January 14, 2012 archive

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

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Yes, it is that time of year, the run up to the Super Bowl XLVI

  • NFL 2012 Divisional Playoffs- Saints @ ‘9ers by ek hornbeck
  • Later ek hornbeck will Live Blog the game between the Denver Bronchos and New England Patriots beginning at 7:30 PM EST.

    This is an Open Thread

    The Stars Hollow Gazette

    Cartnoon

    This week’s episodes originally aired February 4th, 2005.

    Surf the Stars/Samurai Quack, Episodes 19 & 20, Season 2

    2012: The year of social unrest?

      The credit agency S&P cutting the ratings of nine European countries on Friday is normally nothing more than financial news, and it got reported accordingly. But buried deep in its report was an interesting sentence.

     Governments are also aiming to put greater focus on growth-enhancing structural measures. While these may contribute positively to a lasting solution of the current crisis, we believe they could also run counter to powerful national interest groups, whose resistance could potentially jeopardize the reform momentum and impede the recovery of market confidence.

     S&P doesn’t elaborate on who these “powerful national interest groups” are, or why they would oppose governments trying to grow their economy, but it’s pretty easy to guess. It’s also easy to see the likely consequences of this conflict of interests.

    On This Day In History January 14

    Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

    This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

    Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

    January 14 is the 14th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 351 days remaining until the end of the year (352 in leap years).

    It is celebrated as New Year’s Day (at least in the 20th & 21st centuries) by countries still following the Julian calendar.

    On this day in 1761, the Third Battle of Panipat is fought in India between the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani and the Marhatas. The Afghan victory changes the course of Indian History.

    The Third Battle of Panipat took place at Panipat (Haryana State, India), about 60 miles (95.5 km) north of Delhi. The battle pitted the French-supplied artillery and cavalry of the Marathas against the heavy cavalry and mounted artillery(zamburak and jizail) of the Afghans led by Ahmad Shah Durrani, an ethnic Pashtun, also known as Ahmad Shah Abdali. The battle is considered one of the largest battles fought in the 18th century.

    The decline of the Mughal Empire had led to territorial gains for the Maratha Confederacy. Ahmad Shah Abdali, amongst others, was unwilling to allow the Marathas’ gains to go unchecked. In 1759, he raised an army from the Pashtun tribes and made several gains against the smaller garrisons. The Marathas, under the command of Sadashivrao Bhau, responded by gathering an army of between 70,000-100,000 people with which they ransacked the Mughal capital of Delhi. There followed a series of skirmishes along the banks of the river Yamuna at Karnal and Kunjpura which eventually turned into a two-month-long siege led by Abdali against the Marathas.

    The specific site of the battle itself is disputed by historians but most consider it to have occurred somewhere near modern day Kaalaa Aamb and Sanauli Road. The battle lasted for several days and involved over 125,000 men. Protracted skirmishes occurred, with losses and gains on both sides. The forces led by Ahmad Shah Durrani came out victorious after destroying several Maratha flanks. The extent of the losses on both sides is heavily disputed by historians, but it is believed that between 60,000-70,000 were killed in fighting, while numbers of the injured and prisoners taken vary considerably. The result of the battle was the halting of the Maratha advances in the North.

    The Legacy

    The Third Battle of Panipat saw an enormous number of casualties and deaths in a single day of battle. It was the last major battle between indigenous South Asian military powers, until the creation of Pakistan in 1947.

    To save their kingdom, the Mughals once again changed sides and welcomed the Afghans to Delhi. The Mughals remained in nominal control over small areas of India, but were never a force again. The empire officially ended in 1857 when its last emperor, Bahadur Shah II, was accused of being involved in the Sepoy Mutiny and exiled.

    The Marathas’ expansion was stopped in the battle, and soon broke into infighting within their empire. They never regained any unity. They recovered their position under the next Peshwa Madhavrao I and by 1772 were back in control of the north, finally occupying Delhi. However, after the death of Madhavrao, due to infighting and increasing pressure from the British, their claims to empire only officially ended in 1818 after three wars with the British.

