March, 2008 archive
More Good News (Updated) 0
As I have pointed out previously, the collapse of the housing market, which seems to be leading to the collapse of every other market, was not a result of some natural business cycle. (I did hear an economist–I forget who–say recently that the market has two phases: Fear and Greed. Fear is in control now.)
The bursting of the dot com bubble a few years ago might be seen as some type of natural economic phenomenon, in sense the people were buying any stock to do with the Internet, in the assumption that people would do stuff over the Internet, well, simply because they could, regardless of whether it made any sense to do whatever it was on line.
In contrast, the current phenomenon is a direct result of the failure of duly appointed regulators to, well, regulate, thereby allowing Greed to overcome good business sense on the part of just about everyone.
And why did they not regulate? Because NeoCons worship wealth and assume that those with $700 suits, who have someone else to carry their Blackberries for them, are inherently virtuous, and therefore will make moral decisions.
Sadly, it ain’t so.
But the situation is much worse than that.
The number of jobs shed by the private sector – the main driver of the economy – was 101,000, reflecting three straight months of losses in nongovernment jobs.
“That’s how you know we’re in a recession, for God’s sake,” said Eileen Appelbaum of Philadelphia, a labor economist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.
Addendum, Later That Same Evening:
FBI.
What Kind of Nerd Are You? 1
| What Be Your Nerd Type?
Your Result: Literature Nerd
Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and it’s eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today’s society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It’s okay. I understand. |
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| Social Nerd |
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| Gamer/Computer Nerd |
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| Anime Nerd |
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| Science/Math Nerd |
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| Drama Nerd |
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| Musician |
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| Artistic Nerd |
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| What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace |
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Via Susie.
Bushonomics 1
Who needs jobs?
There was the “whew, I need a break period.”
There was the “sitting looking at the television period,” in which he was too depressed and too worried to move.
Now Grillet, 30, is in the “omigod, my unemployment insurance runs out in two months phase.”
Today, the closely watched federal monthly jobs numbers will come out to let analysts and economists know what people like Grillet already know – it’s getting harder to find work, especially for people in financial services, a sector that has been shedding jobs for months as the extent of the subprime-mortgage crisis widens.
Don’t Get Sick 3
From the Nieman Watchdog:
Best health care in the world.
Yeah.
Right.
“Stick Your Right Arm in, Stick Your Right Leg in, You Don’t Have a Left Leg” 0
Dick Polman looks at the Bush-McCain mating ritual:
The Rose Garden pictures cried out for cartoon captions. For instance…
McCain’s inner thoughts: “This guy is presiding over a $3-trillion war, record-high budget deficits, record-high oil prices, and a record-low dollar when pegged against the euro, and two-thirds of the American people – including the the independents who will decide the election – think he’s a buffoon. But if I hide him in a closet, the nutty conservatives will go ballistic on me. So I’m stuck with him.”
Bush’s inner thoughts: “He was a pain in the butt who got in my way eight years ago, which is why we had to falsely smear him with rumors that he’d fathered a black baby out of wedlock, and a host of other things I knew nothing about. I still don’t totally trust him, because he’s not always a loyal Bushie. But he’s the nominee, so I’m stuck with him.”
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall looks at the company McCain keeps, company that would be right at home in Sussex County, Delaware:
And the Demon Princess prowls the lobbies.
What’s That Again? 0
Balloon Juice on do-overs.
Drumbeats from across the Pond (Updated) 0
Where have we heard all this before?
Scott Ritter in the Guardian:
Smith is no unbiased observer. As the spokesperson for the so-called “EU-3” (Great Britain, France and Germany), he serves as the face of a group which has a considerable political investment in maintaining the notion of Iran as a non-compliant player in the diplomatic game that is Iran’s nuclear programme. The EU-3 has been attempting to walk the tight wire between a desire to moderate hardline US policies through placation, and their responsibility under international law to respect the provisions of the non-proliferation treaty. In doing so, the EU-3 has married itself to a policy that centres on Iran’s requirement to suspend unconditionally its uranium enrichment programme, since such a programme could be used in any nuclear weapons program.
(snip)
(In the prelude to the War in Iraq–ed.) Iraq had been placed in the impossible position of having to prove a negative, a doomed process which led to war. I am fearful that the EU-3 is repeating this same process, demanding Iran refute something that doesn’t exist except in the overactive imaginations of diplomats pre-programmed to accept at face value anything negative about Iran, regardless of its veracity. The implications of such a morally and intellectually shallow posture could very well be disastrous.
It moves me to poesy:
Addendum, Just a Few Minutes Later:
Digby has more.
Via Susie.
Gitmo (Updated) 0
Why is the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, still open.
Even the Current Federal Administrator has said that he wants it closed.
One answer is obvious.
If it were closed, the truth of what has been going on there will come out. We can pretty much expect to hear more stuff like this, as Bushies loose their grips on the handles of secrecy (emphasis added):
(snip)
Today Garzón ruled the pair were suffering severe mental and physical problems after their time in Guantánamo and were not fit to stand trial in Spain.
Garzón, Spain’s leading investigative judge who sits at the national court in Madrid, archived the case against the pair, basing his decision on medical reports on their condition provided by the British authorities.
