“Zombie” Fly Parasite Killing Honeybees Scientific American (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Extinctions from Climate Change Underestimated LiveScience (hat tip reader Aquifer)
Poisonous Herb Spices Cat Stew in Felonious Pot New York Times (hat tip reader Buzz Potamkin). People who eat cats deserve to die anyhow.
San Diego naval hospital testing unusual PTSD treatment Los Angeles Times. Reader barrisj points out that the prevalence and severity of PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan vets is the bigger news item than the possible treatment.
Manhattan Apartment Sales Fall 12% on Waiting Bloomberg
Mark Zuckerberg’s Outrageous Week in Uruguay Gawker (hat tip Lambert Strether). Acquired situational narcissism.
File-Sharing Recognized as Official Religion in Sweden TorrentFreak (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Israeli students to get $2,000 to spread state propaganda on Facebook Electronic Intifada. So how much is the State Department paying US students to spread our propaganda?
Oil Price Would Skyrocket if Iran Closed the Strait of Hormuz New York Times. We first said that in January 2007.
Spain sees €50bn of new bank provisions Financial Times
ECB/Fed Support for the European Banking System – 750 billion USD, and counting … Credit Writedowns
A President Alone Can End the Federal Drug War Jon Walker, Firedoglake. So you can know where to assign blame.
Iowa result generates Republican confusion Financial Times. Maybe I am too jaded, but his looks like the political equivalent of pump and dump to me.
A Fight for Post Offices and Towns’ Souls New York Times
First step in stripping troublemakers of their citizenship Lambert Strether
Brace Yourself! The American Empire Is Over & The Descent Is Going To Be Horrifying! Plutocracy Files (hat tip reader rjs)
Methods in a Cat-Litter Ad Don’t Pass a Judge’s Smell Test New York Times (hat tip Buzz Potamkin). Judge Rakoff strikes again!
House Committee Focusing on Ratings Firms Evals of MF Global Wall Street Journal (hat tip reader Hecht)
The Restatement of Property and the Road to Mortgagocracy Adam Levitin. This is REALLY important and depressing.
Antidote du jour:
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Is this an Amur leopard in winter coat? I know the first thing that springs to mind is snow leopard, but I’m not sure it is: the coat coloring seems too dark for the snow leopard and the Amur is the biggest of the leopards.
I am not sure if it’s a clouded leopard.
Don’t think so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clouded_leopard.jpg
Good read on the origins of money – http://whataboutmarx.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-is-money-is-it-same-as-currency.html
These currencies are 100% based on faith (“trust”). Faith is always an important factor in capitalism and in the monetary plane in particular, but today’s currency in circulation is of value purely because the world believes that they are. If people stop believing that they are “of value”, then the value of these currencies will go down to zero. from http://whataboutmarx.blogspot.com/2012/01/what-is-money-is-it-same-as-currency.html
The only “faith” fiat requires is that taxes must be paid in it. Therefore, as long as we have effective government, fiat CANNOT go to zero.
Some of the more sophisticated gold bugs realize this which is why they seek a gold standard – to give their shiny metal a much higher and much more permanent value.
The problem is not fiat but what fiat is wasted on – the government backed/enforced counterfeiting cartel, the banking system.
The only proper place for gold as money (assuming it could surive there) is the private sector.
Are you saying you’re OK with a fiat government currency backed by gold ‘if’ it’s not imposed through our banking cartel?
How can you have a currency backed by gold and be fiat at the same time? Isn’t that a contradiction?
Maybe I had it wrong, but I thought if the currency was not 100% backed by something, it was fiat (i.e. the leveraged portion).
I found this at Wiki:
Even a coin containing valuable metal may be considered fiat currency if its face value is higher than its market value as metal
It’s no contradiction. Fiat means “by decree”. Anything could be made legal tender for government debts and it would have the same value as far as government is concerned.
No. Fiat should be made of the least expensive material that gets the job done.
