Slog Comments
Wednesday Morning News
2
Call me a morning grouch, but the cat was not funny enough to elicite such laughter. I found it funny when you could just see the tip. Also, I have recently begun only looking at animal stories in the news.
3
I like how the weatherman is completely unphased and just keeps listing off the temperatures like nothing is happening. That man is a pro.
4
RE: Winning the Lottery won't make you happy.
I worked as an assistant with some of the researchers who did those studies (not the ones in the 70's... I'm still a young'en). And one of the more interesting things that came from them isn't the lottery part, but the data showing that people who have clinical depression ALSO tend to have the most realistic views of the world. They tend to see people's behaviors as they really are, rather than an idealistic version, and have much more accurate predictions (which are usually for the worse) on future events.
It's almost as if the rest of us - people without depression - are actually living life wearing rose-colored glasses all the time. Probably a good thing though, as it keeps us happy, even if for no real reason.
I worked as an assistant with some of the researchers who did those studies (not the ones in the 70's... I'm still a young'en). And one of the more interesting things that came from them isn't the lottery part, but the data showing that people who have clinical depression ALSO tend to have the most realistic views of the world. They tend to see people's behaviors as they really are, rather than an idealistic version, and have much more accurate predictions (which are usually for the worse) on future events.
It's almost as if the rest of us - people without depression - are actually living life wearing rose-colored glasses all the time. Probably a good thing though, as it keeps us happy, even if for no real reason.
6
Am I a bad person because I can think of better things to do with $2 than piss it away on a Powerball ticket?
7
Why the hell is Obama meeting with Romney?
Romney has no political position, represents no large corporation and represents no groups of people.
He is just a rich dickbag not producing anything. Is Obama going to be having lunch with every rich dickbag in the nation?
What is he going to consult with him about? Romney has proven himself a clueless failure about everything except sucking money from people with less than he has. Baffling.
Romney has no political position, represents no large corporation and represents no groups of people.
He is just a rich dickbag not producing anything. Is Obama going to be having lunch with every rich dickbag in the nation?
What is he going to consult with him about? Romney has proven himself a clueless failure about everything except sucking money from people with less than he has. Baffling.
9
Winning that amount of money money would be a nightmare. No matter how hard you tried, you'd never be "the same" in the eyes of your family and friends.
11
@7, yes, but it's a tradition. They may even enjoy some inside humor that only presidential candidates can share.
12
Thanks about the piece about women in the military. Many of the "volunteer" jobs are off limits to women, like serving on a submarine. If you volunteer to serve your country, then you should have opportunity to do it as well as you can.
13
Whose view of "how the world really is" was used for comparison in that study of depressed people? You could wring out enough subjectivity from that statement to whip up a new religion.
14
@13,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_…
There's a bunch of psychology journal articles out there too that go into far greater detail, but the wikipedia link is a good starting point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_…
There's a bunch of psychology journal articles out there too that go into far greater detail, but the wikipedia link is a good starting point.
15
@ 7 because romney needs a new cell phone and wal mart ran out of them last friday. barack's the president and he's got piles and piles of stuff to give away.
16
Forensic Finance Bible
Most American citizens still don't understand the primary cause for the global economic meltdown? Can you believe it?????
The synopsis below is a summary of the connected events, a continuum or continuity of actions, which led to the present situation today --- which profited a select few, while working towards the impoverishment of the majority.
After World War II, the immediate lackeys of the super-rich established a political slush fund called the Black Eagle Trust. This was based upon recovered Nazi (and to some extent, Empire of Japan) stolen treasures, which most predominantly were taken from Eastern Europe.
The three original controllers of this fund were John McCloy, Robert Lovett and Robert Anderson. The monies from this fund set the stage for future covert perfidy.
Fast forward to the S&L meltdown, which was simply another larger step in national thievery.
Forward to 9/11/01, where we heard on the day prior (9/10), the Pentagon's comptroller announce that an auditing team had uncovered $2.3 trillion which was unaccounted for --- we would hear little further about this as on the very next day an airliner would fly into the west wall of the Pentagon, killing most of that auditing team involved (DIA's Financial Management staff), and severely injuring the remaining members.
Concurrent with the aftermath of events of 9/11, the SEC would invoke its emergency powers under Securities Exchange Act Section 12(k), which allowed for the easing of regulatory restrictions for clearing and settling security trades for the next fifteen days. These changes would allow an estimated $240 billion in covert government securities to be cleared upon maturity without the standard regulatory controls around identification of ownership.
Over the next several months, offshore hedge funds would double in value, from an original $2 trillion to over $4 trillion. Reflect on that for a moment: $2.3 trillion unaccounted for, with another $240 billion cleared --- which may have been part of that unaccounted for trillions.
Further missing monies from the two wars during the Bush administration: $8.7 billion in Iraq, and over $17 billion in Afghanistan.
An enormous transformation, originally incremental and slow, but now with more funds at their disposal, truly took off, with the dismantling of the production/consumption economy, and the implementation of the fantasy finance economy.
