I gotta consider putting Boing Boing on my blogroll. They are always coming up with neat stuff like this.
Invisible to the human eye, but it dazzles the camera.
Month: February 2008
Please, Just Kill Me.
Drive a nail through my skull, impale me on a stake, set fire to me, I don’t care.
Just do it before the new 3D CGI Smurf movie comes out!!!!!!
The horror……the horror….
Supreme Gives 401(k) Participants Standing for Lawsuits
It was a unanimous decision.
The facts of the case are that James LaRue lost $150K after his 401(k) managers ignored his orders to move his holdings to a different account. The lower courts said that only the plan had standing, but SCOTUS said that the participants do to.
Frankly, I’m surprised. I would have figured that one of the court Neanderthals would have taken the side of the incompetent money managers.
$36 Million…..Woah!!!
The Sick Old Man Sells His Soul to the Devil
First he promises, “no new taxes”, and then proposes taxing employer supplied health insurance, which amounts to taxes on about a trillion dollars a year, and then he says that Bush should veto the anti-torture bill.
Raising taxes on the middle class, and going pro torture to suck up to his constituency….some “straight talker”.
BTW, is it me, or is he looking increasingly physically feeble on the stump?
Falling Wages
On TPM Cafe, Jared Bernstein makes a very good point, that wages are falling:
O’Reilly Suggests a “Lynching Party” for a Black Woman
Here.
Of course, the Long Island Klansman will get away with it.
Su-35 Flys for the First Time
This is a major update of the Su-27, with new engines, and a significantly lighter airframe, thought updated materials.
It has no canards, because it has tvc. Additionally, its supposed to be able to supercruise, though it’s unclear if this is clean, or when carrying a meaningful combat load.
I want one for Chanukah.
Credit Crash Hits Student Loans
As the credit implosion spreads, getting credit for safe loans is getting harder. Case in point, Student lenders are getting out of the business, because they can no longer get capital on the markets to lend out.
So, this will hit university bottom lines, effecting economics professors.
Karma, neh?
Wait a Minute, We Can’t Have Acquittals.
So said Pentagon general counsel William Haynes, when it was explained that fair trials always have the possibility of acquittals.
I guess he just hates America and fair trials.
Read the article, largely based on interviews with Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the Guantánamo’s military commissions.
What we find is, as is stated in the article, “For people like Haynes, justice is meant to serve the party.”
Stalinism at its finest, ant it is unnecessary when the defendants are as guilty as hell.
It will be the Saddam show trials all over again, and the officers officiating and prosecuting, along with the civilians directing them, are violating international law, and US treaty obligations.
NATO checks Serbs’ Kosovo border challenge
After Serb mobs burnt down UN border posts in northern Kosova, NATO troops took control of the crossings, and sealed them off.
Good.
Germany and Lichtestein in Talks Over Tax Fraud
Well, it appears that Germany is going after a bunch of tax cheats based on a DVD acquired from a paid informant for $6 million, and the leaders of Lichtenstein are upset.
I have no sympathy. Money laundering has been the Lichtenstinian economy for decades, and it’s time that they started unraveling this mess.
Thoughts on Cuba
First, you have to read what Lower Manhattanite of the Group News Blog said. The short form is, that that the US is in the position of a stalking ex-boyfriend. To true.
Then we have Ben Sargant’s editorial cartoon:
Hoisted from Brad Delong’s comments, it’s an excellent historical perspective:
And I think he knows that he has fallen short and is pained by that. And to have his life evaluated by a moral midget like George Bush and his ilk must gall him.
Having said that, the real decision on Castro will be made by the Cuban people and above all I wish them as much freedom as possible to do this. Freedom from their own government trying to hold on to power the old way even if that is no longer appropriate. But even more, freedom from those in our country would be willing to slaughter large numbers of Cubans and destroy what good Cuba has created over these past.Whatever Castro has been, the Cuban people have paid a high price and achieved genuine social development. The worst tragedy would be for this to be taken from them in a wave of Thatcher-Reagan-Yeltsin privatization combined with America bringing “freedom” to Cuba the way we have brought it to Iraq.
(emphasis mine)
Finally, I have a thought on why the Cubans are way more batsh%$ insane 50 years after Castro left than, for example, my Estonian acquaintance was about the USSR and Estonia 40 years after Stalin invaded:
It’s more than that with the emigres.
You have to understand that Cuba has a heritage of Spanish rule.
For 300 years, when the British Crown got too autocratic, the refrain was, “This isn’t Spain”.
Spain bought into divine right big time, and it got passed down from the Spanish crown to the despotic successors of the crown.
A coup was OK, because that was just the man at the top changing, but Castro, he broke up the estates, and gave them to the peons, some of whom were n***ers (IIRC, Cuba is now majority Afro-Cuban).
That is an affront to God, and cannot be tolerated.
California Town On Near of Bankruptcy
Vallejo, California is broke. They will be out of money on late April.
Unlike Orange County, this is not from bad investments. This is the fruit of proposition 13. They have multimillion dollar homes taxed at 100K, and no tax base.
It doesn’t help that the municipal bond market is frozen, like everything else.
My solution would be to disincorporate.
Someone F*&^ed UP Big Time
I’m not a fan of Barack Obama, but this performance by Texas State Senator Kirk Watson is inexcusable.
When your supporters appear on any show, they should have a 3×5 card with some facts, and what you’ve done in the Senate should be one of them.
Well, this guy is going to be looking for work in the private sector.
Economics Update
Well, let’s start off with real estate:
First, we have an article asking whether the Federal reserve is refilling the housing bubble. Normally this would not merit comment, but look at the link. Look at the author. Look at the title. It’s Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, and it has the word “bubble” in the title.
