred compensation pension into the rank-and-file’s pension plan through a QSERP. And then turned right around and "contributed" $187 million back in cash to the plan – which they then claimed as a tax deduction.

So when an executive retires, Intel won’t have to pay him/her – the tax-deferred workers’ pension plan will. And that $187 million Intel "contribution" generated an immediate tax break of $65 million for Intel.

That means that you, as a taxpayer, not only just helped compensate Intel’s already wealthy executives retirement, but also got stuck covering the lost revenue resulting from Intel’s $65 million tax write-off. And that was just for one year.

Additionally bothersome is the fact that Intel manipulated the IRS rules so that well over 50% of the tax-deferred money in their rank-and-file pension plan (which is supposed to be designated for worker-bees) is now dedicated to compensating just 4% - that’s right, just 4% of Intel’s entire work force ... the high-income executives.

Plus those rich executives, rather than being required by the law to pay taxes on what they would have withdrawn from their own non-tax deferred pension plans, are now able to roll their wealth over into an IRA – thus further sheltering their money. And that cost you, the taxpayer, even more lost revenues.

Of course they knew...

S&P emails slammed mortgage debt products: report - Yahoo! News: "CHICAGO (Reuters) - Analysts at Standard & Poor's Rating Services warned against mortgage-related debt products in internal e-mails that, in one case, called the complex financial deals 'ridiculous,' the Wall Street Journal reported in its weekend edition."

In one email message, an S&P analyst called a mortgage or structured finance deal "ridiculous" and wrote "we should not be rating it."

In another email, an S&P manager said ratings agencies were helping to create an "even bigger monster -- the CDO (collateralized debt obligation) market. Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card falters."

The nearly unbearable speed of things

It has seemed to me that ones life has a cadence to it and mine has the unfortunate quality of going along an enjoyable rhythm for awhile and then dashing into an unpleasant mix of Mozart, Slayer & the angry Sinead O'Connor.

And since I am trying to be both present in the moment and approach life with compassion, this most recent bout of dissonance seems only more frustrating. The meditation and change in philosophy is forcing me to reckon with trains of thought long since discarded.

I struggle much more concretely on a daily basis to decide how I want to operate in the world and while I understand its necessary, I get frustrated because I thought a lot of this work was done, but it is not and maybe it is never really done and that is the essence of this thing we call life. and well goody fucking who. It is demotivating to think that anytime you feel like you are doing it right its really just a brief pause on that particular plateau and there is no apex of the mountain. I am tired.

and fucking continues unabated

FT.com / Companies / Property - Real estate sector fears huge increase in CMBS defaults: "Defaults on commercial mortgage-backed securities issued at the height of the credit bubble will more than quadruple from their current levels under conditions in the US economy expected by the commercial real estate industry, according to a report from Fitch Ratings.

Borrowers would default on an average of 17.2 per cent of securitised commercial mortgages over 10 years if the US economy dips into a recession with 0.2 per cent contraction in growth, compared with current very low default rates of 4 per cent, a rise of 330 per cent.

Such a scenario corresponds 'to the negative predictions currently offered by commercial real estate experts', analysts at Fitch wrote. This would happen if the economy suffered a similar downturn to 1991, and assumes that the value of properties covered by the deals falls by 25 per cent, and cash flow from rents by 15 per cent."

in case you were in a cave and unaware

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: "The world's largest economy contracted at a 0.2 percent annual pace in the fourth quarter of last year compared with a previously reported 0.6 percent gain, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Growth for the period from 2005 through 2007 was also trimmed.

'We're in a recession,' Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. 'It's going to widen, it's going to deepen.'

Nine of the 13 quarters under review were revised down, three increased and one was unchanged.

The largest downward revision was for the last three months of 2007, as the previously reported 2.3 percent gain in consumer spending was reduced by more than half, to 1 percent. Americans cut back on the use of electricity and gas as fuel bills soared."

you are getting screwed

PCBE: Transcripts (June 26, 2008): Session 3: Ethical Questions in the Reform of Health and Medical Care: "And the US is already spending -- these are figures from a couple of years ago -- by far the most of any nation on earth on healthcare. The US is on the bottom. On the top I've listed total health expenditures in other developed nations. For the US at the bottom I've listed total per capita health expenditures divided into the publicly funded and the privately funded share.

And in publicly funded I've included not just Medicare, Medicaid, VA, but also the benefit cost of public employees like schoolteachers and FBI agents, also, so-called tax subsidy to private health insurance. And when defined in that way, I want you to just look and see where that yellow bar ends. Look where the yellow bar ends.

