Tag: ek Politics

Banks are crime syndicates and their management Mafiosi.

Banks Face a Huge Reckoning in the Mortgage Mess

By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG, The New York Times

Published: December 9, 2012

Regulators, prosecutors, investors and insurers have filed dozens of new claims against Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and others, related to more than $1 trillion worth of securities backed by residential mortgages.

Estimates of potential costs from these cases vary widely, but some in the banking industry fear they could reach $300 billion if the institutions lose all of the litigation.

…

Efforts by the banks to limit their losses could depend on the outcome of one of the highest-stakes lawsuits to date – the $200 billion case that the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the housing twins Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, filed against 17 banks last year, claiming that they duped the mortgage finance giants into buying shaky securities.

…

(I)n October, federal prosecutors in New York accused the bank (of America) of perpetrating a fraud through Countrywide by churning out loans at such a fast pace that controls were largely ignored. A settlement in that case could reach well beyond $1 billion because the Justice Department sued the bank under a law that could allow roughly triple the damages incurred by taxpayers.

Bank of America’s attempts to resolve some mortgage litigation with an umbrella settlement have stalled. In June 2011, the bank agreed to pay $8.5 billion to appease investors, including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Pimco, that lost billions of dollars when the mortgage securities assembled by the bank went bad. But the settlement is in limbo after being challenged by investors. Kathy D. Patrick, the lawyer representing investors, has said she will set her sights on Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo next.

What should happen is that they should be seized and the assets distributed to those they defrauded.  Investors should take a 100% haircut and the individuals convicted and sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor.

“All of Wall Street has essentially refused to deal with the real costs of the litigation that they are up against,” said Christopher Whalen, a senior managing director at Tangent Capital Partners. “The real price tag is terrifying.”

But not as terrifying as the tumbrils.

Just don’t tell me it’s raining.

I know none of my regular readers have a problem with concepts like this because…

Well basically because they’re not ignorant rubes who reject mathematics in favor of magic.

Herr Doktor Professor–

Dean Baker catches David Ignatius suggesting that trade liberalization can provide enough economic boost to offset the effects of austerity. As Dean says, the arithmetic is totally off – almost two orders of magnitude off.

Order of magnitude.  What does that mean?

Without overly complicating things (there are 10 types of people, those who know binary and those who don’t) what makes our modern, Arabic system of numeric notation superior for quick calculation to that used by Rome is that we represent numbers positionally using a zero to indicate that no elements occupy a particular multiple of our base.

When you line numbers up in columns this gives you a quick and easy way to see which numbers are about the same size.  Which is bigger- MM or MCMXCIX?

            MM

       MCMXCIX

Why MCMXCIX obviously, it has more numbers.

How about this way?

       2000

       1999

Now that’s actually a bad example because 1999 and 2000 are really close together.  Let’s try something where we are actually displaying some orders of magnitude.

         1

        10

       100

So 10 is 9 more than 1 and 100 is 90 more than 10.  What’s important to notice is not only is 100 more than 10, it’s a lot more than 10.  The difference is bigger between 100 and 10 than it is between 10 and 1, a lot bigger.

Conveniently for us the difference between 100 and 1 is exactly 2 orders of magnitude, just what Herr Doktor ordered.

Let’s look at what Dr. Baker says-

Ignatius’ trade deal will increase growth over the next decade by an average of 0.09 percent a year.

…

By comparison, the Congressional Budget Office’s projections show that the tax increases and spending cuts associated with the end of year fiscal dispute will reduce GDP by close to 4.0 percent, or roughly 40 times the impact of Ignatius’s trade deal.

40 times?  How does he come up with that number?  If we take out the confusing decimal place it looks like this-

         9

       400

So the real number is something like 45 (44.4) times, but that’s still rather big.

Ok, so what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?  Well, if you don’t know how to deal with orders of magnitude you might end up spending an awful lot more for your Chinese tea.  Let’s look at another example.

Goldman Fined for Failing to Block Trader’s $8.3 Billion Bet

By Silla Brush, Bloomberg News

Dec 7, 2012 4:30 PM ET

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) will pay $1.5 million to settle U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission claims the firm failed to supervise a trader who hid an $8.3 billion position. One CFTC commissioner dissented, saying the penalty is far too small.

Goldman Sachs inadequately policed trades made by Matthew Marshall Taylor on seven days in late 2007, ultimately suffering more than $118 million in losses as his bets were unwound, according to the CFTC. Later, Goldman Sachs didn’t send the regulator “important information” on the incident that was provided to another industry watchdog, the CFTC said.

$1.5 million, that’s a lot of money isn’t it?  Perhaps to you and I, but let’s take a look at those orders of magnitude shall we?

       $8,300,000,000 == Amount of the illegal trade ($8.3 Billion)

         $118,000,000 == Amount the trade lost ($118 Million)

           $1,500,000 == Amount of the fine ($1.5 Million)

So the fine was $116.5 Million dollars less than Matthew Marshall Taylor cost Goldman Sachs just by being stupid and wrong and $8.2985 BILLION less than the amount of money at risk in the trade.

And a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

The moral of the story is, don’t let verbal shortcuts confuse you.

Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America

Daniel Fisher, Forbes

12/05/2012 @ 11:57AM

Charles’ many critics on the left-including the President of the United States-accuse him of accumulating too much power and using it to promote his own economic interests through a network of secretive organizations they call the “Kochtopus.” Ironically, the Koch brothers believe they’re fighting against power, at least in the political realm. For the Kochs the real power is central government, which can tax entire industries into oblivion, force a citizen to buy health insurance and bring mighty corporations like Koch Industries to heel.