According to the judge’s order, two British doctors, Jonathan Derek Fluxman and Helen Bamber, examined the pair at the Harrow Road health centre in February and diagnosed serious medical conditions caused by torture at the hands of their captors and the inhumane conditions in which they were kept for five years.
Banna is said to be severely depressed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and to have diabetes, hyper-tension, back pain and damage to the back of his left knee. Deghayes is also suffering from PTSD, depression, is blind in his right eye, and has fractures in his nasal bone and right index finger. Both men are said to present a high risk of suicide.
The doctors’ report on Deghayes, signed by Fluxman, concluded that “given all these factors, I don’t see how Mr Deghayes would be able to give instructions to his lawyers, listen to evidence and give his own accurate testimony”.
A similar conclusion was drawn in the case of Banna. The doctors said were he to be separated from his wife and children again, he risked a severe deterioration of his already fragile mental health.
Garzón’s order said these medical conditions had been confirmed by two forensic doctors in Spain, and said the “PTSD and depression mark a before and after in the lives and psychiatric” condition of the two men. It said their recovery was “uncertain”, meaning they were not capable of defending themselves in any potential trial.
The order blamed the medical condition of Banna on the “five years [he spent] in secret prisons in Gambia and Afghanistan and latterly in Guantánamo … in inhumane conditions”, during which time he was tortured, resulting in the “progressive deterioration of his mental condition”. In the case of Deghayes, it said he was tortured and badly treated in prisons in Islamabad, Bagram and finally Guantánamo before his release at the end of last year.
Balloon Juice has more.
Addendum, Later That Same Evening:
The Group News Blog.
Hidden Treasure 3
If you look really really closely, you can see that what he is burying is a piece of bread.
Yep. Found a slice with a little bit of mold on it, so I tore it up and tossed it outside for the squirrels and other varmints. This varmint found it.
Boy, will he be disappointed if it rains tonight. . . .
Your Browser on Acid 6
My Opera scored 46 out of 100. And my two or three regular readers know what a rabid Opera fan I am.
You can test your browser here.
Acid 3 surfaced in January and aims to set a more rigorous test of how browser software complies with web standards. It includes 100 checks focusing on areas such as DOM2 and ECMAscript, and tests a browser’s ability to handle “Web 2.0 dynamic web applications”.
In an informal Reg Dev test of IE 7 and Firefox using Acid 3 [warning: this could choke your browser – ed] both browsers failed. Firefox at least managed to get half way through (50 of the 100 tests) before falling over. But IE 7 managed only 12 before giving up.
But . . . Linux . . . Is . . . Free 2
And it doesn’t crash. Or lock up. Or invite viruses in to play.
Fortunately, I Have an Electrolux 2
And, no, it doesn’t interest me as anything other than a cleaning appliance. From El Reg:
How To Get Enronned 1
Have people with experience run the government like a business:
“We need a businessman as president.” Or, “We’re at war. We need a military man as president.” Or, “We need the candidate with the most experience.”
That would make Robert Byrd No. 1 on any list. He’s been in the Senate since 1959. I shudder to think of the centrists who in 2000 thought that gravel-voiced Dick Cheney’s experience (in Congress and the Ford and George H. W. Bush administrations) gave the ticket of Bush-Cheney an edge in their minds.
Donald Rumsfeld (Nixon administration, Ford administration, Reagan administration, four terms in Congress): Now, there was experience. Not to mention, he was a businessman. Who better?
What we have with the current administration is specialization run amok. We have businessmen, experienced hands, who say they know how to run government. And, well, they don’t. I see the evils of specialization inherent in a war that was framed as protecting Americans from terrorists but became a war to “spread freedom.” Now it reverts to a war against terrorists. And who can oppose that?
Health Care 2
One of the myths propounded by those who oppose any change to the current broken system of health care in the United States is that “we have the best health care in the world.”
We don’t. It’s, like, what? 37th, I think.
Daniel DiRito deconstructs the “best health care in the world” claim over at ASZ.
Vacation Daze 0
Dan Froomkin reports:
Damn, think of how much damage he would have done if he’d stayed on the job the whole time.
Sheesh!
Connection Problems? 0
Of course, if you have connection problems, you can’t see this.
If you have had connection problems, but can now connect, please use the email link at the top of the page to drop me an email.
Background: Several persons have reported sporadic connection problems. As near as I can figure, the site just fails to load. Then, on other days, they are able to connect okay.
If you have been one of them, please try also to connect to the mail welcome page.
In the mean time, I’m turning off one of the plugins I activated last weekend. I’ll leave it off for a few days and see what happens. Then I’ll try turning off another one.
And so on.
I hate computers.
Bailing Out the Banks 0
In pursuit of commisions, they chose to make bad loans. Now let someone else pay for them:
Here’s how it works. As we know, millions of families are facing foreclosure on their homes because they have mortgages that they can’t afford and live in homes that are worth less than the amount on their mortgages. This is a situation where the banks would ordinarily take a huge hit since they have no hope of recouping anywhere near the amount owed on the mortgages when the homes go through the foreclosure process.
But politicians can’t resist a bank in distress. They want the government to step in and either guarantee or directly issue new mortgages to these homeowners. When these new mortgages are issued to pay off most or all of the prior mortgages, they will be giving the banks far more money than they can reasonably hope to get if the houses had gone through the foreclosure process.
Who Supports Obama? 0
Jon Swift examines the evidence.
