Monday Reads

Posted: August 8, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , | 31 Comments

Good Morning!

All eyes are on global markets for bonds, commodities, currencies, and equities.  Gold futures were hanging around $1700 a troy ounce last night when the Asian markets opened.  Silver is also moving up.  The US dollar set a record low against the Swiss Franc. There’s the down grade to US Treasuries and the negative outlook given to the US to reprice and there’s still consideration for a second recession which could be much worse than the last one.

“It would be disastrous if we entered into a recession at this stage, given that we haven’t yet made up for the last recession,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics.

When the last downturn hit, the credit bubble left Americans with lots of fat to cut, but a new one would force families to cut from the bone. Making things worse, policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options available.

Anxiety and uncertainty have increased in the last few days after the decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating and as Europe continues its desperate attempt to stem its debt crisis.

Good news for investment banks.  Timothy Geithner has agreed to stay on as Treasury Secretary.

Geithner told the president Friday morning that he would remain in his post. Hours later, he had to go to the White House to meet with Obama again and tell him the nation would likely lose its AAA credit rating.

On Sunday afternoon, Geithner joined an emergency conference call involving the seven major economic powers to discuss the impact of the downgrade.

“Secretary Geithner has let the president know that he plans to stay on in his position at Treasury,” Treasury spokeswoman Jenni LeCompte said in a statement. “He looks forward to the important work ahead on the challenges facing our great country.”

White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “The president asked Secretary Geithner to stay on at Treasury and welcomes his decision.”

So, let me change the topic to real Camelot Days and The Daily Mail who claims that there’s some Jackie O tapes with some interesting gossip from back in the day.

Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal.

The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him.

She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy.

Texas-born Mr Johnson, who served as the state’s governor and senator, completed Mr Kennedy’s term and went on to be elected president in his own right.

The tapes were recorded with leading historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr within months of the assassination on November 22, 1963, and had been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston.

The President and Republicans in Congress may want full speed ahead on trade agreements but labor organizations are trying to put on the brakes.  There are agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea in the pipe.

“We’ll be talking to every legislator out there about the trade deals,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Friday.

The AFL-CIO will hold more than 450 events across the country this month where the deals will be discussed, and it has started a petition “urging politicians to bring the same urgency to the jobs crisis that they brought to the politically manufactured crisis over the deficit,” Trumka said.

The fight over the agreements is splitting President Obama from unions and other liberal groups at a time when there is already tension between the White House and the left over the debt-ceiling deal.

Supporters of the trade deals in the administration, Congress and the business community argue they will create jobs and help the economy recover.

Juno began its journey to Jupiter on the 5th of this month.  Juno is a solar-powered probe with a mission to study the origins of our solar system.

Juno is set to unite with Jupiter on July 4, 2016, when the spacecraft will enter orbit around the largest planet in our solar system. As the spacecraft circles Jupiter 33 times over the course of one year, passing over the planet’s poles, Juno will gather information about its atmosphere, magnetic field and structure.

Of all the planets in the solar system, astronomers think that Jupiter formed first, and its strong, clingy gravitational field means that any scraps of primordial material it snatched up then may still be present today—and in 2016, when Juno arrives at the gas giant. By measuring Jupiter’s chemical content, Juno could aid in scientists’ understanding of what this solar system looked like when it first formed.

Two years ago, my brother-in-law’s uncle died, but his dance troupe and legacy live on.  There’s a wonderful article on the legacy of Merce Cunningham at NPR that includes a beautiful photo of the troupe performing Antic Meet. It’s a wonderful narrative of dancers committed to keeping the spirit and vision of the famed choreographer alive.

Passing on Cunningham’s legacy is crucial to more than just the world of dance. In the 1950s, Cunningham broke with the basic notion of dance being inspired by drama and emotion, as he and his partner, the composer John Cage, moved dance into a new era of abstraction. Their work was a key part of the art world’s seismic shift to post-modernism; Cunningham is now seen as one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, on a par with Picasso and Stravinsky.

By the end of his 90 years, Cunningham was in a wheelchair, and instead of creating new dances, he finally began to think about saving the ones he had already made. His longtime friend Laura Kuhn says she urged him to plan for his legacy before it was too late.

“He was making new work up until the end of his life,” Kuhn says. “But the making of new work was less possible — it became less and less possible for him. So I think it became clear to him that in order for his work to survive, someone was going to have to step in.”