That is, we are already through our taxes paying the full price of national health insurance in this country, and then we take an additional $2,500 out of our pockets and pay privately, and we still have the circumstance of 47,000,000 uninsured people, millions more forced into medical bankruptcy.

Now, what do we get for the extra money? And in this set of slides I've got the US in yellow, the other countries in green. What do we get? We do not get longer life expectancy compared to other nations.

We do not get lower infant mortality than other nations. In fact, our infant mortality is twice that of the world leaders.

We don't get more days in the hospital. We send patients out of the hospital quicker and sicker. We don't even get more innovation, more science. And I know one of the speakers brought that up earlier.

When you look at medical journal articles on a per-capita basis (and you get the same results if you look at total scientific output on a per-capita basis_, the United States is not a world leader. So our extra spending is not generating more in the way of science when we look at it on a per-capita basis. That is a myth.

Even for certain high-technology treatments such as bone-marrow transplants, the United States is just in the middle of the pack. Where we do lead the world is in our insurance overhead and our administrative costs. And this is expressed on a per-capita basis for every man, woman, and child in the United States .

We lead the world in insurance overhead. We lead the world in difficulties getting care. This is people are asked, percent, finding it extremely, very, or somewhat difficult to get needed care. We lead the world. This is just the English-speaking world.

Safe banks?

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: "Many are depending on Bankrate.com for 'Safe & Sound ratings'. My advice is don't. Please consider the following.

Safe & Sound Rating For First Heritage



The above chart is from Saturday, July 26, 2008.

FDIC Information for First Heritage Bank, N.A., Newport Beach, CA

On July 25, 2008, First Heritage Bank, N.A., Newport Beach, California was closed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Subsequently the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was named Receiver. No advance notice is given to the public when a financial institution is closed."

Seriously, get your moeny to a safe bank or to your backyard

Rising costs of financial turmoil - Yahoo! News: "'To say we could just walk away from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac without having some severe consequences is really questionable,' says Tim Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon in Eugene. 'The government does have to make that balancing act.'

That balancing act, however, is becoming a fiscal tightrope.

And to the degree that a credit-crunched economy weakens the federal ledger – either through lost tax revenue or direct bank bailouts – one result could be a higher cost of borrowing for the government – a burden that would fall on all taxpayers.

'The credibility of the sovereign is now at risk,' Mr. Morici says. 'It is no accident that we're starting to see articles about the credit rating of the United States.'"

Three US women priests to be ordained, excommunicated - Yahoo! News

Three US women priests to be ordained, excommunicated - Yahoo! News: "BOSTON, Massachusetts (AFP) - Three women are to be ordained as priests Sunday here in one of American's most Catholic cities, but they will face automatic excommunication by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese.

The trio is to be ordained in a ceremony performed by a woman at a Protestant church affiliated to the US Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ, in Boston's first female ordination.

The move has angered the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, which has sent out an email to local priests reminding them of Vatican law that women are allowed to have key roles within the church, but cannot become priests."

Daily Kos: Rove Tried to Fire Fitzgerald During CIA Leak Investigation

Daily Kos: Rove Tried to Fire Fitzgerald During CIA Leak Investigation: "In a supplement to his responses to the House Judiciary Committee, Patrick Fitzgerald confirms what we've always suspected: Karl Rove was trying to have Patrick Fitzgerald fired while Fitzgerald was still investigating Rove for his role in leaking Valerie Wilson's identity--and the timing lines up perfectly with the Administration's efforts to fire a bunch of US Attorneys."

Long time no post

So I am at Netroots Nation in Austin TX after 4 days in Alaska. There was ATV'ing, white water rafting and lots of interesting people. Now I am going from room to room listening to people have conversations about the stuff I obsess about like its normal:) Already I have several nes sites to follow and more films to watch. It's a great vacation and desparately needed. Hopefully I will have the energy and focus to post again now.

US-EU private data sharing agreement at hand: report - Yahoo! News

US-EU private data sharing agreement at hand: report - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States and European Union are close to an agreement to share private data of their citizens, including credit card information, travel history and internet browsing information, The New York Times said Saturday.


Negotiations that begun in February 2007 however have to yet address whether Europeans can sue the US government for mishandling information, according to an internal report on the potential agreement obtained by the daily."