    Meanwhile the Sikhs, the original reason Ahmad invaded, were left largely untouched by the battle. They soon retook Lahore. When Ahmad Shah returned in March 1764 he was forced to break off his siege after only two weeks due to rebellion in Afghanistan. He returned again in 1767, but was unable to win any decisive battle. With his own troops arguing over a lack of pay, he eventually abandoned the district to the Sikhs, who remained in control until 1849. . . . .

    The battle proved the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling‘s poem “With Scindia to Delhi”.

    The strength of Afghan military prowess was to both inspire hope in many orthodox Muslims, Mughal royalists and fear in the British. However the real truth of so many battle hardened Afghans killed in the struggle with the Marathas never allowed them to dream of controlling the Mughal Empire realistically again. On the other side, Marathas, possibly one of the only two real Indian military powers left capable of challenging the British were fatally weakened by the defeat and could not mount a serious challenge in the Anglo-Maratha wars 50 years later.

    Golden slumbers

    We came, we saw, he died.

    Let’s all “drop trou” and whiz.

    Weenie, widdie, whizzie.

    “Golden slumbers fill your eyes,

    Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry.”

    They draft nineteen-year olds for a reason.

    By definition, they haven’t carried that weight

    A long time; gittin’ back home

    is just a plane ride away, innit?

    But the cranial walled-vaults and basements are

    the entire home entertainment section,

    hallucinatory surround, boss graphics,

    gutsy plots, and that now wrenching

    circle of fifths, beautiful and sad.

    Late Night Karaoke

    Random Japan

    Photobucket

    IF THE SHOES FIT …

    Running shoes worn by competitors in a national ekiden relay race have been sent to underprivileged student-athletes at schools in Nagasaki, a move spearheaded by Nike Japan and a Nagasaki Prefecture track and field association.

    Some frozen beef imported into Japan from the United States in July apparently contained spinal columns, “so-called risk materials feared to cause mad cow disease and barred from importation into Japan.”

    Winter bonuses at major companies in Japan rose an average of 3.62 percent from the previous year, up to ¥802,701. It was the second consecutive rise and the first time the figure cracked the ¥800,000 barrier in three years, according to the Japan Business Federation.

    A 77-year-old man, who was punched out and lost consciousness after telling two men not to cross the street on a red light outside Oimachi Station, has died from his injuries.

    Two-time Olympic judo champion Masato Uchishiba was indicted for allegedly raping a member of a university judo team he was coaching after first plying the young woman with alcohol.

    A 55-year-old air traffic controller who nodded off while on duty at Naha airport was docked 10 percent of his pay for a month by the transport ministry.

    Popular Culture (Music) 20120113: A Brief History of The Who

    Last time we looked at 1972, sort of a quiet year for my favorite band.  1973 would be anything but quiet.  Townshend’s opus, Quadrophenia, was released late in the year, and there was a lot of internal conflict with the band members for the way it was done.

    In addition, Kit Lambert was shown to be little more than an embezzler, and that caused a lot of more problems.  Townshend counted on Lambert as a musical wizard, and Lambert, because of his affliction to drugs and alcohol, was anything but that.

    There was still a struggle for control of the band, with a surprise hit by Daltrey that gave him some credibility.  By that time, The Who belonged to Townshend, but Daltrey would not go down without a fight.

    Then there were the other problems.  1973 would prove to be a very bad year for them, but also one of their best years.  Let’s go!

    This Week In The Dream Antilles

       

    Photobucket

    [Note: Your Bloguero has rendered the following dialogue into common English. Originally, it was in the local, mumbled dialect of Limestone County, Alabama.]

    “Look, the first thing we do is drink this moonshine. See how clear it is?  This whole mason jar.  It’s a quart. Wonderfully clear. Nothing in the bottom.  No twigs. I got it from Mr. Toney. And it’s good. We drink it first. And then we get the lights out and we let the dogs go. The dogs know where to go. They know what they’re supposed to do. They look for the coons and they tell us where they are. Then they chase them.  When they have the scent, they call. And they will chase them up a tree. And they call when they’re up the tree. It’s a special barking. We just run after them, see? With the guns.  And the lights. It’s very dark out there already.