“Most power is power to coerce somebody,” says Charles, in a voice that sounds like Jimmy Stewart with a Kansas twang. “We don’t have the power to coerce anybody.”

…

The goal has always been, Charles says, “true democracy,” where people “can run their own lives and choose what they want to buy, choose how to spend their money.”

…

In the mid-1970s their business of changing minds got more formal when Charles cofounded what became the Cato Institute, the first major libertarian think tank. Based in Washington, it has 120 employees devoted to promoting property rights, educational choice and economic freedom. In 1978 the brothers helped found-and still fund-George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the go-to academy for deregulation; they have funded the Federalist Society, which shapes conservative judicial thinking; the pro-market Heritage Foundation; a California-based center skeptical of human-driven climate change; and many other institutions.

All of these organizations, unknown to 99% of the population, and their common source of support, unknown to most of the rest, have provided the grist for conservative thinking since Reagan. It’s a measure of Koch’s success that 40 years after Richard Nixon was stumping for national health insurance, Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand-tinged economics are just a little right of center. That the Supreme Court’s conservative majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts has issued a number of pro-property rights, anti-government decisions in recent years that read like they came straight out of a Federalist Society position paper. That when George W. Bush sought a watchdog on regulation costs, he appointed a top Mercatus executive. And none of this was accidental-it just took millions of dollars over decades of time.

The current budgetary debate (fiscal cliff, austerity bomb, whatever) is focused on the Obama Administration’s apparent insistence that they are going to force the Republicans to eat crow and publicly humble themselves by accepting rate increases on the wealthiest 2%.

As if this were some kind of great progressive liberal victory.

In fact nothing could be further from the truth.  It would be a Bob McNamara body count kind of victory that wins neither hearts nor minds or even holds any ground.

The Truly Grand Bargain

By DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times

Published: December 3, 2012

This is a big political concession, but it’s not much of an economic one. President Obama needs rate increases to show the liberals he has won a “victory,” but the fact is that raising revenue by raising rates is not that much worse for the economy than raising revenue by closing loopholes, which Republicans have already conceded.

In return, Republicans should also ask for some medium-size entitlement cuts as part of the fiscal cliff down payment.

…

Besides, the inevitable package would please Republicans. The House would pass a conservative bill. The Senate would pass a center-left bill. The compromise between the two would be center-right.

It’s pointless to cut a short-term deal if entitlement programs are still structured to bankrupt our children. Republicans and Democrats could make 2013 the year of the truly Grand Bargain.

NYT’s Douthat Dead Wrong on Social Security

by Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Sunday, November 25, 2012

The problem here is that we are not condemned to an era of “mass unemployment, mediocre wage growth and weak mobility.” This has been the outcome of inept macroeconomic policy and trade and regulatory policies that were designed to redistribute income from those at the middle and bottom to the top. Most people would look to reverse these policies rather than eliminate social insurance.

The implication of this comment, that we would somehow be able to make up substantial funding shortfalls from cutting taxes on low and middle income people by taxing the wealthy more also is not very plausible. Given the enormous political power of the “job creators” (as demonstrated by the fact that people are not laughed out of town for using this term), it is unlikely that substantially more money will be raised from the wealthy to pay for Social Security.

Sorry Dr. Baker, Ross Douthat is exactly right.

Our Enemy, the Payroll Tax

By ROSS DOUTHAT, The New York Times

Published: November 24, 2012

Franklin Roosevelt effectively disguised Social Security as a pay-as-you-go system, even though the program actually redistributes from rich to poor and young to old. That disguise has helped keep Social Security sacrosanct – hailed by Democrats because it protects the poor and backed by Republicans as a reward for steady work.

…

All of the components of a sensible Social Security reform – means-testing for wealthier beneficiaries, changing the way benefits adjust for inflation, a slow increase in the retirement age – become easier if the program is treated as normal safety-net spending rather than an untouchable entitlement with a dedicated funding stream.

By cutting the tax rate and promising to make up the difference out of general revenue, the payroll tax holiday took a big step in this direction – and letting it expire would take a big step back. Republicans have every reason to recognize this reality: their long-term size-of-government goals require Social Security reform, and the illusions fostered by the payroll tax are an obstacle – originally created by their political enemies! – to any restraint in what the program spends.

In Which Ross Douthat Examines Social Security

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

11/26/2012 at 1:30PM

Ross Cardinal Douthat yesterday decided that the greedy olds are ripping him off, and he and Chris Van Hollen are not going to take it any more. Or something. In doing so, he masterfully delineated the actual case that conservatives have been making against Social Security since the moment it passed in 1933 – namely, that the biggest problem with the program is that it, you know, really works.

…

Well, we certainly can’t have that. I also would point out that Social Security didn’t “promise post-retirement returns,” it delivered them, every last dime of them, and it pretty much eliminated abject elderly poverty in this country, which I guess is something we can’t have, either.

…

Unless we all get sold out, and the government starts listening to the likes of Ross Douthat, Social Security recipients pretty much get everything that they put into the system while they were working. The CBO says the trust fund is solvent through 2038, and some minor tweaks – like lifting the cap, which Young Master Douthat declines to mention – we can push the event horizon even deeper into the future.

…

The payroll tax cut was intended to be a short-term stimulus, something that, in other guises – say, like rebuilding bridges or repairing dams – His Eminence would be expected to oppose. There were those of us who pointed out that extending it would lead inevitably to some charlatan using it as a wedge to take a hack at the program itself.

…

But, eventually, we get around to what’s really going on. Social Security is a government program that works. It is a government program that people like.