So Kuhn and others close to Cunningham helped him set up the Merce Cunningham Trust, which will maintain an archive of his work and license his pieces, and employ former dancers, like longtime Cunningham dancer Rob Swinston, to teach them to other troupes.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

 

Saturday Morning Reads: A little this and a little that

Posted: August 6, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , | 28 Comments

Good Morning!

Today’s a good day to let sleeping dogs lie!  Man, is it hot down here in the South. I can’t replace Wonk’s Saturday morning pithiness, but here’s my shot at it.

I read this in my hard copy of The Economist and thought I’d share it. It appears we are hardwired to be generous and cooperate.  Maybe somebody ought to break that news to the Homo Idioticus species now residing in the District Beltway.

At the moment co-operation is the most fashionable subject of investigation. In particular, why are humans so willing to collaborate with unrelated strangers, even to the point of risking being cheated by people whose characters they cannot possibly know?

Evidence from economic games played in the laboratory for real money suggests humans are both trusting of those they have no reason to expect they will ever see again, and surprisingly unwilling to cheat them—and that these phenomena are deeply ingrained in the species’s psychology. Existing theories of the evolution of trust depend either on the participants being relatives (and thus sharing genes) or on their relationship being long-term, with each keeping count to make sure the overall benefits of collaboration exceed the costs. Neither applies in the case of passing strangers, and that has led to speculation that something extraordinary, such as a need for extreme collaboration prompted by the emergence of warfare that uses weapons, has happened in recent human evolution to promote the emergence of an instinct for unconditional generosity.

We’ve also seen how the elderly are going to be treated by the current group of knuckle draggers occupying the District Beltway. Did Bronze Age elderly fare any better? Cambridge researcher Jo Appleby compared the graves of children to old people to get some clues. She found distinct difference in grave goods in many categories of people including sex, age, and presumed social status.

When Appleby compared the items in the graves of older people with the items in the graves of younger people, she turned up some intriguing patterns. In the earlier period, older women tended not to be buried with certain objects that appeared more frequently in younger people’s graves. But the elderly weren’t left with nothing, Appleby said.

“They had really good numbers of objects, and they had some of the richer objects, it was just that particular things weren’t found with them,” she said. For example, unlike their younger counterparts, older women didn’t get buried wearing necklaces made of dog teeth.

Later, in the newer cemetery, this age differentiation vanished. Women wore different items than female children, but the age at which a woman died made no difference in her grave goods.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is meeting with her Canadian counterpart  John Baird to discuss a possible US pipeline for oil from Canadian oil sands.  The process of removing oil from sands is expensive and damaging to the environment so in many quarters this is controversial.  It also should be noted that pipelines are known to leak and this is going to head down through some pristine ranch, farming, and recreation territory. However, Canada has been up to its knees in the process for some time–destroying a lot of wilderness in places like Alberta–and would like to see the cash from a pipe that extends from down to Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.  It would pass through six states.

The US government will decide by year’s end whether to issue a permit for a proposed $13 billion oil pipeline stretching from Canada to Texas, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday.

The 1,700-mile (2,700-kilometer) Keystone XL pipeline proposed by TransCanada would begin in Alberta in western Canada and pass through the US states of Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma before ending up in Texas at the Gulf of Mexico.

An extensive review has been performed, featuring analysis and assessments, as well as looking over public comments.

“We are leaving no stone unturned in this process and we expect to make a decision on the permit before the end of this year,” Clinton said during a press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird.

Baird described a “good discussion” with the chief US diplomat on the matter, adding that Clinton “listened respectfully.”

“It is a very important project not just for our government, but I think for Canadians and the future of the Canadian economy,” he said.

The US State Department says it expects to release a final environmental impact statement on the proposed pipeline by mid-August.

A Republican-led congressional committee voted at the time for a resolution urging Clinton to “immediately approve” the project, which would guarantee oil access for the US.

But a number of environmental and citizen groups have launched a fight against the pipeline because of the oil’s origin. The unconventional oil sands of Alberta require energy that produces a large volume of greenhouse gasses.

Okay, it’s still hot down here. That hasn’t changed since you read the first bit.  Frankly, I think it’s hotter.  Slate has an article with a good heading up and it’s called  Can a Heat Wave Make You Insane? If you ask me, the answer is yes. Let me introduce you to some folks I know that seemed pretty normal when they moved down here to the tropics from way up north.

It depends on how hot it is, and whether you’re mentally stable to begin with. Intense heat increases the risk of dehydration, and even mild dehydration can affect the brain. A study published this summer tested two dozen college-age men and found that a loss of 1 percent body mass via exercise-induced sweating (replaceable with three glasses of water) decreased their cognitive performance and increased levels of anxiety.

