February 11, 2009 archive

It is slowly dawning on the American citizenry, after Secretary Geithner’s latest performance, that our government has been captured by the financial industry. We are now so deeply in the territory of WTF phenomena that we need to look around to get our bearings. Here is what has been established so far in this incredible journey:

1. The entire United States financial sector is insolvent, i.e., its liabilities exceed its assets.

2. The US government has decided to place unlimited taxpayer resources at the disposal of the financial industry to restore its solvency.

3. The US government has refused to demand any management changes in the corporations that have become insolvent and dependent on taxpayer subsides.

4. The very same people who created the financial disaster remain firmly in control of insolvent institutions.

5. The highly-paid managers who created the financial disaster continue to award themselves huge salaries and bonuses, using taxpayer funds.

6. The US Government refuses to nationalize insolvent institutions, declaring that it cannot do a better job of managing them than the incompetent executives that caused the disaster.

7. We are rewarding and reinforcing failure on an unprecedented scale.

8. Nothing has been done that will prevent a reprise of this financial disaster.

9. The US financial industry has effectively hijacked the Federal Government, and is now looting the Treasury.

10. The American public is helpless to alter the decisions of its elected representatives, who insist on protecting the wealth of financial industry executives and stockholders at all costs.

WTF?

Washington Healthy, older adults who participated in a training programme to improve the speed and accuracy of brain processing, registered twice the improvement in certain aspects of memory.

“What’s unique in this study is that brain processing activities seemed to help aspects of memory that were not directly exercised by the programme — a new finding in memory research,” said Glenn Smith, Mayo Clinic neuropsychologist co-author of the study.

Kochi (PTI): Human-induced global warming and climate change is a reality, which is occurring at a more alarming pace than was expected, Scientists of National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, said.

In their paper on ‘Is Arabian Sea responding to global warming and undergoing a climate shift’, presented at the International Symposium on Marine Ecosystems here, they said the sea surface temperature (SST) has increased after 1995 “associated with a five-fold increase in the development of cyclones of more than 100 km per hour in the Arabian Sea during the past 12 years.”

“Concurrent with these events, there are warmer winters, decreased monsoon rainfall, both occurring over India and an increase in the phytoplankton biomass in the Arabian Sea,” they said.

Warmer winters cause a reduction in the annual wheat yield while decreased rainfall results in the decline of vegetation, increase in aridity and increased occurrence of heat spells over India, they said.  

Washington (IANS): Eligible women were found to be more expressive than men in texting messages, thanks to technology.

Indiana University (IU) researchers found that when men and women exchange text message in a public, interactive dating market, it is the women who use more non-standard, expressive language techniques.

Susan Herring and Asta Zelenkauskaite show that while men historically talk more in public settings, when the exchanges occur via text messaging in a public venue — in this case, Italy’s interactive channel Allmusic, it is the women who push their messages closest to the character-count limit, who use more abbreviations and insertions.

 

I thread therefore I am.

Just another victim of Republican policies? I am sure we will find out over the next few days. We don’t know her full story yet, but she is just one of the millions of homeless or at risk citizens of our country.