November 2009
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Back-Door Taxes Hit U.S. With Financing in the... →
Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) — Salvatore Calvanese, the treasurer of Springfield, Massachusetts, for four years, had a ready defense for why he risked $14 million of taxpayer money on collateralized-debt obligations laden with subprime mortgages in 2007.
He didn’t know what he was buying, he says, and trusted the financial professionals who sold them and told him they were safe.
October 2009
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Small UI Updates and a Help Request
If you’ve spent any time on the Diesel Civil Trust site in the last 24 hours, you may have noticed some small user interface updates. I’ve added a Share This button to all permalinks, and finally solved the issue of empty tags appearing in the markup (yawn.)
What I’ve really focused on was the search box. I’ve integrated a Google Custom Search to shore up an abysmal prior...
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Medical chief warns of extremists’ attacking flu... →
Extremists are attempting to derail the introduction of a national swine flu vaccination campaign, the country’s top doctor has warned.
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Torrent crackdown pushing pirates towards file... →
feastingonroadkill:
“RapidShare in particular has become massively popular, with traffic demand pushing it into the top 20 list of most trafficked websites on the internet, Alexa reports. The site holds a reported 10 petabytes of files on its systems, which have the capability to handle up to three million users at any one time. Users with premium accounts enjoy unlimited download speeds while...
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“Clear proof of the irrational behaviour and irresponsibility of the new...”
– Mikhail Gorbachev (via azspot)
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Police in £9m scheme to log 'domestic extremists'... →
Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.
The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor “domestic extremists”, the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the...
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Swine flu jab link to killer nerve disease: Leaked... →
A warning that the new swine flu jab is linked to a deadly nerve disease has been sent by the Government to senior neurologists in a confidential letter.
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“Is this the best we can do? Forcing people to buy private health insurance,...”
– Dennis Kucinich (via azspot) (via robot-heart-politics)
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The Catastrophic Economic Impact of Cap and Trade... →
Testimony before The Energy and Commerce Committee U.S House of Representatives April 22, 2009
My name is David Kreutzer. I am the Senior Policy Analyst in Energy Economics and Climate Change at The Heritage Foundation. The views I express in this testimony are my own, and should not be construed as representing any official position of The Heritage Foundation. I want to thank the members...
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Can renewable energy save the world? | vox -... →
Can renewable energy save the world from climate change, and do so at a reasonable cost? This column says we can replace some fossil fuel power with renewable power without a major cost increase, but we cannot hope to replace a major fraction of our fossil power with intermittent power sources such as wind and solar energy unless we can develop energy storage technologies.
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A Novel Thought
What if we had a “think tank” that actually thought?
I mean really dug into the issues and then said something smart, having looked at both sides of the problem. Every time I read an issue statement decrying to growth/death of the economy due to cap and trade or the benefits/pitfalls of a smart grid, I have to check the source. And guess what? Nine times out of ten, it’s another...
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Celebrating 40 years of the net →
azspot:
At 2100, on 29 October 1969, engineers 400 miles apart at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford Research Institute (SRI) prepared to send data between the first nodes of what was then known as Arpanet.
It got the name because it was commissioned by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).
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The choice is between increasing or decreasing... →
DoctoRx, Rob Parenteau and Marshall Auerback have each written articles here to bring clarity to some issues I first raised at the beginning of the month in my post, “The recession is over but the depression has just begun.”
http://twitpic.com/ne7y4 - Still unsure of speculation—large traders are net long since August, 100% committed. *oil 6*
Day late, US crude inventory up 0.8M/bbl, refined gasoline up 1.7M/bbl. WTI trading near $78/bbl: http://tinyurl.com/3h2d4 *oil 4*
Though to my last, the FT makes a case for managed money—not speculators—to show their cards: http://tinyurl.com/yftk3ck *oil 6*
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Editorial - Ongoing Agony of the Banks -... →
It is hardly surprising that GMAC is circling back to the government for a third helping of taxpayer money. GMAC is struggling under the double whammy of bad car loans and the fallout from its misguided foray into mortgage finance at the height of the housing bubble. After the government applied stress tests to the banks last May, it was the only big bank that could not raise the capital it was...
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“Where is the open source search engine, the one that doesn’t link the...”
– Google uber Alles (via azspot)
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The Spooky World Of Quantum Biology →
intrepidwanderer:
One hundred and fifty years ago, paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley (an autodidact and philosopher who coined the term “agnostic” and was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his passionate defense of natural selection) asserted that humankind would eventually take the processes of evolution into our own hands. Within a few decades of his proclamation, a cadre of equally brilliant...
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Calculated Risk: Report: The WaMu "Bank Run"... →
In July 2008 there were persistent rumors of a bank run at WaMu. According to a fascinating piece by Kirsten Grind at the Puget Sound Business Journal, the bank run was more than a rumor …
RT @LossAngeles Folks, here is the bottom line on recession…if over, gov’t wouldn’t be extending home credits and unemployment benefits.
OPEC pledges to raise production if oil reaches $100/bbl: http://tinyurl.com/ylsfygz *oil 5*
Saudis drop WTI contract in favor of new Gulf Coast Sour Crude Index (Argus) come January: http://tinyurl.com/yfnzggb *oil 6*
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Unemployment Claims Steady
crazynutjob:
This week’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report has been released. Initial claims dropped to 530,000. This is at the high end of the Bloomberg consensus range of 520k to 530k. For the first time in a long while, last week’s data was not revised upwards. From the report:
In the week ending Oct. 24, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 530,000, a...
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“Michael Godorov, PPL’s manager of smart meter operations, said that a real-time...”
– Cost of electricity: ‘It has to be painful’ « Green Hell Blog
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Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A.... →
KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
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New York Fed’s Secret Choice to Pay for Swaps Hits... →
Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) — In the months leading up to the September 2008 collapse of giant insurer American International Group Inc., Elias Habayeb and his colleagues worked nights and weekends negotiating with banks that had bought $62 billion of credit-default swaps from AIG, according to a person who has worked with Habayeb.
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“So according to The Washington Post, dropping bombs on, controlling and...”
– “America’s Priorities,” by the Beltway elite - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com (via apsies) (via robot-heart-politics) (via quotingthecrisis)
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Speak up to save the Internet →
azspot:
Who do you want to decide which websites you can visit or what Internet content you can access — you or a big telecom company?
That’s what the fight about network neutrality is all about. Net neutrality is the principle that Internet users, not Internet service providers, should be in control.
RT @F1LT3R RT @jimpick: RT @kk: Jaw-dropping photographs of pollution in China http://bit.ly/2pEPqH
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Health Care Goes Behind Closed Doors →
retropolitics:
The Daily Beast: Despite promises from Barack Obama that health-care legislation would be passed out in the open for all to see, the senators working on the overhaul bill have returned to negotiate behind closed doors. It is a familiar move for Washington but one that runs against the president’s pledge. Beginning last Wednesday and moving into next week, Senate Majority Leader...
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7 Months, 10 Days In Captivity: NYT Reporter David... →
soupsoup:
During our time as hostages, I tried to reason with our captors. I told them we were journalists who had come to hear the Taliban’s side of the story. I told them that I had recently married and that Tahir and Asad had nine young children between them. I wept, hoping it would create sympathy, and begged them to release us. All of my efforts proved pointless.