Which gave us that global meltdown: John Paulson and his hedge fund, along with Goldman Sachs, designed and created a financial fraud instrument, the Abacus CDO, layered with sure-to-fail crappy loans, which they took out a bunch of credit default swaps (naked swaps, or unregulated insurance instruments) against.
So each naked swap they purchased at $1.4 million apiece, paid out an incredible $100 million --- and that was a bunch of swaps as Paulson made an estimated $3.4 billion on that deal.
Now imagine all the others involved in similar transactions. So multiply Paulson's deal by 100, or 1,000 and you begin to understand the cause for the meltdown. Another financial firm, Magnetar Capitals, created a bunch of losing deals --- in fact, 96% of their deals went into the toilet as losses, but they made out like the ultra-bandits they were as they did exactly what Paulson had done. Now multiply that by 100, or 1,000.
And much or most of those deals were made through AIG, the world's largest "insurance" corporation --- AIG did $460 billion worth of those deals, with no capital to back it up.
That means that AIG sold CDSes at $1.4 million a pop, with $460 billion worth (there were variations in the price, but I'm keeping this as simple as possible), so the possible payouts would range from $20 trillion to a potential $40 trillion or more --- funds which AIG didn't have to pay Paulson (and Alan Greenspan who worked at his hedge fund) and Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, BofA and Citigroup, etc.
Hence that bailout --- better known, as paying off the ultra-thieves who ruined everything for the rest of us --- for many, many years to come.
Now, Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns have been blamed, and they share plenty of blame, but they were the firms that were simply outwitted by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank doing bear runs on them, after their perfidy left them in highly vulnerable positions, the other three banksters pulled the rug of their counterparties, thus destroying their financial positions. Further consolidating, further monopolizing the financial industry.
(Paid stooges like Barry Lynn at New America Foundation, which is funded by Pew oil money and David Rockefeller's lackey, private bankster Peter G. Peterson, would have us believes these monopolies just accidentally happen --- never trust those disinformation specialists, they practice "soft" propaganda, and please beware of Bill Moyers [longtime FBI snitch], Kevin Phillips, who would have us believe the CPI, or Consumer Price Index, was the cause of the economic meltdown, Noam Chomsky and Robert Reich, or both truly muddy the waters of truth.)
The rich and super-rich simply became the ultra-rich through their rigging of the markets and their insider trading --- it is really that very simple.
Now the six principal methods of their manipulation are the following:
(1) unlimited number of investors per hedge fund
(2) unlimited number of commodity futures contracts
(3) unlimited number of credit default swaps (or naked swaps)
(4) DTCC's Stock Borrow Program (SBP), which allows for naked short selling
(5) LIBOR rates manipulation, which can and was used to manipulate the prices of structured finance loans (private equity LBO loans based upon securitizations, and securitized financial instruments called credit derivatives), manipulation of the prices of municipal swaps, profiting the banksters but screwing states, counties and cities, mortgage lending and ARMs, etc., etc.)
(6) unlimited unregistered trusts (normal hiding of wealth and ownership has historically taken place through the use of foundations, trusts, and offshore finance centers, or tax havens, and using those foundations and trusts as conduits, they set up unregistered trusts, especially offshore --- and do you track those unregistered trusts? You can't!
Any single usage or combination of the above in a myriad number of ways, offers almost limitless power to the financial-intelligence-complex which primarily runs things in America, and at the global level, the transnational capitalist class, or global banking intelligence complex.
It's really, really that simple . . . .
More...
Most American citizens still don't understand the primary cause for the global economic meltdown? Can you believe it?????
The synopsis below is a summary of the connected events, a continuum or continuity of actions, which led to the present situation today --- which profited a select few, while working towards the impoverishment of the majority.
After World War II, the immediate lackeys of the super-rich established a political slush fund called the Black Eagle Trust. This was based upon recovered Nazi (and to some extent, Empire of Japan) stolen treasures, which most predominantly were taken from Eastern Europe.
The three original controllers of this fund were John McCloy, Robert Lovett and Robert Anderson. The monies from this fund set the stage for future covert perfidy.
Fast forward to the S&L meltdown, which was simply another larger step in national thievery.
Forward to 9/11/01, where we heard on the day prior (9/10), the Pentagon's comptroller announce that an auditing team had uncovered $2.3 trillion which was unaccounted for --- we would hear little further about this as on the very next day an airliner would fly into the west wall of the Pentagon, killing most of that auditing team involved (DIA's Financial Management staff), and severely injuring the remaining members.
Concurrent with the aftermath of events of 9/11, the SEC would invoke its emergency powers under Securities Exchange Act Section 12(k), which allowed for the easing of regulatory restrictions for clearing and settling security trades for the next fifteen days. These changes would allow an estimated $240 billion in covert government securities to be cleared upon maturity without the standard regulatory controls around identification of ownership.
