Live worm removed from woman’s brain BBC. Eeew! And this took place in the US.
Where a baby girl is a mother’s awful shame Guardian
That Money Isn’t Leaving the Vault Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times (hat tip reader Dwight)
In Housing Slump, Elderly Forgo Assisted Living New York Times
AIG to sell plane lessor ILFC to investors Reuters. Mirabile dictu! AIG sells something!
Surge In Egg Donors, Surrogate Moms Amid Downturn CBS Chicago (hat tip Michael Panzner). Interesting, but I am not impressed yet. Being an egg donor is a big ticket item, particularly since the donors have to be young, so the payments are meaningful relative to income. I am waiting to see reports that more people are selling blood.
The Auto Industry Bailout: Thoughts About Why GM Executives Are Clueless And Their Destructive “No We Can’t” Mindset Bob Sutton (hat tip Felix Salmon)
Bulging Side Pockets: Turning Hedge Funds into Private Equity Funds? Roger Ehrenberg
Better targeted regulation: Let banks be banks, let investors be investors Alberto Giovannini, VoxEU
Antidote du jour:
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Svelte Citzen of the World: “What I want to know is, Where’s MY Bailout? Foraging has been all downhill since the Pre-pottery Neolithic. Can’t a working mother catch a break, here?”
Re: ‘That Money Isn’t Leaving The Vault’…
Ah Gretchen, have you forgotten what Paulson said when congress asked that strings be attached to the TARP program?…’If we attach strings then banks will not participate.’ Followed by…’If we don’t get this bail out done the financial world will end!’
It was all bs! There was no intention to inject money into banks in order for them to lend. The goal was to inject money into banks in order for them to repair their balance sheets and to buy time for some Wall St banks, friends of Paulson, to heal.
For the Keynesians: According to Mises in order to understand the business cycle one must understand what the biz cycle does to Main St, the real economy. The Fed starts the party by lowering interest rates. Cheap money attracts entrepreneurs who promptly make bad investments with the cheap money. Then the Fed ends the party, the hammer slams down, interest rates are raised. Main St entrepreneurs are big losers during the bust. Wall St are the big winners, in fact, the game is rigged so that Wall St cannot lose. Wall St makes money in the boom, and during the bust they are bailed out by us, the taxpayers. A gigantic transfer of wealth has taken place. The profit is privatized and the losses are socialized.
So, Gretchen, I know you are a very smart lady. Stop with the phony bloney about ‘Why are the Wall St banks not lending’…What is happening is obvious to anyone that is not holed up in a cave.
After Wall St got the TARP money they began asking ‘how can we be expected to loan into such a weak economy?’ One would think that the taxpayers would figure out this scam after the umpteenth time it is pulled on them…but they don’t. Enough time is allowed to pass so that the memories fade before the scam is pulled again (another business cycle, which is nothing but a shakedown of taxpayers). The simple fact is that Wall St has a lot more pull than the voters.
Little wonder that Keynes and his ‘solutions’ were so popular among politicians and bankers, eh?
I saw a report on local TV news that blood banks buying blood were booming. Some were up to 800 donors a week.
Rodent in photo is the Fed. Heavy China pot is string. Rock that rodent is using for leverage is US Taxpayer.
Great catch on photo Yves!
Typically awful article by Gretchen Morgenstern. Lots of finger-wagging and not a second spent trying to understand why the banks might be acting this way.
Duckling feeding carp Youtube antidote
Gretchen is a good reflection of the general public and probably most of Congress. The horror of the banking industry actually evaluating risk in its lending, what will happen to our consumer driven GDP without cheap,fast available credit!
Maybe someday they will catch on to the fact that most of the profits and growth from consumer side corporate profits was based on leveraged credit creation.
Years ago my zoology textbook had a cross section of a human brain that was full of worms (the human brain has a cavity in the center, and the worms were frolicking about there). They had operated to try and determine the source of convulsions and a worm came wiggling out – if I had been the surgeon, I would have pooped my pants.
This is a visual metaphor that uses a squirrel to represent the act of piracy. This land-based model is a reference to training exercises associated with terrorist organization and the more recent aerobic activities connecting Somalian pirates to mobile oil reserves.
As such, this metaphor strongly hints at the mobility of pirates who bring the fight to where they want to be, versus the authorities taking the fight to the pirates.
The real essence of this metaphor is thus, that if society is to be free, if were are to live in a time of justice and have a better future, then authority has to take the good fight to where injustice is, e.g, our banking system which is run by Somalian pirates, is a very liquid form of terrorism which is not regulated or controlled, because our government has made the game of banking into a network of chaos which is collapsing under its own weight. Too many pirates have wrecked the kitchen and now Rome is burning.