Catholic charity helped teen get abortion - Giving- msnbc.com

Catholic charity helped teen get abortion - Giving- msnbc.com: "RICHMOND, Va. - Authorities are investigating whether a Catholic charity violated state and federal law by helping a 16-year-old illegal immigrant who was in the organization's care get an abortion.

Workers with Commonwealth Catholic Charities helped the girl travel to and from the procedure in January and signed a consent form for the abortion, Joanne Nattrass, the charity's executive director, said in a statement Thursday. She declined further comment.

Four of the Richmond-based charity's workers were fired, according to a letter by David Siegel, head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' refugee resettlement program."

Om mani padme hum

So Tuesday night I went into Anaphylaxis and could not breathe whilst walking on a trail with neither m cell phone or wallet. I was given epinephrine, rushed to the hospital and treated with steroids. That was two days ago. I was wildly unprepared for the terror that being suddenly unable to breathe would cause. I have been trying really hard to make the world feel normal again. I am back in my place. I am on steroids still so will not have another reaction in the next couple of days.

but still I am sitting here, listening to music, drinking beer, chatting with people online supposedly reconnected and alive....but that terror, the total helpless vulnerability is rocking me to the core. i feel terribly, horribly awfully mortal, frail, breakable. I keep thinking this is where you are, embrace, accept, compassion but I am not sure its working. I kind of feel like i am losing my shit and just totally freaking out. lets hope that this too shall pass.

So not out of the woods yet

Do not believe them when they tell you its getting better, it's not.

Strange, Stranger, Opaque

I recently received an Email from John Hempton at the Bronte Capital Blog. John is writing Barclays - strange, stranger and truly opaque. I have not had time to go through all of his analysis but these snips caught my eye.
In four years our derivative exposure (total face) has gone from 5.9 trillion pounds to 29.2 trillion pounds. Our credit derivative exposures have gone from 43 billion pounds to 2.4 trillion pounds.

It is not just the derivatives that they grew. The on balance sheet exposures grew to astronomical size too.

All beginings are hard

I sometimes wonder how the world would look to me had I never learned to read. There are drawbacks to absorbing so much of your perspective of the world based on reading rather than doing. That said, my reading took me far afield from what I knew far before I had the ability to do so with experience.

As a result, I know that all beginnings are hard. Just because they are beginnings. So as I sit here in this latest beginning and try to be mindful and aware I attempt to embrace that it is difficult by nature of what it is rather than by caprice of events.

Still, while I may get better at being where I am when I am there, the desire to know, to understand, to be peaceful about what is....continues to be the deep throbbing incessant driver of my wanderings.

Amazing and will make you cry

so cool

Things you begin to understand

Over to the right on my bloglist is a link to XKCD.org. I found this comic whilst stumbling I believe and have since become an ardent fan. Thus it should be cool to see it in the Nytimes, instead its somehow disappointing. There is clearly this attempt to understand what is referred to as niche markets. There is the book the Long Tail as well as theories such as crowdsourcing, viral marketing etc. Which is great and fascinating, but is it just me or does it take away some of the fun of liking something once it becomes an explainable theory? Is that just me?

Buffy

Great story on NPR about an Iraq war reporter who watched Buffy to help her deal with the stress of being in a war zone.

Sen. Edward Kennedy has malignant brain tumor - Yahoo! News

Sen. Edward Kennedy has malignant brain tumor - Yahoo! News: "BOSTON - A cancerous brain tumor caused the seizure Sen. Edward M. Kennedy suffered over the weekend, doctors said Tuesday in a grim diagnosis for one of American politics' most enduring figures. 'He remains in good spirits and full of energy,' the doctors for the 76-year-old Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement."

Paranoia isn't always paranoia, sometimes they really are watching you

Daily Kos: Police State 2.0: It's Here: "Klein says that the latest unrest in Tibet was a test for the ever-expanding system, called the 'Golden Shield.' And the oppressive infrastructure earned at least an A-. Dissident cell phones were jammed. Information favorable to the protestors was blocked on the Internet. Photos of the participants, especially the leaders, were rapidly disseminated on 'Most Wanted' posters on the Internet and the protests were 'spun' through Chinese media to make the Tibetans look like violent thugs.

While some in the West were protesting the crackdown on dissent, companies like Yahoo, Google, Cisco and a mysterious company called L-1 Identity Solutions have been cooperating with the Chinese government and hoping to profit greatly from helping construct Police State 2.0. Yahoo came under mild Congressional criticism in 2006 for turning over email data belonging to dissidents who had (unwisely) used their free email service. Google custom tailors searches in China to censor out results offensive to the government. Cisco provides the routers for the Great Firewall of China that not only blocks out websites like the BBC but also allows deep packet surveillance on Chinese surfers.