I guess that it is should be made of something, instead of nothing, has to do with proseletyzing and inculcating faith…the need for some sort of material miracle.
No. The gold bugs wish to force government to buy or rent gold to create new money. That desire is fascist.
“Links 12/5/12”
Dang, the year went by quick, and no major problems that I can think of.
Fixed, thanks.
Steve Keen has posted his Debtwatch Manifesto – a great summary of his ideas, on both causes and solutions:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/01/03/the-debtwatch-manifesto/
Shock – Horror!
Shocker: Empathy Dropped 40% in College Students Since 2000
College students who hit campus after 2000 have empathy levels that are 40% lower than those who came before them, according to a stunning new study presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science by University of Michigan researchers. It includes data from over 14,000 students.
Although we argue in Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential–and Endangered that modern child-rearing practices are putting empathy at risk, this is the largest study presented so far to quantify the decline.
Previous research done by psychologist Jean Twenge had measured what she labeled a “narcissism epidemic,” with more students showing selfish qualities and with increases in traits that can lead to a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. That is a condition in which people are so self-involved that other people are no more than objects to reflect their glory.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/born-love/201005/shocker-empathy-dropped-40-in-college-students-2000
Skippy… let me see if I have this right. You have to PAY lots of $$$MONEY$$$_to turn_your already manufactured desire cortex injection brat, into an even bigger tool!I wonder what happens when the figure goes above, say 60%… shudder the thought!
Dear skippy;
Take the 40% figure and fold in the ‘electronic narcissification’ produced by Androids, PS7s, Blackberrys, Very Angry Birds, ans Spearing Brittany 36.0, and you’ll easily get to your 60%. What you get then, and a lot of us who work with lots of the kids will attest to, is something right out of Dickens.
Re: Brace Yourself! The American Empire Is Over & The Descent Is Going To Be Horrifying!
The link was posted in comments yesterday. The interview is very good but the whole thing is three hours. I found a different link that is easier to scroll through. Makes it easier to watch in pieces by noting the current time offset and scrolling to that point in a later viewing.
Here’s what I posted as a comment yesterday:
—-
Yes, that is a very good interview, but the whole thing is about 3 hours! Took me a while to get through but I can’t say I had any real disagreement with anything he said.
Here is another version from the original source that is a little bit better quality. It also is streamed very well so that you can quickly scroll to any part of the video. Helpful if you want to stop and restart later, or go back to some part.
BookTV — In Depth: Chris Hedges
America never ever had an “empire” – who are you kidding, but yourselves?
All men are created equal – but in an Empire, any empire whatsoever – that can never be, by definition… so when did the USA rip up its Constitution, on their road to their so-called “empire”?
America has never been and has never had an “Empire”, and certainly wasn’t one at the time America had its greatest prosperity and happiness: and I suspect any who talk of “the decline of the American Empire” simply want more wars abroad, with less thought about entering into them.
The more Americans think of themselves as being an “empire”, the more they cease to be… American.
I have not viewed the video, but from this Wikipedia page about Mr. Hedges:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges
… but it seems to me he’s understood the working alliance between Christian “fundamentalists” and Atheist “fundamentalists” in attacking the Islamic religion, and any and all legal systems derived from it, thereby stoking the fires of violent and intractable conflicts between and amongst people.
Perhaps judgments of the Israeli Supreme Court like this one (completely un-reported in North America, as far as I can see) :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/03/israeli-companies-west-bank-resources?newsfeed=true
– holding that Israelis may exploit natural resources found in Occupied Territory, so long as the Occupation has gone on for thirty years or more, without any need to compensate those whose lands are thus Occupied and exploited –
..are more explicative of some conflicts, than un-evidenced assertions, loudly acceded to by bigotry and ignorance, as to the injustice and/or “intractable incompatibility” of entire widely-held religious traditions.
Why all the comments without viewing the video (or at least part of it)?
I would say the long title is more of an attention grabber than an accurate summary. Although it is the same video, I would say the title in the alternative link I provided is more accurate.