Dramatic overheating can also lead to heatstroke, symptoms of which progress from confusion and irritability to hallucinations, violent behavior, and delirium. In animal models, overheating causes some neurons to become more excitable, which might underlie the psychiatric effects. Most of these are transient—cool off and they go away—but heatstroke may lead to long-term brain damage. (It can also kill you.) You won’t keep hallucinating for years to come, but you might end up a little clumsy or slur your speech. Case reports that have been pointed out to us by the folks at the office of Wolf & Pravato personal injury attorneys show that through heatstroke, long-lasting personality changes (similar to those caused by traumatic brain injury) also exist, but this complication appears to be rare.

Those of you with tinfoil hats may want to consider changing to something a little less metallic because a major geomagnetic storm is hitting Earth right now. Those of you up north should check for the infamous Northern Lights.  Evidently Seattle is set to get some so if you’ve got the rare clear sky up there, check them out. I already called the sister and she’s checking them out from her weekend retreat on the Puget Sound.

A massive solar storm hit Earth on August 5, raising the possibility of auroras being visible even at relatively low latitudes, as well as potential disruptions to communications satellites and GPS devices.

“My estimate is we will probably get aurorae in the northern tier of the U.S.,” physicist Brian J. Anderson told the Baltimore Sun’s meteorology blogger. “We might be able to see it in the Baltimore-Washington area if it [the magnetic field in the solar storm] turns due south.”

According to spaceweather.com, the burst of radio static which reached the earth on the evening of August 4th — prior to the main electromagnetic blast — was “so powerful that receivers on Earth picked it up after sunset.” Events of that kind are extremely rare, and radio astronomers have never been able to offer a conclusive explanation for how they happen.

So, you want to see a picture of the real Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?

Lucy Vodden was the subject of a painting brought home from nursery school by a young Julian Lennon, who showed it to his dad, John, and told him it was “Lucy — in the sky with diamonds”.

Julian got back in touch with Lucy a few years agi when he heard that she was battling Lupus, an auto-immune disease.

Now, a plaque commemorating the woman who inspired the Beatles’ hit, will be placed in Liverpool in memory of Vodden who died in 2009 at age 46. (See the original painting below)

Following her death, Lennon became heavily involved with St Thomas’ Lupus Trust, which commissioned the plaque, and he become the Lupus Foundation of America’s Global Ambassador.

Okay, I need another glass of ice tea.  The big question is if I can face a drive in a hot car to the grocery store.  So, now it’s up to you. What’s on you reading and blogging list today?

Friday Reads

Posted: August 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Democratic Politics, Foreign Affairs, income inequality, morning reads, Somalia, Syria | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 29 Comments

Good Morning!

At least there’s some good news this morning.  Senator Harry Reid has found a deal to end FAA furloughs so that lots of people can return to work and those monies go to the government and not into the pockets of the airline industry.

Under a deal Reid made with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Senate will pass the House bill that includes cuts to rural flight service to airports in Nevada, West Virginia and Montana. But Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will use his authority to waive the airports from the cuts, ending a 13-day impasse that left 4,000 FAA employees and about 70,000 construction employees out of work.

Reid said the deal did not solve the issues that led to the partial shutdown of the FAA, but he said those can be dealt with another day.

“I am pleased to announce that we have been able to broker a bipartisan compromise between the House and the Senate to put 74,000 transportation and construction workers back to work,” Reid said in a statement released by his office. “This agreement does not resolve the important differences that still remain. But I believe we should keep Americans working while Congress settles its differences, and this agreement will do exactly that.”

NASA’s funding may be on the chopping block, but the agency continues to do first class science.  It has announced that it has found evidence of liquid water on Mars.

Pictures taken by the powerful HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) showed fingers of dark material running down rocky slopes facing the equator during spring and summer months. Scientists believe that this represents a significant sign that briny water is flowing on the surface of the red plant.

The dark stripes, approximately 0.5 yards wide and hundreds of yards long, appear during the warm months and then disappear again in cold months. The salty surface of Mars means that liquid water would be salty as well, making it less likely to freeze at the observed tempratures.

“These dark lineations are different from other types of features on Martian slopes,” MRO project scientist Richard Zurek said in a press advisory. “Repeated observations show they extend even farther downhill with time during the warm season.”