Nope, the real problem is that President Obama, his Administration, and the institutional Democratic Party agree with Ross Douthat.

The Real Problem with Simpson and Bowles

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

11/28/2012 at 11:42AM

The commission crashed and burned, although you would never know it from the cargo cult that has sprung up around it within our political elites. It produced a “plan” that so many members of the commission hated that the “plan” never really was submitted to Congress. Every single Republican on the commission walked away from it. It was a thoroughly rotten deal for poor people and for the middle class, the living embodiment of Alan Simpson’s obvious contempt for everyone who is not him, as a number of progressive politicians pointed out. Undaunted, Simpson and Bowles pretended that their “plan” actually was a working document. It was a remarkable act of political faith-healing and, over the past couple of years, the “plan” that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone of the pitch for “bipartisan” “compromise. Senator Richard Durbin,supposedly one of the lead progressive voices in the Senate, can’t shut up about the bloody thing.

…

Only in the funhouse mirror that is the Beltway media are these two guys an “improbable buddy act.” Only in that same mirror are they an “odd couple.” (And the fact that “business groups” pay them 40-grand a pop proves nothing except the fact the two of them shouldn’t be trusted as far as you can throw Lloyd Blankfein’s desk.) Both of them are tools of the financial power that has come to be the ruination of the nation’s economy and is more than halfway toward ruining the nation’s democracy as well. For example, the nation’s tattered social safety net is in as much danger from the two of them as it is from the outright zombie-eyed granny-starver, Paul Ryan, who personally walked away from the Simpson-Bowles “plan” because not enough grannies were being starved. Bowles just wants to hand the entire social insurance system over to his financial masters. (He’s one of the masterminds behind the Fix The Debt scam by which we are supposed to believe that a passel of avaricious CEOs have the country’s best interests at heart.) The financial elites, for whom Erskine Bowles would run the Iditarod if you put him in harness, loved it, which should have been a warning to everyone. Simpson hates the people who depend on the programs. But one of them is a lot taller than the other one so – bipartisanship! The plan lives!

…

It is everything that has been wrong with this enterprise from the start. It is an exercise in Beltway wankery that hasn’t even bothered to pause to estimate the human cost of the deal it is seeking to foist on the American people. (And of which Alan Simpson is indecently contemptuous.) It traffics in the spurious notion that any deal with which “”both sides” are angry must be the right deal. (Can we please have an honest assessment of credibility here? If billionaires are angry because they might have to chip in some boutonniere money on April 15, and a middle-class family is angry because their 82-year old grandmother with Alzheimer’s is lying in her own filth in a substandard nursing home because of Medicare “reforms,” are we honestly saying that the anger of both sides is equally justified? Has anyone even asked that question?) It is the product of a heedless national elite so insulated from the consequences of its actions, and so coddled by a feckless national political media, that its actions are seen to have no consequences that matter once you cross the Potomac. (I’d have felt better about the whole deal if there were one nurse, one urban health-director, one social-worker on the entire commission.) The primary constituencies upon whom this “plan” will fall hardest were not even represented in its development, and they do not seem to factor in at all in the effort to implement it. The whole debate is taking place in a bell jar of unreality. Only there could Simpson and Bowles be seen as honest brokers, and only there could their “plan” be seen as anything except a new front in the steady looting of the national wealth, a “compromise” between lions and sheep.

How Obama Tried to Sell Out Liberalism in 2011

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

3/19/12 at 6:21 PM

Last summer, President Obama desperately attempted to forge a long-term deficit reduction deal with Congressional Republicans. The notion that he could get the House GOP to accept any remotely balanced agreement was preposterous and doomed from the start, but Obama responded to the increasingly obvious reality by reducing his demands of the Republicans to virtually nothing.

The Washington Post has a long narrative report about the negotiations between Obama and the House Republicans. The narrative frame of the Post’s account is that Obama blew the potential deal at the last minute. That’s a story that people close to Obama’s fired chief of staff, Bill Daley, have been peddling for a long time. But that conclusion is utterly belied by the facts in the Post’s own account. But let’s put that aside for now, because the facts in the Post’s account support a different and far more disturbing conclusion: Obama was even more desperate to cut a deal than previously believed – dangerously desperate, in fact.

It has previously been reported that Obama had offered to John Boehner to make a series of cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and the domestic budget, to reduce top-end tax rates, and to prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, in return for increasing tax revenue (over current tax levels) by about $800 billion over ten years. That is a pitiful sum of new revenue, less than half as much as recommended by deficit proposals by Bowles-Simpson, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and other bipartisan worthies.

…

The obvious reality is that there never has been any way to get House Republicans to agree to a balanced deficit deal. Even the capitulation Obama offered – $800 billion in semi-imaginary revenue, all raised from the non-rich – was too much for them to agree to. Locking in that low level of revenue would have required huge cuts in spending, making a decent liberal vision of government impossible. The Post is making the case that there was a potential deal, and Obama blew it by failing to properly handle the easily-spooked Republican caucus. What the story actually shows is that Obama’s disastrous weakness in the summer of 2011 went further toward undermining liberalism than anybody previously knew.

Bargaining Among Thieves, Thugs, Cheats, Liars and Naïfs

By: masaccio, Firedog Lake

Sunday November 25, 2012 10:40 am

Obama thinks the election will encourage the Republicans to act like human beings and remember the needs of their constituents. And they will. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can be counted on to carry the water of their billionaire constituents and screw the rest of the country. The hyper-rich may have lost the presidency, but their serving-men will fight to destroy Obama’s second term even harder than they did his first, and if the country goes into a second recession, well that’s too bad. The thieves who steal money from every human on the planet want tax cuts, dammit, and they don’t want their precious corporations to pay taxes, dammit, and the odious twins will do their damnedest to accomplish the wishes of their masters.