To me, your responses seem totally tangential to the actual video and Mr. Hedges world view.
“Brace Yourself! The American Empire Is Over & The Descent Is Going To Be Horrifying! ”
Watched the whole three hour video… Amazing, Amazing, Amazing. I was riveted to CSPAN for three hours. I don’t that is a sentence that has been uttered many times. Go see what a real journalist (and mensch) looks like – you may not have seen one in a while.
Righty-o. No humongous military, no system of globe-spanning bases, no tribute, no hegemony. Pull the other one, it’s got bells on!
So, what’s most important is that we not THINK that we are an empire, even if we are?
Kinda funny how for a non-empire to have roughly 1000 military bases spanning the vast majority of the world’s countries. And Obama’s talking about more in the South Pacific.
Italy alone has over 100 US military installations.
http://www.kelebekler.com/occ/busa_files/busag.gif
Materially and politically, I consider it to be a full-fledged colony of the US.
Never had an empire? Oh, my! You need to learn something about the history of how the Sandwich Islands became the State of Hawaii. Or maybe what happened after McKinley declared war on the Spanish Empire. Do you know anything about what happened in Cuba from 1895 up until Castro took over? Do you know what our Marine Corps was used for from 1900 up until World War II? Have you never heard of Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador? Ever heard of Smedley Butler? I know none of this stuff is covered in the school textbooks, and I know public libraries have been under attack since at least 1949, but it just seems like if I could learn about this stuff anyone could. I haven’t viewed the video yet, so I don’t know if he talks about these things, but the statement that “We never had an empire” is just false, and that should be common knowledge.
Rex, it’s worth it to hang in there for the whole 3 hours. It’s that good.
More on the Fed’s decision to improve “clarity” by publishing 12 different interest rate projections going forward. If only they’d been readers of Naked Capitalism back in 2008.
http://financeaddict.com/2012/01/the-feds-definition-of-clarity-is-not-like-yours-or-mine/
“Zombie” Fly Parasite Killing Honeybees Scientific American:
I’ve been a beekeeper in the northeast for nearly 30 years now and it’s getting increasingly difficult for me and other beekeepers I know to keep honey bee colonies alive, mostly because of mites. This newly discovered problem will not make things any easier. I’ll have to set up a trap next spring and see if these parasites are already here.
I watched a bubble bee die on a potted Meyer’s lemon. The bee was happily bumbling from flower to flower and then it rested, and rested, and rested, refusing to move when I poked it. It was grasping the flower tenaciously. It was still alive after several days, finally falling off when I pushed it. There was a precipitous drop in the bubble bee population last year around the house. This explains the odd behavior. As far as the bee was concern, there was an on-off switch to it’s activity.
That description of bee-parastic fly larvae has a squick factor with a serious multiple, I’ll say.
So we’re calling these parastic, corpse-gutting flies Goldman bugs now, right? I mean, right??
Dead right, Richard Kline.
At first I was appalled and alarmed by the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president, but on second thought maybe it wouldn’t make much of a difference if he did win, and he would be a lot better than nut-jobs like Santorum and Gingrich.
Obama is a black glib phony and a weakling who believes in nothing and only wants to get re-elected. Romney is a white glib phony and a weakling who believes in nothing and only wants to get re-elected. What’s the difference?
Look at this conservative blog post, in which the blogger reviews Romney’s record as Massachusetts governor:
http://rightwingnews.com/column-2/no-on-mitt-romney/
“First off, he raised taxes… Second, Romney rammed through Romneycare….Third, on social issues, Romney was about as strong a social conservative as RuPaul would have been.
If he was faking it, he’s an Oscar-caliber conservative. What the record reveals isn’t a conservative attempting to play nice with liberals only to sucker-punch them with right-wing policy that works. The record shows that Romney was willing to change positions repeatedly in order to attain power, and once in power, he was willing to change positions repeatedly in order to maximize it. His road to Damascus conversions on abortion, taxation and other key issues are always conveniently timed to allow him to make a play for the most valuable audience. … Nominating Mitt Romney would be a betrayal not only of conservatism but also of the greatest opportunity for resurrection of American greatness in a century.”