In my Monday Reads I mentioned the horrible famine taking place in Somalia.  SOS Hillary Clinton has made an appeal to al-Shabaab to focus on feeding hungry people and letting world aid groups do their jobs.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday appealed to al-Shabaab militants in Somalia to give unfettered access to relief workers trying to aid thousands of people threatened by famine.  Clinton said a high-level U.S. team will lead a fact-finding mission to neighboring Kenya to review relief efforts.

The United States lists al-Shabaab, which has ties to al-Qaida, as a terrorist organization and has actively helped Somalia’s U.N.-supported transitional government try to resist a takeover by the Islamic militants.

But in an unusual direct appeal to al-Shabaab, Clinton urged the group to drop what she said was its deliberate effort to block food deliveries in south-central Somalia and in parts of the capital, Mogadishu, under its direct or indirect control.

“It is particularly tragic that during the holy month of Ramadan, al-Shabaab are preventing assistance to the most vulnerable populations in Somalia – namely children, including infants, and girls and women who are attempting to bring themselves and those children to safety and  the potential of being fed before more deaths occur,” said Clinton. “I call on al-Shabaab to allow assistance to be delivered in an absolutely unfettered way throughout the area that they currently control.”

Al-Shabaab, which dominates the southern part of Somalia, maintains there is no famine and has barred the entry of aid groups other than the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Creepy old polygamist leader–Warren Jeffs– has been convicted of child sex abuse despite his self representation in criminal court.  He mostly hid under the mantle of The Book of Mormon and his right to practice his religion as he saw fit.

Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, has been convicted on child sexual assault charges.

His case stems from his relationship with two young followers he took as brides in what the FLDS church calls “spiritual marriages.”

Jeffs has acted as his own attorney during the trial after firing his attorneys on July 28.

In 2008, authorities raided the YFZ ranch near Eldorado, and seized about 400 children.

Jeffs faces up to life in prison.

A forensic analyst testified that Jeffs was an almost certain DNA match to the child of a 15-year-old mother.

Jeffs also was accused of assaulting a 12-year-old girl.

At least 2000 Syrians that oppose the dictator there have been killed.  The latest slaughter–which is taking place during the Islamic holiday of Ramadan–includes tanks in Hama.  SOS Hillary Clinton has said the current government of Syria has lost all legitimacy.

“The sound of tank shelling and their heavy machineguns echoed in Hama all day. We fear many more martyrs. Most people in my neighborhood have fled,” said one resident in Sabounia district, a small business owner who did not want to be named.

“The shabbiha (militiamen loyal to Assad) are cleaning the streets near the university campus to stage a pro-Assad march tomorrow as if nothing is happening in Hama,” he told Reuters by satellite phone.

Electricity and communications have been cut off and as many as 130 people have been killed in a five-day military assault since Assad, from Syria’s minority Alawite sect, sent troops into the city on Sunday, residents and activists said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington believed Assad’s forces were responsible for the deaths of more than 2,000 Syrians in their attacks on peaceful protesters during the five-month uprising.

Clinton repeated that the United States believed Assad had lost legitimacy in Syria and said Washington and its allies were working on strategies to apply more pressure beyond new sanctions announced earlier on Thursday.

Meanwhile, happy times are here again if you’re stinking, filthy rich.

Nordstrom has a waiting list for a Chanel sequined tweed coat with a $9,010 price. Neiman Marcus has sold out in almost every size of Christian Louboutin “Bianca” platform pumps, at $775 a pair. Mercedes-Benz said it sold more cars last month in the United States than it had in any July in five years.

Even with the economy in a funk and many Americans pulling back on spending, the rich are again buying designer clothing, luxury cars and about anything that catches their fancy. Luxury goods stores, which fared much worse than other retailers in the recession, are more than recovering — they are zooming. Many high-end businesses are even able to mark up, rather than discount, items to attract customers who equate quality with price.

“If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon, and the former chairman and chief executive of Saks.

The rich do not spend quite as they did in the free-wheeling period before the recession, but they are closer to that level.

The luxury category has posted 10 consecutive months of sales increases compared with the year earlier, even as overall consumer spending on categories like furniture and electronics has been tepid, according to the research service MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse. In July, the luxury segment had an 11.6 percent increase, the biggest monthly gain in more than a year.

I’d say that trend might end given that equities markets are crashing and crashing extraordinarily big time.  Yesterday was the worst day for the market since 2008.  That’s what happens when the confidence fairy runs off with the high priest of voodoo economics. Poof!  Don’t say I didn’t tell you to bail a few months ago!