Across the aisle there are plenty of lame duck Blue Dog Democrats who were always willing to dishonor the legacy of the Democratic Party and screw their constituents in search of some mythical middle ground between themselves and the true believers on the back bench of the Crazy Party.

…

Obama spent his first term ignoring the people who elected him, especially progressive activists, the professional left, but also all of the members of his coalition who can’t live decent lives without Social Security and Medicare. So, when Grand Bargain I, the Betrayal, came out, it did very badly with Obama’s base. There was a lot of anger and hostility among the professional left, and a lot of it carried over to that base. No one was sorry to see Grand Bargain I pulled from the stores to be replaced by the laughable Supercommittee/Fiscal Cliff.

Fresh off his electoral victory, Obama called in the leaders of groups that supported him and asked them to help him in the introduction of Grand Bargain II, Revenge on the Old. Of course, he didn’t exactly ask them to sign on to cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Instead, he asked them to carry the message that taxes on the rich should be increased. Practically every sane American thinks that the first step in dealing with the deficit is to hike taxes on the richest among us, the people who caused the Great Crash, who sucked up all the benefits from government action to deal with it, and whose outsized influence kept the government from lifting a finger to help millions of homeowners. So these leaders signed up for this term’s version of the Veal Pen.

…

The worst part of this idiot bargaining is that the President is really worried about getting the Republicans to actually do the deed. In Grand Bargain I, the Republicans were supposed to pretend to accept tax hikes, none of which were specified. That was intolerable to the worst of the crazies, and Boehner couldn’t deliver the votes. This time, the President is looking for some other idiotic sop to throw to the nutcases to conceal their defeat on the tax hike issue.

How Obamacare Came To The Fiscal Cliff

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

11/23/2012 at 12:15PM

Wait. Stop. The president, and the congressional Democrats, are under no affirmative obligation to make John Boehner’s life easier just because he’s got a caucus full of more nuts than a Wal-Mart fruitcake. The president, and the congressional Democrats, are under no affirmative obligation to arrange for John Boehner’s mellow to stay unharshed just because he’s dependent upon a political “base” that went to the monkeyhouse 30 years ago, pitched a tent, and never left. John Boehner’s political problems are John Boehner’s political problems. They’re not the country’s to solve, and certainly not the president’s, either. Let him solve them himself. The popular speculation is that this is all just political posturing, and sop-tossing, and ass-covering. I am less sanguine. In this atmosphere, in which the entire discussion is taking place behind closed doors and in which the general welfare of most Americans seems to be little more than a side issue, empty rhetoric has a way of becoming empirical political fact.

If you stand for nothing, you will stand for anything and that includes throwing your own babies under the bus.

I think gender stereotyping is the moral equivalent of teaching children gibberish instead of a language.  It is wrong for the child and bad for society and it’s amazing to me that people defend it on the basis of biology.  Balls does not equate to brain, quite the opposite.

Easy-Bake Oven accused of sexist marketing by 13 y.o. girl (and she’s right)

by Chris in Paris, Americablog

12/4/2012 7:03pm

As someone who loves to cook, does all of the cooking at home, and who has enjoyed cooking since I was a kid, I would say most definitely, yes – the Easy-Bake Oven’s marketing is sexist (see a sampling below).

Just as it’s sexist to dissuade young girls from math, it’s completely sexist to suggest cooking is not for young boys.  And that’s what Easy-Bake Oven’s entire marketing scheme is about – girls, to the exclusion of boys.

What makes all of this a strange topic is that in the world of “top chefs” in the restaurant business, there’s also a heavy dose of sexism against women. Most of the big name chefs are men, though fortunately there are more women that are getting the respect that they deserve. Even in the context of sexism, cooking is odd since it discourages one sex or another depending on age (it’s okay for men to cook but not boys, and women’s place is in the kitchen unless it’s a really big famous kitchen).

What’s so complicated about being a boy or a girl, a man or a woman and wanting to cook without regard to your gender?

‘Worst Toy Awards’ Target Lego Friends

By KJ DELL’ANTONIA, The New York Times

November 29, 2012, 6:15 pm

The Lego Friends line may promote gender stereotyping. It may be an unnecessary segmenting off of would-be girl Lego builders into “girly” Legos and away from more basic brick sets that offer the complex challenges of creating your own models and worlds (although no more so than any branded Lego kit, all of which are too limiting in the eyes of many Lego fans). It might have provoked all sorts of debate, here and elsewhere when it was introduced, over whether the sets (designed for more role play and storytelling) exploit girls’ natural play patterns or embrace them.

…

There’s much to consider in the realm of gender-targeted marketing and products, and as I wrote earlier today, it’s all too easy to find yourself grabbing the pink Lego set for a girl without thinking about whether she’d rather just have the Volkswagon Camper Van. One of my girls loves the pink Legos. The other prefers the classic stuff. But they’re both sitting in there on the floor building and whispering stories to themselves, and that’s scarcely destructive to their childhoods.

…

Lego may have created and marketed its Friends line in the hope of selling more girls on its product, but that’s what toy companies do – and that product, no matter what color it is or what it can build, is still one of the least commercialized options out there, still without batteries or screens, and still, at its core, a building toy.

I love Legos, it’s still just about my favorite toy.  As a point of information it’s structurally possible to build a tower 2.17 miles high out of 2 x 2 bricks, but professional Lego engineers say it’s a practical impossibility because they don’t stack straight enough.