So maybe Romney would just continue the same corporatist and Wall Street agenda as Obama, He would leave taxes as they are (except for a host of user fees) because once in office he would care more about the deficit than top-bracket tax cuts. Obamacare/Romneycare would continue on, subject to Supreme Court review. On social issues Romney would talk a good game for the conservative right but would back off on any radical changes such as undoing abortion (after all, the right wing never wants to give the nutty-right what it wants, because that would remove their motivation. Also, Romney is not a true whacko Christian but a Mormon replete with full-body satin underwear). On the Supreme Court he would appoint another Anthony Kennedy, who is not much different than Kagan. He would not touch Medicare and Social Security, because that would ruin his re-election chances. Defense spending and the foreign wars would continue as they are now, but with no attack on Iran because that would destroy the economy and thus doom his chances for re-election.
A nut-job like Santorum could conceivably be a lot worse than Romney, by giving tax cuts to the rich and cutting Medicare and SS.
Obama has already committed the greatest damage to the country that he could have done, by backstopping 15-20 trillion dollars of private debt and failing to prosecute the bank fraudsters. That can’t and won’t be undone, either by Obama or Romney.
I suppose what really bothers me about Romney is that he looks and sounds like the huckster salesman character Harold Hill in the musical Music Man, who begins every public address with, “Friends, …”
For which see:
http://fredforyourhead.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/mitt-romney-in-a-revival-of-the-music-man/
Perhaps I can overcome this aversion by simply turning off the TV whenever he shows up, or singing along, “Friends, oh we got trouble here in Capital City, trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with ‘B’ and that stands for Broke…”
I don’t Romney can go the distance. People are going to start falling asleep. Newt was fun because he was unpredictable.
Newt was fun because he gave a new generation a chance to hear 1968 George Wallace talking points–as bigoted and laughable today as they were back then.
They are all shills for the .01%–the 1/100th of 1% trickling gravy to the 1%.
The prevalence and severity of PTSD amongst current American/NATO vets should not be a surprise. This was anticipated at least five years ago (I don’t recall the exact time) because of specific conditions of combat. It is well known that PTSD prevalence correlates with the amount of _continuous_ time spent in immediately life-threatening conditions: it’s the continuous stress that cooks the nervous system, more or less. Non-combat soldiers had much lower levels. Getting soldiers out of combat duty regularly for R & R was essential.
Well in current conditions, exposure to life-threatening conditions was readily identified to be, essentially, _constant_ in Iraq and once Afghanistan hotted up there too. Not because of the intensity of combat per se; many other wars have been far worse. Because of the continuous threat of mine/bomb/suicide bomber blast. Soldiers in those environments have been ‘combat exposed’ everywhere they were for most of their tours. So they were seen to be coming by seriously fried by it even where the volume of actual fire they’d been taking was neither continuous nor tremendously high. But the prevalence of high lethal _risk_ was nearly nonstop.
Multiple tours in such conditions are criminal. But then, governments don’t give a handful of manure for those they order off to die on the dungfields of empire. We have many, many fried vets in the US. And they are over-concentrated in the smaller town and suburban environments from which they are predominantly recruited.
And here’s something else: PTSD affects families exposed to the struggles of exposed individuals so that, just as in the case of severe local wars, the effects cascade for several generations after. There are many families still paying a price for the impacts that _World War One_ had on their immediate kin. Think about that the next time someone wants to ramp up a ‘good war’ over there: for those who go over it isn’t over even after it’s done, there’s a century yet to run . . . .