    “Now the most important thing about this hunt – I know you never did this before, right? – the most important thing is when the dogs get the coon treed, we have to get there. In a hurry. To that tree. Because very soon, that coon is not going to stay up in that tree with the dogs barking at it. Nope. He’s coming down, and he’s going to be mad, and when he does come down, he’s going to fuck these dogs up. You understand what I’m telling you? We don’t want that to happen.  Look at Old Lester over there.  See that he has no left ear? See that he’s got a scar across the top of his head? He’s a great coon hound. That’s what we’re talking about. We don’t want that to happen to these dogs. So when the dogs are barking the special bark, telling us that the coon is up in the tree, there’s no time for fooling around. Got to run and get there in a big hurry before the coon changes his mind about staying up in the tree.  And then you have to shoot him out of the tree.  That’s what the lights are for. You shine them up in the tree so you can see the coon.  That and making sure you don’t trip and break your head while you’re running.”

    “But,” says your Bloguero. “It’s really dark now. There’s no moon yet. And the paths in these woods aren’t clear.  And if we drink all of this shine, how the hell are we going to get to some tree that’s far away in time to shoot the coon before he comes down from the tree? I mean, it sounds like we could be stumbling around drunk in the woods and tripping on things and getting all scratched up. And we could easily shoot ourselves while we’re running. And not get to the tree so fast.  In other words, this could be a disaster.”

    “Oh you a city boy, aren’t you? I know you never did this before. That’s not bad. Look. We’re going to show you how to do it. We’ll get there. We might get a little scratched up by the bush, and we might trip on some roots, and we might take a while to run to the tree.  We might get pretty drunk. But don’t you worry. We will get there. These dogs need us to get there, and we will.  Matter of fact, we almost always do. I’ve been doing this since I was 10, and I’m 70 now. And Obie over there, he’s 72 now. We’ve been hunting together for 60 years or so. So we know how to do this.”

    “But what about Lester’s ear? And how the hell can 70 year old men who are completely drunk and carrying loaded guns run through the woods without getting hurt? Are you sure this is safe?”

    “Look, I told you before, we’re not perfect. Sometimes we fuck up. We try not to, but sometimes it can’t be helped. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t try to do this any more, right? We are not retiring from this. I mean: this is all that can happen when you go coon hunting. There can be problems.  Of course.  Like anything else. And we try to make sure they don’t happen. But we’re not stopping until we can’t do it any more. Right now, thank God, we can still do it.  So we do.”

    This Week In The Dream Antilles is usually a weekly digest. Usually, it appears on Friday. It’s a digest of essays posted at The Dream Antilles in the previous week.  Sometimes, of course, like right now, it jumps the rails and doesn’t tell you anything about the past week.  Sometimes it gets all distracted and goes completely astray. To know what’s on the Dream Antilles you have to visit it.

    Verizon Fios

    I and my wife hereby state that.

    The format, color scheme, fonts used and the abbreviated descriptions of available movies and programs of your newly “updated” menu system bites, sucks, is hard on the eyes and that family plan many families are now cancelling?  Well the pay as you go plans are also a rip off.

    Like I said.  Humans have their eyes front and center which makes us predators.  We are wired that way.  We are that way.  You have to focus on something to kill in order to eat and survive.

    EU: Austerity Policy Making It Worse

    Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

    The current policy of austerity that is being forced on the European Union by Germany and England has been called “financially futile, economically erroneous, politically puzzling and socially irresponsible” by economists and monetary experts. Author and derivatives expert, Satyajit Das, writes in the first part of his series on “The Road to Nowhere, Part 1 – Fiscal Bondage” at naked capitalism that the December 2011 European summit to resolve the euro crisis was a failure:

    The proposed plan is fundamentally flawed. It made no attempt to tackle the real issues – the level of debt, how to reduce it, how to meet funding requirements or how to restore growth. Most importantly there were no new funds committed to the exercise.[..]

    The plan may result in a further slowdown in growth in Europe, worsening public finances and increasing pressure on credit ratings. This is precisely the experience of Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Britain as they have tried to reduce budget deficits through austerity programs. This would make the existing debt burden even harder to sustain. The rigidity of the rules also limits government policy flexibility, risking making economic downturns worse.[..]