Over the next several months, offshore hedge funds would double in value, from an original $2 trillion to over $4 trillion. Reflect on that for a moment: $2.3 trillion unaccounted for, with another $240 billion cleared --- which may have been part of that unaccounted for trillions.
Further missing monies from the two wars during the Bush administration: $8.7 billion in Iraq, and over $17 billion in Afghanistan.
An enormous transformation, originally incremental and slow, but now with more funds at their disposal, truly took off, with the dismantling of the production/consumption economy, and the implementation of the fantasy finance economy.
Which gave us that global meltdown: John Paulson and his hedge fund, along with Goldman Sachs, designed and created a financial fraud instrument, the Abacus CDO, layered with sure-to-fail crappy loans, which they took out a bunch of credit default swaps (naked swaps, or unregulated insurance instruments) against.
So each naked swap they purchased at $1.4 million apiece, paid out an incredible $100 million --- and that was a bunch of swaps as Paulson made an estimated $3.4 billion on that deal.
Now imagine all the others involved in similar transactions. So multiply Paulson's deal by 100, or 1,000 and you begin to understand the cause for the meltdown. Another financial firm, Magnetar Capitals, created a bunch of losing deals --- in fact, 96% of their deals went into the toilet as losses, but they made out like the ultra-bandits they were as they did exactly what Paulson had done. Now multiply that by 100, or 1,000.
And much or most of those deals were made through AIG, the world's largest "insurance" corporation --- AIG did $460 billion worth of those deals, with no capital to back it up.
That means that AIG sold CDSes at $1.4 million a pop, with $460 billion worth (there were variations in the price, but I'm keeping this as simple as possible), so the possible payouts would range from $20 trillion to a potential $40 trillion or more --- funds which AIG didn't have to pay Paulson (and Alan Greenspan who worked at his hedge fund) and Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, BofA and Citigroup, etc.
Hence that bailout --- better known, as paying off the ultra-thieves who ruined everything for the rest of us --- for many, many years to come.
Now, Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns have been blamed, and they share plenty of blame, but they were the firms that were simply outwitted by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank doing bear runs on them, after their perfidy left them in highly vulnerable positions, the other three banksters pulled the rug of their counterparties, thus destroying their financial positions. Further consolidating, further monopolizing the financial industry.
(Paid stooges like Barry Lynn at New America Foundation, which is funded by Pew oil money and David Rockefeller's lackey, private bankster Peter G. Peterson, would have us believes these monopolies just accidentally happen --- never trust those disinformation specialists, they practice "soft" propaganda, and please beware of Bill Moyers [longtime FBI snitch], Kevin Phillips, who would have us believe the CPI, or Consumer Price Index, was the cause of the economic meltdown, Noam Chomsky and Robert Reich, or both truly muddy the waters of truth.)
The rich and super-rich simply became the ultra-rich through their rigging of the markets and their insider trading --- it is really that very simple.
Now the six principal methods of their manipulation are the following:
(1) unlimited number of investors per hedge fund
(2) unlimited number of commodity futures contracts
(3) unlimited number of credit default swaps (or naked swaps)
(4) DTCC's Stock Borrow Program (SBP), which allows for naked short selling
(5) LIBOR rates manipulation, which can and was used to manipulate the prices of structured finance loans (private equity LBO loans based upon securitizations, and securitized financial instruments called credit derivatives), manipulation of the prices of municipal swaps, profiting the banksters but screwing states, counties and cities, mortgage lending and ARMs, etc., etc.)
(6) unlimited unregistered trusts (normal hiding of wealth and ownership has historically taken place through the use of foundations, trusts, and offshore finance centers, or tax havens, and using those foundations and trusts as conduits, they set up unregistered trusts, especially offshore --- and do you track those unregistered trusts? You can't!
Any single usage or combination of the above in a myriad number of ways, offers almost limitless power to the financial-intelligence-complex which primarily runs things in America, and at the global level, the transnational capitalist class, or global banking intelligence complex.
It's really, really that simple . . . .
17
The laughing during the cat walk was annoying. Reminds me too much of AFHV. But, I did smile when the tail was only thing visible.
19
I would personally be happy to pay $2000 in taxes if it means more taxes are being paid by rich people.
22
Sorry, but the cat tail,and then cat ass, wanderingthru the weather report made me laugh out loud.
As it did, unsurprisingly, for those who work at the station.
As it did, unsurprisingly, for those who work at the station.
24
I have a power ball ticket, my first one ever. Seems fun when it's above $400 million. If I could really find something better to do with $2.00; I'd bring my coffee from home instead of buying drip or a latte.
26
@1 Well who do you think Hiassen has been ripping off all these years.
@6 Of course not. You're a bad person for so many more reasons than that.
@6 Of course not. You're a bad person for so many more reasons than that.
27
@12: The Navy began allowing women to serve on submarines a year or two ago. It may still be in the "pilot" stage, but it's happening.
Otherwise, you're spot on.
Otherwise, you're spot on.
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