Here is story around my area about a Delaware solider accused of the abduction and killing of a random woman during his holiday leave from Afghanistan.
http://www.cnycentral.com/news/story.aspx?id=699616
How about the horror of being drafted into the regular army because you joined the National Guard to protect your State in times of peril? How about the horror of the Bush Dynasty diktat that soldiers with blown-off faces, legs, and you know what, must be kept alive, so that the number of the dead are kept low? At least you could die of such horrifying wounds in the past. Now, it’s “Suck it up” and deal with the ruin of your life.
The results of the Bush policy should be enough to find Bush guilty of War Crimes Against His Own People: the acts of a ruthlessly profiteering dictator.
Anonymous on NDAA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFgexT0v5qY&feature=uploademail
Thanks for the link.
Nine little words, hidden within section 1031 (b) (2), amongst a few commas and an “or”…
“including any person who has committed a belligerent act [or]
Petition – A Petition to Support the Saving American Democracy Amendment : Bernie Sanders – U.S. Senator for Vermont – Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court decision in a case called Citizens United vs. FEC. The Saving American Democracy Amendment states that:
Corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people.
Corporations are subject to regulation by the people.
Corporations may not make campaign contributions or any election expenditures.
Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances.
http://sanders.senate.gov/petition/?uid=f1c2660f-54b9-4193-86a4-ec2c39342c6c
It’s a nice start, but the omissions are glaring to me. Leaving so much to congress to address later/on their own – a bunch of one percenters who only have their positions of power due to their ability to fundraise should be considered an outrage.
One example… why, oh why would anyone omit a line Establishing public campaign finance? Are so many citizens going to be so easily swayed away from substantive reforms? Sanders scores an Incomplete! And so does every proposed amendment I’ve read from congresscritters or MOve To Amend dot borgs.
PetroChina controls Canadian oil sand project – Canada’s Athabasca Oil Sands Corp said it has sold the remaining 40 percent of interest in the MacKay River oil sands project to a subsidiary of PetroChina, a move that will render a Chinese company full ownership of such a project for the first time. The deal with PetroChina International Investment Limited was worth C$680 million ($666 million), Athabasca said in its press release. Canadian regulators previously approved PetroChina to buy 60 percent of the project for C$1.9 billion in November 2011, according to Xinhuanet. The MacKay River project is located in northern Alberta of Canada, a region that contains 85 percent of the world’s oil sand. The first phase of the project will begin in 2014, with a daily output of 35,000 barrels of oil. Its max daily production is expected to be 150,000 barrels, according to Xinhuanet.
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90778/7695892.html
Lovely cat.
Funny bit of history on the mystery candidate Rick Santorum.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/04/santorum-thats-latin-for-asshole/
The Restatement (2nd) of Property’s recommendation that courts adopt a broad view of agency relationships to enable enforcement of mortgages or else there may be a windfall to the mortgagor (the free house argument)deviates from other areas of law where consequences are not considered. Juries in criminal cases, for example, are routinely instructed to make factual determinations by following the law without considering the consequences of their verdict. For the ALI to recommend a result rather than an objective standard is a perversion of the purpose of the Restatement.
Yesterday, you had a link about the FDA refusing to restrict the use of antibiotics in agriculture. That’s actually out of date: the FDA has enacted some good restrictions.
on the cat comment, after my cat got flattened by a car, the wildlife and birds in our little yard proliferated. A wild mink took over mouse patrol. Also, how about eating dogs? They are quite good in a stir fry. Happyness is a warm puppy.
outdoor cats should be killed on sight. they do a tremendous amount of damage.
nobody would tolerate a dog loose in the neighborhood but a cat spraying the neighbor’s door and using the neighbor’s yard as a litter box seems to be ok.
and, why yes, I do have 2 INDOOR ONLY cats.
Re: PTSD levels in the Afghanistan/Iraq wars: I was a civilian Clinical Psychologist for the Army from 1989-2004. These two wars used the highest number of “unseasoned” soldiers since the Vietnam war. In that war, the unseasoned soldiers were draftees. In these two later wars, those soldiers are National Guard and Reserve soldiers.