When the NAR is calling it a bubble, it’s a bubble.
We also have reports that people are defaulting on subprime loans before they reset, which implies that these people so overbought their houses, that they can’t even afford the “teaser” rates.
We also have single family home starts dropping to a 17 year low, though there has been a pickup in condo and apartment construction (not sure how much is the former, and how much is the latter).
We also have Mortgage applications plummeting 22%, as rates rise in the face of the fed cuts, because no one trust to lend anymore.
The fed is “pushing on a string”.
Finally, we are starting to see Foreclosure tourism, with bus tours of foreclosed homes becoming a regular event in Florida.
It’s an attempt by some realtors and speculators to get the market moving again. Isn’t gonna happen.
In terms of more personal finance, we have an explosion of people tapping their 401(k) accounts for living expenses.
Yep, those private accounts to replace social security sound like such a good idea. As I’ve said before, it’s like eating your seed corn, which is what these folks are doing.
On a more general macroeconomic note, inflation is up, with the CPI rising 4.3% in 2007, and prices rising at a 5% annual rate in January.
On top of all this, the Federal Reserve has cut its forecast for economic growth.
Considering the fact that the official CPI understates inflation, we are probably closer to an 8% inflation rate (prices doubling every 9 years), so I’m calling stagflation, which seems a no brainer, even without oil hitting another record, with it peaking at trading at $101.32/bbl and closing at $100.74/bbl….No…wait….that’s two records.
In terms of the financial establishment recognizing that the problems are far deeper and broader than previously understood, we have Martin Wolf of the financial times saying that, “America’s economy risks mother of all meltdowns“, and we have Portfolio.com wondering if the basic model used to evaluate the complex instruments in the big sh$#pile, or more generally, the prices of options, the Black Scholes Pricing Model, is simply inaccurate, which would render their prices unknown. It’s literally look at the chicken entrails to figure out the prices time.
Basically, the model falls apart, and has always fallen apart:
Good theory. The glitch was discovered only after the fact: When a market is crashing and no one is willing to buy, it’s impossible to sell short. If too many investors are trying to unload stocks as a market falls, they create the very disaster they are seeking to avoid. Their desire to sell drives the market lower, triggering an even greater desire to sell and, ultimately, sending the market into a bottomless free fall. That’s what happened on October 19, 1987, when the sweet logic of Black-Scholes was shown to be irrelevant in the real world of crashes and panics. Even the biggest portfolio insurance firm, Leland O’Brien Rubinstein Associates (co-founded and run by the same finance professors who invented portfolio insurance), tried to sell as the market crashed and couldn’t.
This is what has happened with investment banks and leveraged loans, where they have been left holding the bag on $197 billion in loans to people like private equity buyout specialists that they cannot resell.
In the ever popular world of the bond insurers collapsing, we have Moody’s predicting a $7-$10 billion hit for banks as a result, though I would add at least one zero to that total.
As a result, a unit of private equity firm KKR cannot refinance, and has delayed repaying loans as a result.
Compounding this is the fact that the proposals to split the insurance companies into separate Municipal bond insurance and sh&^pile insurance is making it much more difficult for them to raise the capital they need to stay afloat.
In 2000, McCain Aides Felt Compelled to to Build Human Shield Around His Penis
The New York Times has just broken a story on a possible inappropriate relationship between John McCain and a young attractive lobbyist, Vicki Iseman*.
Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers.
A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.
When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement.
There is no specific allegation of any sort of physical or romantic relationship, but his aides were concerned enough about this that someone had a serious talk to him, and they prevented further contact between McCain and Iseman, forming a sort of a human shield.
Let’s be clear, it’s entirely possible that they never did anything physical. What’s more it could be possible that they never expressed to each other, or to anyone else any romantic feelings.
To put it in a military perspective, fraternization between an Officer and an Enlisted man does not have to involve romance. A BFF (Best Friends Forever) relationship is inappropriate within a chain of command.
That being said, given his involvement with con artist Charles Keating and his role as one of the Keating 5, where he was “just doing favors for a friend”, it is remarkably intemperate. It was insanely reckless.
John McCain has has a reputation for outbursts and instability, and it calls his judgment into question.
To quote a friend of his:
“He is essentially an honorable person,” said William P. Cheshire, a friend of Mr. McCain who as editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic defended him during the Keating Five scandal. “But he can be imprudent.”
This at best brings his judgment, his common sense, and his commitment to really changing things in Washington into question.
The issue is not whether he had sex with that woman. It is why he forged such a close relationship with a lobbyist, and did favors for her after having experienced what he himself calls his catharsis in the Keating matter.
To put it bluntly at best is he reckless, and is he nuts.
*Well, young to me. She’s 40 and I’m 45.
Remaining F-15s Cleared to Fly
Interesting that, once the SecDef rebuked the Air Force general over his statements on needing more F-22s the USAF pulls its head out of its…..wild blud yonder, and clears the rest of its F-15 fleet.
I guess there were too many people calling this a stunt to try to get more F-22s, and the Gates put his foot down.
Musharraf Is Toast
The military was unwilling to stuff ballot boxes for him, and now the anti-Musharraf parties are talking coalition, and it looks like they will make it to the 2/3 necessary to remove him.
Musharraf has been hopeless on terror, buttressing his support, now gone, with Pakistani military rather than engaging in meaningful antiterror operations, so good riddance.
Finally, the FTC Goes After Big Pharma’s Payments to Generic Drug Manufacturers
The FTC has finally gotten off of its duff, and filed an antitrust complaint against Cephalon for payments to generic drug makers not to make a generic version of Provigil.
Unfortunately with the Roberts/Scalito court, I’m pretty sure that at least 4 of the justices are in big pharma’s pocket.