    The fiscal compact did not countenance any writedowns in existing debt. It also did not commit any new funding to support the beleaguered European periphery. Germany specifically ruled out the prospect of jointly and severally guaranteed Euro-Zone bonds. Instead, there were vague platitudes about working towards further fiscal integration.[..]

    Instead of dealing with the financial problems of the central bailout mechanism (the EFSF – European Financial Stability Fund), European leaders chose the re-branding option.

    Actions, or rather inactions, have consequences.

    Germany is already in a recession too

    by Edward Harrison

    As I predicted in a message to Credit Writedowns Pro subscribers on Monday, statistics have shown that the German economy has finally succumbed to the deflationary economic policy of the euro zone.

       Germany showed first signs of feeling the pain from the euro zone’s debt crisis as the economy shrank in the last three month of 2011, despite outperforming its peers for main part of the year thanks to strong domestic demand and exports.

       Gross domestic product (GDP) grew 3.0 percent in 2011, preliminary Federal Statistics Office data showed on Wednesday, below the previous year’s growth rate of 3.7 percent – the fastest since reunification – and in line with a Reuters poll estimate.

       But GDP contracted by around 0.25 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, an official from the Statistics Office added.

       “Germany cannot isolate itself so easily from tensions within the euro zone. In addition the export sector is facing a difficult period given the fall in global demand,” said Joerg Zeuner, chief economist at VP Bank.

    Harrison wrote in November in the New York Times

    that Europe is already in a double-dip recession. Already two months ago, the Markit Eurozone Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index, which measures activity across Europe in services and manufacturing, had fallen to 50.4, the lowest since September 2009. The divider between expansion and contraction is 50, so Europe was still expanding. But last Wednesday, Markit data indicated that the situation has since deteriorated; the latest data showed a drop in private sector activity in the euro zone for the first time since July 2009. Moreover, the data are poor in the core of the euro zone as well as in the periphery, with Germany and France’s economies stalling as well. The sovereign debt crisis and the fiscal consolidation implemented to deal with it have taken their toll.[..]

    Until the banks take substantially more credit write-downs and recapitalize, this crisis will continue and get worse.

    The downward spiral is evident throughout Europe with even the strong German economy feeling the effects of erroneous policies

    The German economy expanded faster than any other Group of 7 nation last year, official data showed Wednesday, but the stress of the euro crisis and a slowing global economy appear to be already weighing on output.

    Germany expanded by 3 percent last year from 2010, the Federal Statistical Office said in Wiesbaden. It noted, however, that the growth came mostly in the first half of 2011, and estimated that the economy actually contracted by about 0.25 percent in the fourth quarter from the prior three months.

    Some economists now predict another contraction for Germany in the first three months of 2012, which would meet the usual definition of a recession as two consecutive quarterly declines in output.

    And austerity measures in Greece are making their budget deficits even worse:

    Greece’s budget deficit widened last year as an austerity-fuelled recession cancelled out much of the extra revenues the government was hoping to raise through emergency taxes, data showed on Thursday. The central government budget gap widened 0.8 percent year-on-year to 21.64 billion euros ($27.45 billion) last year, according to figures from the finance ministry.

    David Dayen at FDL News Desk thinks it is probably worse since “the EU uses a different measure to assess the Greek budget.”  He points out that even with increased taxes, the fall in tax compliance from an already lax system has reduced income. It all looks good on paper but that’s not the reality of what is actually in the treasury.

    There is some hope that Europe’s leader are waking up to reality that there needs to be a growth strategy, although it may not be enough, or soon enough, to reverse the spiral.

    It is a crisis in the € zone. The divergent trends in the € zone are too large. It is not an “optimum currency area”

    It’s not just government, to “sovereign debt” but also excesses in the financial sector, real estate etc.

    We must do everything to avoid recession. … We need a fiscal strategy that is “growth friendly”

    Fiscal consolidation will not tell us to say “no” to all or which is cut everywhere. We must “prioritize”

    We ask each member state to establish a “job plan”, we make commitments we can evaluate

    The next meeting of the Eurozone member is the end of this month where a tax on financial transactions will be considered and, hopefully, they will discuss job creation and debt reduction.