How tall can a Lego tower get?

By Ruth Alexander, BBC News Magazine

3 December 2012

“There isn’t a chance you could do it in reality,” Johnston says. “Long before the brick fails, the tower would fail as a structure itself, by buckling. The other thing you have to remember is that we were very careful to load this equally down the middle, so that all four walls were loaded.”

A 3.5km tower would have to be built so straight that it was no more than 2mm off centre at the midway point, he says.

“And I’d be delighted to meet a Lego builder who could make a 3.5km tower so accurately.”

Cue Duncan Titmarsh, the UK’s only certified Lego builder – and one of only 13 worldwide – and Ed Diment, his partner at company Bright Bricks.

They built the 12.2m (40ft) Lego Christmas tree that stood in London’s St Pancras station last Christmas, and the 5m x 3m advent calendar standing in Covent Garden.

Do they think they could take up the challenge? No.

“If you try stacking 2×2 bricks as soon as you get beyond 3 or 4m tall there’s almost no way you can take out all of the kinks,” Ed Diment says.

And their computer games are as highly structured as their bricks.

Lego The Lord of the Rings – review

Simon Parkin, The Guardian

Monday 3 December 2012

The Lego games, which seek to rebuild colossi of contemporary family cinema franchises in miniature bricks, have rather less to do with the plastic stuff from which they take their name than appearances suggest. The physical toy is a creative material that allows us to build from the imagination in near limitless ways. From a relatively small palette of interconnecting bricks – which click together with all the reassurance of a lipstick lid – one can fashion everything from a lopsided hot-rod to a lumpy dog to the Taj Mahal. Therein lies its simple wonder and universal appeal.

Traveller’s Tales’ games, by contrast, are entirely prescribed. You squeeze a button and the loose collection of bricks at your character’s feet assembles itself in a magical micro-hurricane into a bridge or a ladder or whatever object is needed to facilitate minifigure Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones’s pre-laid story. There is no capacity for personalisation; a player may only affect the rate at which they move towards the conclusion. If Minecraft is the true freeform construction game, offering players a world of blocks to heave into a world of shapes, the orthodox Lego games have us closely following an instruction manual. Piece by piece we reveal the predestined finished article, meticulously prepared for us by the game’s designers.

…

The basics of the recipe remain consistent – each cinematic plotline split into 18 sequential stages; the characters divided into “types”, each with their own set of exclusive abilities which must be called upon to overcome obstacles; the post-completion secret hunting – but the structure is ever-changing.

Lego Lord of the Rings presents the most dramatic overhaul yet, retaining the 18-stage structure, but granting players the run of Middle Earth in between these climactic chapters. It’s not quite Lego Skyrim, but these hills and valleys are filled with nooks and secrets, valuable bricks hidden behind waterfalls and deep inside yawning caves, the land seasoned with eager minifigs waiting to send you off on fetch quests. It’s this expanse of hub that gives Lego Lord of the Rings a rare sense of scale and place, one articulated by a map that, more than in Tolkien’s prose or Jackson’s film, allows one to understand exactly how Shire links to Mordor in geographical terms.

So you remember the Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum plans to drill exploratory wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas this summer?  Plans that were quite controversial because of the lack of any oil spill containment capability and the remoteness of even U.S. Navy and Coast Guard support (not that they’re optimized for that type of mission anyway though I suppose they could nuke the wellhead as was proposed by some during the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon disaster)?

Remember how the flagship of their high tech rapid response was a 35 year old ice breaking barge called the Arctic Challenger that was pretty much useless as an ice breaker because of design flaws even before they plated over the stern push points for the tug boats that provided the only motive power (yep, doesn’t even have its own propellers) so they could use it as a launch point for their super high tech blowout containment unit?

Remember how there were constant safety inspection failures during the refurbishing of this “loser dockside queen” culminating in the complete failure of the containment unit “Saturday, September 16th, in clear, calm, warm summer weather on Puget Sound“?

Well, thanks to KUOW Seattle National Public Radio we now know what happened blow by blow-

Day 5: The test has its worst accident. On that dead-calm Friday night, Mark Fesmire, the head of BSEE’s Alaska office, is on board the Challenger. He’s watching the underwater video feed from the remote-control submarine when, a little after midnight, the video screen suddenly fills with bubbles. The 20-foot-tall containment dome then shoots to the surface. The massive white dome “breached like a whale,” Fesmire e-mails a colleague at BSEE headquarters.

Then the dome sinks more than 120 feet. A safety buoy, basically a giant balloon, catches it before it hits bottom. About 12 hours later, the crew of the Challenger manages to get the dome back to the surface. “As bad as I thought,” Fesmire writes his BSEE colleague. “Basically the top half is crushed like a beer can.”

Like a beer can eh?  Yah don’t say.

I highly recommend clicking on the link, the picture is quite stunning.

Anyway you’ll be happy to know everything is under control.

(h/t EdwardTeller @ Firedog Lake)

Gen. Petraeus, Gen. Petraeus

Fox News chief’s failed attempt to enlist Petraeus as presidential candidate

By Bob Woodward, The Washington Post

December 3, 2012

So in spring 2011, Ailes asked a Fox News analyst headed to Afghanistan to pass on his thoughts to Petraeus, who was then the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. Petraeus, Ailes advised, should turn down an expected offer from President Obama to become CIA director and accept nothing less than the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military post. If Obama did not offer the Joint Chiefs post, Petraeus should resign from the military and run for president, Ailes suggested.