Stocks plunged Thursday in their single worst day since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Dow tumbled 512 points — its ninth deepest point drop ever — as fear about the global economy spooked investors.

“The conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that the economy was growing — that the worst was behind us,” said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. “Now what people are realizing is the stimulus didn’t work, and we may be headed back to recession.”

Also, don’t tell me I didn’t tell you that the stimulus wasn’t going to be enough to jump start the economy either.  I think we all saw it.  Too bad they never listen to us?  Hmmmm? So, I’ll continue to watch this.

The disaster at Fukushima nuclear power plant continues. Radiation levels inside the crippled was said to be at levels that went beyond measurement capabilities.  Folks, this is so scary. I can’t imagine the bravery of the workers trying to deal with this.  It sounds like going near the place is a death sentence.

Radiation dosages of 5 sieverts per hour were detected indoors on the second floor of the No. 1 reactor at the crisis-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on Tuesday, the highest figure yet indoors, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said.

The figure was detected in front of a pipe in an air-conditioning machine room, the utility said, adding the dosage may be larger than the measured amount as it exceeds the capacity of measuring equipment.

Radioactive substances are considered to be staying in the pipe after they entered there when pressure in the reactor’s containment vessel was lowered on March 12, according to Tokyo Electric known as TEPCO.

The company has made the area off-limits.

TEPCO also said radiation doses of more than 10 sieverts, or 10,000 millisieverts, per hour were detected outdoors again Tuesday at the plant.

If exposed to such a high-level dosage of radiation in a short period of time, almost all people exposed would die, radiation experts said.

On Monday, Tokyo Electric said radiation doses of as high as 10 sieverts per hour were detected outside the buildings for the No. 1 and No. 2 reactors.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Tuesday Reads

Posted: August 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, children, Crime, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, Psychopaths in charge, Syria, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women, voodoo economics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!! I have a few interesting reads for you today, and they aren’t all about the idiotic debt ceiling debate. I’m going to lead off with a few excellent blog posts about that idiocy, and then I’ll move on to something else.

First up, Scarecrow compares the movie Cowboys and Aliens to the events in DC: In Cowboys and Aliens, Humans Win; In Washington’s Zombies Vs. Pods, They Lose. In the movie, Scarecrow writes:

humans of all types realize they have to join together to defeat the rapacious creatures who are looting the planet and turning humans into zombies and pod people. There’s hope for our species!

Back in Washington, D.C. there are no heroes and no upbeat ending. Instead, the looting, muggings and beatings will continue until morale improves.

In our “real” world, there is a radical extremist group driven by zombies and zombie beliefs who successfully blackmail the nation into strangling its own economy. The supposedly “sane” group that is supposed to stop this madness has become cowardly and turned into mindless pod people, who assure the nation that the gutting of American government and essential services and safety nets won’t occur in one step but in several, whose outcome is locked in by an undemocratic Super Congress and the next debt limit blackmail in 2013.

It’s a terrific post.

On a more serious note, Emptywheel asks, Is Mark Warner the Designated Social Security Killer? It’s all about what may happen if the so-called “Super Congress” comes to be. Read it and weep.

At the New Yorker, John Cassidy argues that the debt ceiling bill is all smoke and mirrors.

In removing the immediate threat of a debt default, the agreement…signals that the U.S. government still satisfies the minimum standard of financial functionality: it pays its bills on time. That should be enough to head off an immediate downgrade in the nation’s credit rating, and it explains why Wall Street bounced at Monday’s opening bell.

Beyond that it is hard to see anything very positive about a deal in which President Obama finally persuaded the Republicans to accept a Republican plan. Putting on my ethicist cap, I agree with Bernie Sanders that the deal is wrongheaded and immoral. To be sure, America has a long-term fiscal challenge that needs to be confronted. But at a time when fourteen million Americans are unemployed, and many millions more have been forced to work just part-time, the government should be focussing on job growth rather than cutting the budget….

As I’ve said before, headlines such as “Democrats and Republicans agree on $2.4 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years” are virtually meaningless. The United States, like every other country, budgets on an annual basis. What really matters for the economy, and for the unemployed, is how much cash the federal government will spend in the remaining months of the 2011 fiscal year and in fiscal 2012, which begins October 1st. A pledge to cut spending in 2016, say, is just that: a pledge. Between now and then, we will have another bipartisan spending review (that’s also part of the deal), a Presidential election, and who knows how many budget battles. The actual 2016 spending outcome will almost certainly bear little relation to the figures in this agreement.