I believe that’s partly the reason for the very high numbers of PTSD cases seen in these two wars. Also, in the two later wars, many of the soldiers at high risk were those in “non-combat” MOS’s, especially including those trained for Transportation, whose troops were those most exposed to IEDs for example and other roadside bombs.
We have a huge bill going forward for treatment of the thousands of soldiers suffering from this. The good news is that it took a couple of decades for Vietnam vets to receive treatment, whereas many of the vets of these two later wars got treatment much sooner.
“Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Jerome Sloss, a member of the South Carolina National Guard, seemed fine when he was serving in Iraq. But when he came home to his job as a state trooper, he had trouble concentrating. Sloss committed suicide on May 27, 2004 — five weeks after his return.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4668346
The U.S. doesn’t need to pay students to spread propaganda. That’s what journalists are for.
As to the cat stew story, a writer who travels widely said that the Chinese find a way to cook just about everything alive wherever they live, so there is an unsettling absence of other species in Chinese communities. If they only knew, our cats, mice and palmetto bugs would sport little American flags.
You don’t know the half of it.
Dogs are crammed so tightly together into tiny metal cages they cannot even bark. Yards away the blood-spattered carcasses of others lie on the ground.
This is Three Birds’ Market in Guangzhou, China, officially described as a poultry market.
But, as these exclusive pictures show, many traders on the 60-acre site are doing brisk business selling dogs and cats to restaurants for slaughter and human consumption.
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/03_02/Cats1DM2903_468x602.jpg
Or as the ever-tactful Prince Philip put it:
“If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.” Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.
It sounds like he’s saying they eat four-legged tables in China.
Sweet and sour table, anyone?
Adam Levitin, ALI’s Restatement of Property and the question of agency law. This has been coming for a long time. Last year didn’t the NYFed release a paper extolling the validity of MERS and emphasizing to state judges the proper legal position on the split note theory? The NYFed tried to say at that time that it doesn’t matter where the note wanders, because the mortgage always follows it and the two can be reunited regardless of breaks in chain of title. And now ALI tells judges that the proper legal procedure is to look for even the slightest indication that there is an agency relationship (MERS) and accept it as valid and, again, don’t worry about the chain of title. Lawyers will jump on this and tell judges that the Restatement says it’s OK to ignore the land title system. Will judges buy it? And if so, how will they fix it? The fact is the court system cannot fix it if it is allowed to be destroyed.
This destroys the authority of qualified State agents over real property in the State, especially of the time-honored Recorder of Mortgages. The continuity of the Chain of Title, meticulously recorded and filed among courthouse records, is the sine qua non of the Title to real property without a *cloud*. The bed rock of unclouded title is the “Title in Fee Simple”–the gold standard for hundreds of years in the United States.
This is one more example of TREASON: Elected representatives who aid and abet the trashing of the Law, in violation of their Oaths of Office, in order to serve a “power foreign” to the the Constitution and the Public interest.
The subversion of the Constitution, the trashing of the Law, is the preamble to the imposition of Absolute Tyranny via Martial Law.
the antidote is not a linx (note the spelling)
Two link suggestions from Der Spiegel:
Ponzi Planet – http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,806772,00.html#ref=nlint
Roger Ailes’ GOP Reality Show – http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,806765,00.html#ref=nlint
I hope there was some kind of barrier between the photographer and that cat. He’s gorgeous, but dangerous!
re: GAO and the NCUA, here are two links for the hmmm file.
http://www.creditunions.com/printerfriendly.aspx?articleid=4815
http://www.gao.gov/assets/590/587409.pdf
Not only did credit union not benefit from a bailout, natural person CUs had to pick up the bill for fraud.