…

The Washington Post has obtained a digital recording from the meeting, which took place in Petraeus’s office in Kabul.

…

McFarland mentioned her conversation with Petraeus in a FoxNews.com piece on April 27, 2011. “Our discussion was off the record, and to respect that I will not quote the general,” she wrote. By that time, it was clear that Petraeus would be nominated as CIA director. “I can’t help thinking that the Obama administration has done something a bit underhanded but politically shrewd by tapping Petraeus for the CIA,” she added, because it would remove him as a “potential rival” in the presidential contest.

On Monday, Ailes, 72, said there was “zero chance” he would leave Fox to reenter politics for Petraeus or anyone else. “The money is too good,” he said, declining to say how much he earned, although reliable reports have pegged the amount at roughly $20 million per year under a new four-year contract.

“I left politics in 1988 because I hated it,” Ailes said. “My main interest is seeing my 12-year-old’s basketball games.”

Heh.  Just another Beat Sweetener.

(I)t’s impossible to tell the difference between the tone of a reporter who we now know was literally sucking the dick of her subject and the tone of just about any other modern American reporter who is given access to a powerful person for a biography or feature-length profile.

–Matt Taibbi

At Halftime, Costas Put Spotlight on Guns. By Morning, the Spotlight Was on Him.

By BILL CARTER, The New York Times

December 3, 2012, 8:23 pm

Many of the harshest reactions to Mr. Costas’s comments charged that it was inappropriate to use the platform of an NFL telecast to make arguments concerning a hot-button issue like gun control.

Mr. Costas noted in response that N.F.L. coverage on many networks had talked about the incident all day on Sunday.

…

He said the criticisms of his commentary “hold no weight with me” because the same people saying that that was an inappropriate time and place to talk about the gun issue “would have thought it was fine if they agreed with what I was saying.”

The issue of guns has come up far too often in sports already, he said, with athletes seeming to be among the groups with the most gun owners. “Do you think the place guns have in sports is appropriate?” Mr. Costas asked. “That it’s healthy?”

He added: “I defy anyone to give me one example when an athlete having a gun averted trouble, defused a situation, protected someone from harm. But we can think of countless situations where an athlete having a gun led to tragedy.”

Compare and contrast with his colleagues whether you agree with the substance of his position or not.

I think it’s obvious why the more autocratic, authoritarian, and avaricious elements of the current criminal crony system of monarchist merchantile monopolism are constantly attempting to change the commons culture of the Internet.

They want to be able to charge you for access to the library/thesaurus/dictionary/encyclopedia/studio/printing press.

If you’re like me you’ve already switched from the sometimes evil Google to the equally corporate captured but less popular bing or Yahoo.  I personally use duckduckgo which has the benefit of not limiting the results of your searches to things you have discovered before.  If I’m searching I want to find new things, not the same old stuff I’ve already seen.

The reason I mention duckduckgo in this context is that they’ve been out in front of identifying yet another threat to our continued abusive Internet addiction, the WCIT 2/ITU treaty talks being held in Dubai, that hot bed of corporatist freedom.

Indeed the particular bone of contention in these talks is whether providers should be charged for bandwidth as well as consumers with a secondary issue of how long the United States should be allowed to continue it’s DARPANET dominance.

Now normally I’m all for socking it to the suits and chauvinists but in this case not so much.  Certainly this artistic thing I share without expectation of anything except ridicule and disagreement in return would be made even more difficult as the inputs (that’s what they call them in econospeak) became scarce and restricted and my output (such as it is) more expensive to produce and inflict upon you.

Nor am I in favor of outright government corruption and graft which appear to be the goals of the “reformers”.  Public servants should, oh I don’t know, serve the public and not their personal pocketbooks.

I realize this is radical thinking.

So with that declaration of my personal conflicts of interest and prejudice I share these stories and action items.

The not-boring guide to the United Nations’ non-takeover of the Internet

By Andrew Couts, Digital Trends

November 30, 2012

Next week, the United Nations will take over the Internet. Or, actually, it won’t take over the Internet, but it’s going to let the Russians take over the Internet. Or maybe it’s just going to poke the Internet with a stick. No, no, wait, that’s not right either… Nobody’s going to take over the Internet, but a bunch of “important people” from around the world are going to pretend like they know what’s best for the Internet, and all we can do is sit around hoping they don’t screw it up.

Yeah, that sounds more like it.

I’m talking, of course – of course – about the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT, which kicks off in the fun-loving city of Dubai on Monday, December 3, and runs through December 14. During WCIT (pronounced “wicket”), member states of a UN agency called the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will talk about a whole bunch of complicated stuff that could, somehow, affect the Internet we all love so much.

Problem is, the whole shebang is a giant mess. Worse, most of the filth is a secret – one of the many reasons people, Internet advocacy groups, governments, and companies are freaking out.

…

The whole thing is really just about money

In addition to concerns from U.S.-based Internet companies, like Google, that changes to the ITRs could result in more rules and burdensome regulation, the real worry is money. Some African and Asian nations, as well as the European Telecommunications Network Operators’ Association (ETNO) want to impose something called “sender party pays,” which would require Web companies to pay local Internet operators around the world for the data-heavy traffic they send through their system. As former U.S. Ambassador David Gross told me earlier this year, the ETNO proposal would impose “a radical change” on “the economics of the Internet.”

According to Amb. Gross and others, the establishment of “sender party pays” could, at the very least, result in companies like Google deciding that it is not worth it financially to operate in developing nations that generate little in the way of advertising revenue. This in turn could result in these countries being kicked further behind due to a lack of access to the open Web we enjoy here in the U.S.