Also at the New Yorker, Hendrick Hertzberg has a funny piece about Louie Gohmert, looney Texas Republican Congressman quoting Communist Leon Trotsky. I don’t want to ruin it for you by pulling out a quote. It’s not long, so go read the whole thing.

Susie Madrak has a great post at Crooks and Liars: This Year We’ve Broken Or Tied 2,676 Heat Records – So Far. Think We Could Talk About Climate Change Yet? Be sure to check it out.

Do you realize how many people go missing in the U.S.? A lot. And most of them seem to be women and children. Here is a slide show of 64 people from the FBI’s kidnapped and missing persons list.

The little girl whose photo comes first is 11-year-old Celina Cass, from West Stewartstown, NH. Her body was found today in a river near her family home. Sadly, when a child disappears, a family is often responsible. In this case, I have a feeling her stepfather had something to do with Celina’s death. I hope I’m wrong. At least she was found fairly quickly.

Many missing people aren’t found for years, if at all. Indiana University student Lauren Spierer disappeared from Bloomington, Indiana on June 3. Despite intense searches by hundreds of volunteers and a large reward offered by her parents and IU, she has not been found. It looks like people whom Lauren thought were “friends” may have had something to do with her disappearance, because just about everyone who was with her before she went missing has lawyered up and isn’t talking to police.

A Denver woman, Amy Ahonen, disappeared without a trace a few weeks ago. Her car was found parked unlocked along the highway with her purse, ids, cell phone, and keys inside. What happened to her? No one knows and the police have stopped looking. It so happens that a budding serial killer was on the loose in the area at the time of her disappearance, but the police don’t seem to be making that connection.

There are many more stories like this breaking every day in this country. Why do we accept that women and children will disappear daily and in most cases, they will be found murdered and often raped?

Speaking of missing people, a legendary missing person has resurfaced in the news. From the LA Times: D.B. Cooper hijacking mystery is revived with ‘promising lead’

D.B. Cooper, the infamous airplane hijacker who vaulted into urban mythology by parachuting out of a jetliner over the Pacific Northwest with a $200,000 ransom, is back on the FBI’s radar screen.

Cooper, whose case remains the only unsolved airline hijacking in U.S. history, became the stuff of legend on the night of Nov. 24, 1971, when he jumped from a Boeing 727 into the skies between Portland, Ore., and Seattle. He disappeared with the ransom he extorted — 10,000 $20 bills.

The case has remained open, but the trail has been cold despite hundreds of tips, thousands of theories and dozens of breakthroughs in scientific investigation. Now the FBI, which has previously said that Cooper is likely dead, is looking at fresh evidence, according to weekend reports in the media in Seattle, the epicenter of the story that seemingly can never die.

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The man investigated as a suspect in the D.B. Cooper case – the nation’s only unsolved commercial airplane hijacking – has been dead for about 10 years, and a forensic check didn’t find fingerprints on an item that belonged him, an FBI spokesman told seattlepi.com Monday.

“There are also other leads we’re pursuing,” agent Fred Gutt said. “Some of the other names have been out in the public, some of the names have not come out.”

The name of a man not previously investigated was given to the FBI nearly a year ago by a law enforcement colleague, and an item that belongs to him was sent for fingerprint work at the agency’s Quantico, Va., forensic lab, agents told seattlepi.com.

“The nature of the material was not good for prints,” Gutt said.

He added agents are obtaining other items that may have the suspect’s fingerprints in hopes of matching them with prints taken from the Northwest Orient plane after Cooper jumped the night of Nov. 24, 1971.

The situation in Syria is escalating. There has been a great deal of violence there for some time, and it is not getting the same attention that Egypt, Iran, and Libya have gotten. But now the UN Security Council plans to take up the issue.

Reacting to new bloodshed in Syria, European powers relaunched a dormant draft U.N. resolution to condemn Damascus for its crackdown on protesters, circulating a revised text to the Security Council at a meeting on Monday.

Following the hour-long closed-door meeting, several diplomats said that after months of deadlock over Syria in the council, the fresh violence appeared to be pushing the divided members towards some form of reaction.

But envoys disagreed over whether the 15-nation body should adopt the Western-backed draft resolution or negotiate a less binding statement.

Germany requested the meeting after human rights groups said Syrian troops killed 80 people on Sunday when they stormed the city of Hama to crush protests amid a five-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

More than 1600 people have been killed during the Syrian uprising.

From the Daily Beast:

You have to wonder if President Barack Obama ever rereads his speeches.