This squirrel pirate represents a CEO raiding the cookie jar (yet again) only this time, the cookie jar has become a direct conduit of TARP tax payer revenues. The pirate doesn't even need to go out on hit and run attacks to steal or hint at ransom requests — because the loot is now being delivered as a direct deposit to the pirates Cayman bank accounts — which of course, are tax free and off the books.
Furthermore, this expansion of this metaphor between pirates, squirrels and CEOs can be built upon by adding in metaphorical dog associations (it's that friggn bad today):
Chocolate contains theobromine. A naturally occurring stimulant found in the cocoa bean, theobromine increases urination and affects the central nervous system as well as heart muscle. While amounts vary by type of chocolate, it's the theobromine that is poisonous to dogs.
If a 50-pound dog eats a teaspoonful of milk chocolate, it's not going to cause serious problems. However, if that same dog gorges himself on a two-layer chocolate cake, his stomach will feel more than upset and soon it's likely he'll be vomiting or experiencing diarrhea.
> So, here we are now with sweet thoughts of Somalian CEOs gorging themselves (to death) on compensation and XMAS bonuses, while the authorities have turned a blind and patched-over eye to the corruption and terrorism caused by these pirates. Meanwhile, society sits back with the vague notion thinking the cops are protecting us all from the nasty crooks — but, what an absurd notion, to not realize that the cops are on the take getting drunk with the pirates and playing an active part in the collusion that brought us all to the point of systemic collapse.
Maybe society should let these dogs and pirates gorge themselves until a point where they get either so fat or sick that they can't find the strength to get the lid off the cookie jar, and then after they stagger around in a mindless dizzy spell, maybe these rodents will fall off the ledge and cease to exist!
The sad reality is though, society is collectively impotent and unable to snap out of being in a state of denial, because the vast majority of people are searching for the means to join the pirate clubs and to live the good life, a life filled with riches beyond imagination.
Now, wash your filthy hands you fuc-ing pirates… and run the Jolly Roger up the pole for Obama …
Where is Putin? Where does he go?
I just watched part of a video lecture by Randy Pausch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0
In this at about 18:32 (of a very long hour) he speaks of Disneyland being built from start to finish in 366 days — which is used as an example of motivation and time management. The symbolic Disneyland represents the simplicity of focus versus the amount of fraud and corruption currently built into re-tooling the auto industry and re-tooling the financial engineering bullshit related to the pirate ship wall street.
America can be re-organized, but it will take a dream and then hard work — and most of the hard work will be to get rid of the crooks, then, the rest is easy!
Also See: Disneyland Opening Day – Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rHjoimz5XI
I think the following link about 40k people picking their own food in Colorado is more telling. Hope it was nice weather that got the people out to the farm to pick leftover harvest.
Thousands pick up free vegetables on Colo. farm
Sunday, November 23, 2008
PLATTEVILLE, Colo. — A farm couple got a huge surprise when they opened their fields to anyone who wanted to pick up free vegetables left over after the harvest _ 40,000 people showed up.
Joe and Chris Miller’s fields were picked so clean Saturday that a second day of gleaning _ the ancient practice of picking up leftover food in farm fields _ was canceled Sunday.
“Overwhelmed is putting it mildly,” Chris Miller said. “People obviously need food.”
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Nov23/0,4670,FoodGiveaway,00.html
plugra
Yves – RE: Blood Sales
Here you go from AP via FAUXNews – Nov 20
Poor Economy Has Some Selling Blood For Cash
WAUKEGAN, Ill. — There are signs the nation’s economic woes are prompting some to sell their blood for extra cash.
College students and the down-and-out have long donated plasma for easy money. But in the current economic climate, the number of people extracting plasma for gas or grocery money is exploding.
An industry group said total donations may hit 16 million this year, up from 10 million donations just three years ago. At Talecris Plasma Resources in Waukegan, manager Rhonda Johnson says this fall is among the busiest seasons she’s observed, with more first-time donors joining the twice-a-week regulars.
Whatever their motivation, plasma donors are a valuable resource for an industry that has grown to nearly $10 billion a year. Patrick Robert of International Blood/Plasma News says whatever their motivation, plasma donors are a valuable resource for an industry that has grown to nearly $10 billion a year.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,455111,00.html
No figure on the prices offered.
Maybe we’ll soon see kidneys on eBay or CraigsList.
River said: “According to Mises in order to understand the business cycle one must understand what the biz cycle does to Main St, the real economy. The Fed starts the party by lowering interest rates. Cheap money attracts entrepreneurs who promptly make bad investments with the cheap money. Then the Fed ends the party, the hammer slams down, interest rates are raised. Main St entrepreneurs are big losers during the bust. Wall St are the big winners, in fact, the game is rigged so that Wall St cannot lose. Wall St makes money in the boom, and during the bust they are bailed out by us, the taxpayers.”
Here’s an alternative/additional explanation: http://prorev.com/moneyreform.htm .