Columnist Michael Geist concurs that “sender party pays” would “create enormous new costs for major content providers such as Google or Netflix.”

UN internet regulation treaty talks begin in Dubai

By Leo Kelion, Technology reporter, BBC

2 December 2012

“The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world’s privilege, ” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, ahead of the meeting.

“ITU wants to change that.”

…

The ITU says there is a need to reflect the “dramatically different” technologies that have become commonplace over the past 24 years.

But the US has said some of the proposals being put forward by other countries are “alarming”.

“There have been proposals that have suggested that the ITU should enter the internet governance business,” said Terry Kramer, the US’s ambassador to Wcit, last week.

“There have been active recommendations that there be an invasive approach of governments in managing the internet, in managing the content that goes via the internet, what people are looking at, what they’re saying.

“These fundamentally violate everything that we believe in in terms of democracy and opportunities for individuals, and we’re going to vigorously oppose any proposals of that nature.”

He added that he was specifically concerned by a proposal by Russia which said member states should have “equal rights to manage the internet” – a move he suggested would open the door to more censorship.

However – as a recent editorial in the Moscow Times pointed out – Russia has already been able to introduce a “black list” of banned sites without needing an international treaty.

…

Vint Cerf – the computer scientist who co-designed some of the internet’s core underlying protocols and who now acts as Google’s chief internet evangelist – has been even more vocal, penning a series of op-ed columns.

“A state-controlled system of regulation is not only unnecessary, it would almost invariably raise costs and prices and interfere with the rapid and organic growth of the internet we have seen since its commercial emergence in the 1990s,” he wrote for CNN.

I must admit the argument “Censorship is already possible” is not very compelling to me.

InternetCoup.org Petition

Think of all the terrible things governments do to the Internet. The US destroyed Megaupload, Russia jailed activists over a YouTube video, and China monitors Internet users’ every move– even hacking activists outside its borders.

Now imagine if a panel of governments, giant corporations, and dictatorships had absolute power over the entire Internet, deciding in secret what you can see & do online.

When the ITU meets December 3rd, they’ll decide on this. Only a global outcry can stop it.

Join us on December 3rd, and tell your leaders right now: “I don’t trust the world’s governments to run the global Internet. Don’t give the ITU any more power.”

Click through even if you don’t want to sign the petition because the page also has a lot of interesting links to futher discussions of the issues.

duckduckgo is one of the leaders in Internet privacy and they also featured this petition in a recent doodle which while not directly related speaks to some of the same concerns.

Our nation’s privacy laws are profoundly out of date. I am writing to urge you to support updating the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 to protect our Fourth Amendment rights and uphold the integrity of law enforcement in the digital age.

My emails, online documents, and text messages should have the same protections from unreasonable search and seizure as my phone calls, postal mail, and paper documents. The government should have to get a warrant from a judge to obtain these documents, or to track my location using my cell phone. Prosecutors, regulatory agencies and other government officials should not be able to issue their own subpoenas to read my emails.

The last significant update to electronic communications privacy legislation was in 1986 when the Internet was in its infancy and email was a novelty. Current electronic privacy laws don’t adequately protect online communications. This legal uncertainty harms the growth of modern businesses that increasingly store documents in “the cloud.” Updating ECPA will support small businesses, create jobs, and reinforce our Constitutional rights.

I am following this issue closely and look forward to your reply.

VanishingRights.com

Our rights are in danger. The Bill of Rights was intended to grant all Americans protection from unreasonable government intrusions into our lives. Two decades ago, Congress recognized that the courts were not keeping up with the times, so it passed a law to preserve privacy rights in electronic communications. The 1986 law made some critical reforms, but came from an era with no Google, no Facebook, no World Wide Web. Now, that law needs to be updated to ensure that our rights don’t vanish as our lives move into the cloud.

Right now, the government claims that the Constitution does not protect the privacy of communications, calendars, photos and documents stored online. That 1986 federal privacy law provides some protections, but it has crazy distinctions like one rule for email more than 180 days old (no warrant required) and a different rule for email 180 days old or less (warrant required). Bottom line: the statute says the government can read a lot of your most personal stuff without a warrant. That doesn’t make any sense.

And the 1986 law didn’t even address location information, so the government claims that it can track your location using your phone without ever going to a court and getting a warrant from a judge. Congress has failed to pass common sense updates to that outdated 1986 law to ensure that privacy protections you get in your home apply equally to the Internet.

…

Congress has acknowledged in the past that legislation must be updated to keep pace with technology in order to protect the original meaning of the Constitution. In 1986 it passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Congress thought that provisions such as the “180 day rule” made sense at the time, since most companies didn’t store your email even for six months. (In 1986, most customers downloaded their email to their personal computer, where, by the way, the government agrees it is protected by the Constitution.)

With each passing day, more and more of our personal information, business documents, and communications are stored online. Almost everyone holds years’ worth of email in webmail accounts, along with calendars, private photos, drafts and many other sensitive materials. Unless we ACT NOW to urge Congress to make common sense updates to existing privacy laws, aggressive government prosecutors will try to make the privacy promised in the Fourth Amendment obsolete.

…

The Fourth Amendment allows the government to conduct searches and seize evidence if it can convince a judge it has probable cause that a crime has been committed. These balanced protections have been the framework for legitimate law enforcement since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Ensuring by law that the same protections apply to the Internet doesn’t undermine law enforcement, it strengthens it by providing clarity for officers to do their jobs with integrity.