At the State Department last May, the president spoke at length of democratization in the Middle East. He chose his words carefully, dropping caveats and provisos. But Obama also bluntly declared that, “it will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.” He justified the intervention in Libya by recalling that “we saw the prospect of imminent massacre … Had we not acted along with our NATO allies and regional coalition partners, thousands would have been killed.”

Yet precisely such sordid outcomes have come to pass, not in Libya but during the four-month uprising against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Around 1,600 people are believed to have been killed, not mentioning some 3,000 disappeared, many of them presumed dead. Massacres have proliferated, and on Sunday, the eve of the holy month of Ramadan, the Syrian army entered the city of Hama, which had effectively escaped from government writ weeks ago.

Throughout, the White House has painstakingly avoided demanding that Assad step down, saying only that he must lead a transition to democracy or get out of the way. The Syrian dictator has, of course, done neither.

I’ll end with just one more link on the debt deal that Dakinikat sent me.

Reuters analysis – Debt deal unlikely to boost investor confidence

Rather than a relief rally, U.S. stocks ended modestly lower on Monday as ugly economic data and some lingering concerns about whether the deal would get through Congress dominated trading. But even when the House of Representatives voted to pass the plan late in the day there was little reaction from U.S. stock index futures.

The deal agreed to by Republican and Democratic leaders will raise the government’s borrowing ceiling while cutting spending by at least $2.1 trillion over 10 years. All of the burden could fall on spending cuts with no guarantee of steps to lift tax revenues.

Rather than perceiving it as a meaningful effort at tackling the United States’ huge debt problem, investors worried about the impact of austerity on an economy already hit by souring business and consumer confidence.

Plans for such a significant fiscal retrenchment, even though most of the impact will be in the latter years of the program, come at a vulnerable time for the world economy. Recession risks are rising in the United States, the European economy remains entwined in its own debt crisis, and China’s supercharged economy could slow.

“Risk markets may rally temporarily, but until economic growth and job creation is addressed, there can be no sustained rally,” Bill Gross, the co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, which manages more than $1.2 trillion, said in an interview.

Will Washington ever wake up to reality? I’m afraid they (and we) will have to hit bottom first. They are like alcoholics, except they are drunk on greed and power. So on that note, what are you reading and blogging about today?

Monday Reads

Posted: August 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , | 50 Comments

Good Morning!

President Cave-in and the spineless Democrats in congress have handed Republican hostage takers a big win. This is beyond ridiculous. As I’ve said before, President Push-over draws a line on the etcha sketch then goes shake shake shake!

Anything can happen, but it apppears the GOP is on the verge of pulling off a political victory that may be unprecedented in American history. Republicans may succeed in using the threat of a potential outcome that they themselves acknowledged would lead to national catastrophe as leverage to extract enormous concessions from Democrats, without giving up anything of any significance in return.

Not only that, but Republicans — in perhaps the most remarkable example of political up-is-downism in recent memory — cast their willingness to dangle the threat of national crisis as a brave and heroic effort they’d undertaken on behalf of the national interest. Only the threat of national crisis could force the immediate spending cuts supposedly necessary to prevent a far more epic crisis later.

Under the emerging deal, President Obama can hike the debt limit in two stages — the first in exchange for equivalent cuts; the second after a Congressional committee comes up with second round of yet more cuts, including to entitlements. The talks appear close to resolving the spending cut“trigger” that would force the committee to act — without giving the GOP an incentive to deliberately sabotage its work. The remaining question is how to get it through the House. But a deal seems immiment.

Again and again, Dems drew lines in the sand that they promptly erased as the threat of default grew. A clean debt ceiling hike? Dropped. Cuts to Medicare benefits? They’ll likely be in that committee’s crosshairs. The insistence on revenue hikes? Withdrawn.

This is sure to create a recession.  There’s no lack of economists expressing that view point either.

Macroeconomic Advisers, a leading forecaster, said Thursday that a rewritten plan offered by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, would shave more than a tenth of a percentage point off of growth next year, while the plan being pushed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would cause an even larger hit on growth in fiscal 2013 — shaving almost half a percentage point.

That view was shared by Thomas Lam, Singapore-based chief economist at OSK-DMG, a joint venture of Malaysian securities firm OSK Holdings Bhd. and Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG.

“Our calculations … suggest that the Senate and House proposals, respectively, could lower economic growth on average by less than 0.5 percentage points, all else equal, over the next five years (from 2012 to 2016),” Lam said in a research note that suggested the Senate Democrat plan would hit the economy harder.