And L-1 may be the lynchpin of the whole system. Some say their facial recognition sofware is the best in the world. Despite American laws prohibiting the export of technology that could aid the Chinese govenment in oppressing its citizens, L-1 is stealthily working with Chinese companies to compete for the contract to make the facial recognition software that will tie China's rapdily growing high resolution camera phalanx into a integrated system that can identify everyone on the street at any time and tie their face to their national ID and the vast amount of data kept there.

Save your money

Calculated Risk: "There seems to be sentiment developing that the U.S. has weathered the worst of the current cyclical economic storm and blue skies are ahead. We disagree. Any blue skies you see are likely to be short lived. The economy is in the relative calm of the eye of the business-cycle hurricane. The mortgage credit problems are not over. And credit problems in other sectors are just beginning as the housing recession spreads to the rest of the economy."

I have been somewhat obsessed with financial news the past couple of years. As a result I regularly read Businessweek, Financial Times, WSJ, NYTimes, Economist (although I really hate them) etc. I also read several economic blogs, several who are very good at taking hard to understand finance talk and break it down into understandable scenarios.

And I am officially terrified of the coming storm.

I wish I had more money in the bank. I wish I believed that what I do for a job was actually useful and necessary and thus harder to layoff. I wish I knew how to grow food or even cook from ingredients, because I think this is a new era. I suspected that they screwed the pooch.

Now I think I begin to grasp the sheer amount of money that was lost and understand that a lot of that money was people's retirement, government's savings and generally speaking the bedrock of the world financial system as we don't understand it, and it's gone. It's really, really gone. Never to return.

And people get angry when their money is gone and government's sure as fuck get angry when their money is gone and just for fun we have had an asshole of president who has been handing out the treasury to his cronies for eight years and he will get to waltz off into the Texas sunset while we idiots think hiring Barack Obama will matter. It won't matter, because they stole the country and a lot of the rest of the world's money and they and us are going to be pissed and there may not be a way out of this. Just saying.

Your not Paranoid

Media Matters - Military analysts named in Times exposé appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast nets, cables, NPR: "Military analysts named in Times exposé appeared or were quoted more than 4,500 times on broadcast nets, cables, NPR

Summary: A New York Times article detailed the connection between numerous media military analysts and the Pentagon and defense industries, reporting that 'the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform' media military analysts 'into a kind of media Trojan horse -- an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.' A Media Matters review found that since January 1, 2002, the analysts named in the Times article -- many identified as having ties to the defense industry -- collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR."

Thanks Ann!

Indian village proud after double "honor killing" - Yahoo! News

Indian village proud after double "honor killing" - Yahoo! News:
"THE POWER OF UPPER CASTE MEN

The relatively prosperous northern state of Haryana is one of India's most conservative when it comes to caste, marriage and the role of women. Deeply patriarchal, caste purity is paramount and marriages are arranged to sustain the status quo.

Men and women are still murdered across the villages of northern India for daring to marry outside their caste, but in Haryana the practice is widespread, and widely supported.

Here, women veil their faces with scarves in public. The illegal abortion of female fetuses is common, the ratio of women to men in Haryana just 861 to 1,000, the lowest in the country.

Anyone who transgresses social codes, by marrying across caste boundaries or within the same village, is liable to meet the same fate as Sunita and Jasbir.

Many such murders are never reported, hardly any result in prosecution, says Professor Javeed Alam, chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research."

Just interesting

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

and also...

"I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school," the now 24-year-old told AFP.

"I was 'filet mignon' for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade," or around 16 years old, he added.

Chiroux joined the US army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.

He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines and was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.

On Thursday, he refused to go, saying he considers Iraq an illegal war.

The Corporation as Sociopath

Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis - Green Living, Environment - The Independent: "Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution."

Cargill's net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.

Similarly, the Mosaic Company, one of the world's largest fertiliser companies, saw its income for the three months ending 29 February rise more than 12-fold, from $42.2m to $520.8m, on the back of a shortage of fertiliser. The prices of some kinds of fertiliser have more than tripled over the past year as demand has outstripped supply. As a result, plans to increase harvests in developing countries have been hit hard.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that 37 developing countries are in urgent need of food. And food riots are breaking out across the globe from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, from China to Cameroon, and from Uzbekistan to the United Arab Emirates.