    Congressional Game of Chicken: Recess Appointment A Dilemma

    Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

    President Obama’s recent exercise of his constitutional authority to make recess appointments to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and filling vacancies the National Labor Relations Board has created some dilemmas for himself and congressional Republicans. Republicans, of course, will continue to block confirmation of any Presidential appointee but are split as to how to address President Obama’s dismissal of the sham “pro forma” sessions and his four recess appointments.

    With the appointment of Jack Lew as Chief of Staff, there is now a vacancy to head the Office of Budget and Management but the bigger issue may be the vacancy for a new director to the Federal Housing Finance Administration. That institution has been without a confirmed director for over two years, since David Lockhart left. The president is being pressured by the House Congressional Delegation from California to replace the Republican acting director of the FHFA, Ed DeMarco, who they say has been obstructing efforts to stem the housing market collapse and help keep owners in their homes. David Dayen at FDL News Desk reports that he is of two minds on DeMarco:

    (DeMarco) has interpreted his mandate very narrowly. It’s a bad thing when he refuses to engage in principal reductions for troubled borrowers, even though that would make more money for Fannie and Freddie in the long run, because he doesn’t want to take the short-term financing hit. But it’s a good thing when he sues 17 banks over misrepresentations of the mortgages in the securities they sold to Fannie and Freddie, with the hope of forcing repurchases of those mortgage pools.

    There have been signs that DeMarco is warming to a more activist stance. He agreed to the changes to HARP, which is more of a stimulus program than a program that will save homes, but which will allow expanded refinancing come March of this year on GSE-owned properties. Freddie Mac just initiated a program for a 12-month forbearance (where the borrower can skip payments) for unemployed borrowers, although Democrats maintain that not everyone eligible will receive that forbearance.

    Most promisingly, DeMarco is considering a principal pay-down program put forward by a California Democrat, Zoe Lofgren, that would allow underwater homeowners with GSE loans to have their mortgage payments go entirely to equity for five years, waiving the interest payments. DeMarco said he would look into the idea back in October, and there have been leaks since then suggesting that principal pay-down would happen. However, there has been no final word, and officially FHFA “continues to evaluate” the Lofgren proposal, even though in a meeting with House Dems they promised an assessment within two weeks.

    Meanwhile those poor Republican obstructionists have a headache, as Brian Buetler at TPMDC reports:

    Scores of House Republicans have signed on to a non-binding resolution disapproving of Obama’s four winter recess appointments – Cordray, and three members of the National Labor Relations Board – all fodder for conservatives, who are furious about the existence of these agencies, let alone the recess appointments themselves.

    “It’s astounding to me that the president is claiming these are recess appointments and within his authority, when Congress was not in fact in recess,” said Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) who authored the resolution. “These appointments are an affront to the Constitution. No matter how you look at this, it doesn’t pass the smell test. I hope the House considers my resolution as soon as we return to Washington so we can send a message to President Obama.”

    This creates an election-year dilemma for GOP leaders who may not want to make a big show of their opposition to the one person in Washington tasked with protecting consumers from predatory financial actors.

    But with so many key vacancies, President Obama has his own dilemma headache, not just to make more recess appointments but how to do it:

    [T]he breaks between the last week in January and the first week in August will be very brief ones. Which means that if Obama declines to use his recess appointment power in the next several days, he’ll have three options, none ideal: He can fight it out with Congress and push for regular confirmations; he can wait until August, when Congress goes home for over a month; or he can broaden the parameters of his own precedent, and use the recess appointment during brief one-week vacations between now and then.

    Republicans will likely keep holding pro forma sessions during those breaks, challenging Obama to take things further than he already has. [..]

    As far as the Constitution and the Senate rules are concerned, there wouldn’t be much difference between a recess appointment in, say, April, and the recess appointments he announced last week. But their public rationale for the January appointments wouldn’t really stand in April. And after attacking President Obama’s supposed power grab, Republicans would slip the precedent in their back pocket, to be deployed when they control the White House.

    We shall see if the president has finally abandoned all hope of getting any bipartisan cooperation from the Republicans.

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