Remember, these aren’t new rights! We are simply asking for ALL of our personal information to have the SAME Constitutional protections regardless of how we choose to store it. A few courts have already recognized that the Fourth Amendment applies to the cloud, and Congress can stop the DOJ from undermining this growing body of precedent by updating ECPA.

October 4, 1957 to June 20, 1963

42 Million Dead In Bloodiest Black Friday Weekend On Record

The Onion

November 26, 2012

Survivors of the deadly holiday sales event said that while the weekend began as a chance to “get in on some unbeatable post-Thanksgiving deals,” it quickly escalated into a merciless, no-hold-barred fight to the death.

“At some point in time we all stopped caring about the deals and the holiday shopping and were pretty much just out for blood,” said Dana Marshall, 37, a Target shopper who suffered seven broken ribs and a cracked sternum while fighting two other customers for a discounted Nikon digital camera. “I remember just sitting on top of a woman and smacking her head with a DVD player until her face was completely unrecognizable. I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

The Onion will continue to publish a running list of the Black Friday dead throughout the week.

Ha ha ha.  You are so funny ek.

I am put in mind of a question- you see someone slip on a banana peel and tumble down a flight of stairs doing the most hilarious prat falls you can imagine.  When they land at the bottom they stop in a motionless heap.  You go over to check and find them dead.

Question: When did that stop being funny?

Answer: It never stopped being funny.

Alleged Walmart thief dies after confrontation

WSBTV

Monday, Nov. 26, 2012

According to a police report obtained by Channel 2 Action News, the incident happened at the Walmart on Fairington Road in Lithonia. The police report said that about 1:30 a.m. Sunday, a middle aged man was caught shoplifting two DVD players.

He exited the front door of the store and three employees caught him in the parking lot, where a physical altercation took place while they detained him.

…

The police report said one of those Walmart employees had placed the man in a choke hold, but the cause and manner of death will be determined by a medical examiner.

(h/t Chris in Paris @ Americablog)

Sales at Nation’s Retailers Fell Short of Expectations in November

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD, The New York Times

Published: November 29, 2012

“The traditional post-Black Friday lull, normally starting the following week, started on … Black Friday,” Mr. Johnson wrote in an e-mail. Activity in shopping malls slowed down starting about noon that Friday, he said, “right about the time the early bird specials expired, and long after the Thanksgiving evening doorbuster items were all sold out – leaving financially stressed consumers with little reason to shop” so many weeks away from Christmas.

Over all, the 16 retailers tracked by Thomson Reuters that reported results Thursday recorded a 1.6 percent increase in sales at stores that were open at least a year. Analysts had expected a 3.3 percent jump.

…

Some shoppers said the deals this year were not good enough to get them to buy. “We looked through the ads and didn’t see anything we really wanted,” said Lisa Apple, 46, who was shopping in Columbus, Ohio, on Black Friday. “The good deals were on TVs, but how many TVs do you need?”

Another shopper, Laura Schimpf, 32, who lives in Delaware, Ohio, and works for the state’s government, agreed. “The deals don’t seem too good. We really had to hunt for good ones. I’ve been looking online for three weeks,” she said.

Retailers report weak sales gains for November, hurt by Superstorm Sandy early in the month

By Associated Press

Nov 29, 2012 09:17 PM EST

Meanwhile, department store chains Macy’s and Nordstrom Inc. reported their first monthly sales drops since late 2009 when the U.S. economy was just coming out of the Great Recession.

Nordstrom recorded a 1.1 percent decline in November, blaming the weakness not only on Sandy but also on tepid customer response to its semi-annual sales in the first half of the month. Nordstrom also said customers continue to prefer fashion and newness over bargains, which has made its clearance sales less enticing. The November figure was Nodstrom’s first monthly decline since September 2009 when it had a 2.4 percent drop.

Macy’s revenue at stores open at least a year fell 0.7 percent in November, compared with the 1.5 percent increase analysts expected. It was Macy’s first monthly sales drop since November 2009 when it recorded a 6.1 percent decline.

…

Perhaps most surprisingly, Target reported that revenue at stores opened at least a year fell 1 percent, well below the 2.1 percent increase that Wall Street was anticipating.

…

Analysts were puzzled by Target’s disappointing sales performance in November. Earlier this month, the no. 2 discounter behind Wal-Mart had issued a profit outlook for the holiday quarter that beat analysts’ estimates. The chain also opened its doors at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving, three hours earlier than a year ago.

Given the tough spending climate, Brian Sozzi, chief equities analyst at NBG Productions, said: “Not everyone is going to win.”

Retailers’ Thanksgiving Deals Cut Black Friday Sales

By Sapna Maheshwari & Matt Townsend, Bloomberg News

Nov 25, 2012 1:41 PM ET

Karen Carlow, a 57-year-old from Coventry, Rhode Island, said the damage caused by superstorm Sandy made her “think more about what other people lost.” Carlow said in an interview at the Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut, that she was less willing to make extravagant purchases this year.

Others are spending carefully as the unemployment rate, while down from almost 9 percent a year ago, remains above 7 percent. Deb Bettini, 56, plans to spend about $300 on holiday gifts, about the same as last year and mostly in the form of gift cards to retailers such as Lowe’s Cos. and Panera Bread Co., she said said yesterday after spending $27.04 on pajamas and socks at a Roses discount store in Reidsville, North Carolina.

“There is a lot of belt-tightening by companies going on and people are still losing their jobs,” said Bettini, who with her husband, Randy, raises grapes, mushrooms and vegetables on a family farm. They also plan to give gift baskets with homemade cider. “People are trying to get by the best way they can.”

Ho, ho, ho.  Merry ek’smas.