Re the article on property:
So? The noteholders and the securitizers with all their legal and financial resources failed to follow the law and exercise due diligence and, by knowingly doing so, severed their legal connection to the mortgagee and assumed the associated risk. Now that risk is coming home, and in response we are getting a lesson, not in the law, but in how kleptocracy works. Supposedly, independent, reputable actors, like the American Law Institute, suddenly start stooging for them, not in subtle ways, but overtly and crassly. The argument the ALI is making is essentially that no matter how much the banks and all those in the securitizing chain ignored the law, they should be given a do-over, and that the mortgagee with whom they deliberately broke their legal connection should now have that connection re-instated with its attendant liabilities, on the flimsiest of grounds, so that those who produced and profited by these abusive, and let’s be frank, fraudulent arrangements should suffer no liability or loss from them.
We really need to understand that our elites either are kleptocrats or work for them. The ostensible reason for tolerating elites and the privileges and inequalities they demand is that in exchange society, that is us, receive better governance from them than we could without them. But this is no longer true. Our elites have given up on governance in favor of looting. As in this instance, they are using their authority not for a societal good but for their good, to protect elite sponsored looting. It is an example of self-validation. One group of the elite (ALI) is telling another segment (the judiciary) that the deficient (read criminal) activities of yet a third elite group (bankers and investors) should be made good, at the expense of the non-elites, because elite interests should always take precedence over non-elite ones.
Right, Hugh. The criminals are closing ranks, sworn to omerta, huddling close to the store of gold in store. They have nothing to lose by being “thick as thieves, and everything to lose if they break ranks. The pols and the bankers are scared.
“Desperate people do desperate things.” The top dogs are in the bunker–like Hitler and “the family” hunkered down, with cyanide and pistols ready to end it all, if foreign royalty refuses to give them shelter. Their fighting legions must do or die.
Will we bring D-Day in time to win the war?
I’ve spent too much time in the Luxury Hospitality sector.
Zuckerberg’s requests didn’t even seem weird to me. Dear lord, do you have any idea what Emirs request?
Drugs can free inhibition, the $$$green$$$ sort is the most slippery mental juice, friction free?
Skippy… story’s… one could tell… eh.
I agree…….I`m willing to believe all sorts of horrible things about what people will do to GET money, but this list doesn`t seem so bad at all (and I`m not rich). It seems more along the “anyone with cash is a dick” line than anything else.
I have a terrible allergy to cats myself. I love them and had a pet act when I was a child. But if I visit someone with a cat nowadays (and am unaware beforehand so I can take a bunch of pills and inhalers I`d rather not take frankly) my eyes itch and swell until I can`t see and i become unable to breath. I certainly couldn`t sleep overnight.
Secondly, he`s got a billion dollars and he`s going on a holiday. Only 2 bodyguards? That seems minimal to me. A chef? Big deal. he`s creating work for people. I`ve seen Prince and Axl Rose need more than that just to go into a bar for a beer.
Another Tunisian set himself on fire today.
Let’s hope Facebook revolutions are not a fad.
Video captures a fish mimicking a mimic octopus that mimics fish http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0105/Video-captures-a-fish-mimicking-a-mimic-octopus-that-mimics-fish
If you put them between two mirrors, the mimicking will never stop.
The many benefits of mimicry…
Fooling predators http://www.offthemark.com/cartoons/1998-01-18.gif
Fitting in http://bobsutton.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b75569e200e5543c7a0f8834-800wi
Mimicry in food science http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/shr/lowres/shrn1262l.jpg
I believe Nixon created the drug schedule with no action from Congress and we’ve been “dealing” with it since. Time to just say no to drug schedules. It really is that simple.
Is it too early to start printing the “Judge Rakoff for President” bumper stickers?
lol
How about “Rakoff and Black in 2016”?
It is a snow leopard a.k.a. irbis.
Yves,
Don’t get yourself in the wrong waters with this israeli-arab conflict, you’ll end up being accused of something :-)
For exmaple, Israeli students get 2000$ to spread govmnt point of view. Ok fine…fair point… not the most kosher of things. But shall we now begin to enumerate the things that Palestinian students as well as “students” as well other citizens or non-citizens have gotten paid for and still get paid for? (with Arafat’s stolen billions of course…)
test