The chief economist for forecaster IHS Global Insight, Nariman Behravesh, warned Friday that “a weak economy will only make the tough decisions on the budget even more difficult and the case for fiscal austerity in the near-term even weaker.”

Some House Republicans backed by tea party groups demand even deeper front-end cuts, perhaps as much as $100 billion, arguing that politicians can’t be trusted to keep their promises further out.

That’d be dangerous, warned Mark Zandi, chief economist for forecaster Moody’s Analytics.

“I think the idea is a very serious policy error,” he said. “This would be the fodder for another recession. The economy may be able to digest $25-30 billion more (in federal spending cuts) … but $100 billion, I don’t think it could digest that.”

Zandi, who’s frequently cited by Republicans and Democrats alike, favors spending cuts “when the economy is off and running,” but he cautions that “to add more fiscal restraint in the latter part of 2011 and 2012 would be a mistake.”

It's a bi-partisan pony!

Obama is choosing to ignore the jobs crisis and expects to win the election on the back of the bi-partisan pony, I guess.  I can’t believe the recession that will be inevitable shortly isn’t going to tank a few political careers.  Also, wait until every one finds out that the programs that no one wants cut are going to be subjected to possible across the board cuts. My guess is that the super committee will deadlock and those triggers will turn in to a bunch of big regrets for every one. This will only create more havoc on the budget also.  It’s really bad policy.  Afterall, did we get anything done from the catfood commission or the gang of six?  These committees are beginning to remind me of the old soviet style planning commissions and their 5 year plans.

The famine in Somalia is deepening.  The Economist has an interesting piece up suggesting ways that the world can respond to the desperate situation there.  It also suggests that we missed all the signs that should’ve told us it would happen.

Famine has a technical meaning these days. It is declared when 30% of children are acutely malnourished, 20% of the population is without food, and deaths are running at two per 10,000 adults or four per 10,000 children every day. Parts of Somalia exceed these dreadful thresholds. In three provinces almost a third of people are acutely malnourished, says the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). FEWS Net conducted surveys across southern Somalia this month and found that malnutrition exceeded 38% in most areas—a catastrophic rate. Famine is likely to spread all over the south in the next few months (see map). About 2.8m people are thought to need immediate life-saving help.

Yet famine was not declared until July, eight months after the first FEWS Net forecast. The UN did not issue its first appeal until then, though it made a small provision for expected problems in November. The response by donors has been patchy. In a sign of its growing global role, Brazil has pledged more to Somalia than Germany and France have combined. Italy offered nothing. Of the $2 billion the UN says the region needs, it has received less than half. The cash available for food in southern Somalia looks likely to run out well before the next rains.

Outsiders’ caution is linked to the role of the Shabab, an Islamist militia which controls much of southern Somalia and is locked in battle with the internationally recognised but feeble government. The Shabab has banned food aid in most of southern Somalia since 2009, branding Western aid agencies anti-Muslim. The WFP, the biggest provider of food aid, has had 14 staff killed there since 2008. Agencies also worry that militias use food aid to rally their troops—some say this happened in Ethiopia and Eritrea in the 1980s—and do not want to pile into southern Somalia to find they have reinvigorated the Shabab.

Syria’s dictator ushered in a violent start to the Ramadan holy days by upping the level of violence used against democracy protestors.  This is yet another terrible story.

Rights activists said 80 civilians were killed in Sunday’s tank-backed assault on the central Syrian city where Assad’s father crushed an armed Muslim Brotherhood revolt 29 years ago by razing neighbourhoods and killing many thousands of people.

Security forces had besieged the Sunni Muslim city of 700,000 for nearly a month before Sunday’s crackdown on the eve of Ramadan, a holy month when Muslims fast in daylight hours.

Many flock to mosque prayers at night, occasions which may provide opportunities for protests to multiply across Syria.

The Syrian state news agency said the military entered Hama to purge armed groups that were terrorising citizens, an account dismissed as “nonsense” by a U.S. diplomat in Damascus.

The agency said eight police personnel were killed while “confronting armed terrorist groups” in Hama.

U.S. President Barack Obama said he was appalled by the Syrian government’s “horrifying” violence against its people in Hama and promised to work with others to isolate Assad.

“Syria will be a better place when a democratic transition goes forward,” Obama said in a statement

So, it appears that most of today’s news will be that Wall Street and the global financial markets can take a breather.  It also appears to be a sad day for sane fiscal policy and America’s poor and elderly.

What’s on your blogging and reading list today?

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