In celebration of autumn

From PartiallyClips - a Webcomic for Grownups, now easily accessible from over there on the right.

Dollar goin' doooown

An economist, from the Northern Trust, predicted in July (quote below) that the US dollar will fall precipitously propelling us into a serious recession if Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae fail and must be bailed out by the US Government.

Now it looks like that has happened.
Fannie and Freddie have 233 Billion of debt that no one will touch, except us, dear reader, the US taxpayers. Thus, they're toast; we're all toast. Let's be toast together!

Our risk case scenario is that the U.S. dollar begins to fall precipitously coinciding with a rise
in Treasury bond yields. U.S. inflation does not moderate because of the depreciation in the
dollar. As a result, the Federal Reserve is forced to raise the funds rate even in the face of a
rising U.S. unemployment rate. This would be “checkmate” for the U.S. economy, turning a
relatively mild recession into a severe one. Why might the dollar dive? Because the U.S.
Treasury is forced to issue more debt in order to recapitalize either Fannie/Freddie/ the Federal
Home Loan Bank System/FDIC, and the rest of the world balks at being the buyer of last
resort for U.S. government debt. As this is being written on Friday, July 11, a hint of this is
happening. Rumors are swirling that the U.S. Treasury will have to recapitalize Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac. Rather than resulting in the usual flight-to-quality bid for U.S. Treasury
securities, yields on Treasury coupon securities are rising and the dollar is falling. Another
factor that could precipitate a further sharp decline in the dollar might be the severing of the
pegs that foreign monetary authorities have maintained between their currencies and the U.S.
dollar. The byproduct of these pegs has been upward pressure on the inflation rates in these
foreign economies. If these monetary authorities can no longer tolerate this imported inflation
and sever their currency pegs to the dollar, the dollar would likely go into a tailspin.

Northern Trust prediction of US economy, July, 2008

So where did "Stairway" come from, you ask?

Davey Graham, English Folkie -- 1959

"She was a wild thing, fine as a bee's wing...."

Anne Briggs--Blackwaterside.



One of the most beautiful voices you will ever hear. She stopped singing when still very young, worked as a construction worker, disappeared from view.... Jimmy Page noticed her at some point, though, crediting himself with this song, cleverly retitled "Black Mountain Side."

McCain can't tell fiction from reality. Really.

What we need as the president of the "free" world.

On Saturday, Aug. 16th, he recited a section from a book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The cross in the Dirt," as if it had happened to him as a POW in Viet Nam. Great. What other fantasies does he clutch lovingly to his chest?

CA Prop. 8, Smiths version: Panic on the streets of Salt Lake

Panic on the streets of Provo, I wonder to myself, could life ever be the same again?

It's goin' down down down. Prop. 8 forbids same sex marriages. Californians think such a proposition is silly, as do all right thinking people.

The Field Poll found that 51 percent of likely voters say they would vote against Proposition 8, while 42 percent say they would vote for it.

The poll shows a turnaround from 2000, when 61 percent of voters cast ballots in favor Proposition 22, which strengthened the state's 1978 one-man, one-woman marriage law with the words "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

A topical song, considering the Patriot Act, etc.

Plus, us old farts may remember it dimly from our youth. On only a slightly more serious note, I think Paul Simon; make that I KNOW Paul Simon has never had a harmonizer as beautiful as Art Garfunkel. I want to hate this, but cannot.

One of the multitudinous perils of being both an idiot and old.

Dad Left His "A" Game Somewhere in the Eighties

Girl #1: Okay, so you know how my dad asked me if I wanted to see Counting Crows and Maroon 5 last week?
Girl #2: Yeah, what the hell was he thinking?
Girl #1: I dunno man, but today he asked me if I wanted to see Rush.
Girl #2: Dude, what the fuck?
Girl #1: Well in his defense, he thought they were Journey.

--Pizzeria Uno, South Street Seaport

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/index-6.html
Journey? The feeling of unearned but blissful and sanctimonious superiority is almost a reason to live.

(Edited, unsucessfully, to give the illusion that I am not 'and idiot.')

Pretty music for a Friday--but listen to the Punk first or you are so not punk rock and you suck.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim. Listen, take careful emo fashion notes, and worship. Or MORE PUNK! I AM NOT KIDDING!

Punk Friday!

First in a new series!

Watch, friends, romans, pirates, hatters, cartwrights, countrymen/wymmen

x-ray Spex in that perfect moment just before they really understood how to play...



Watch watch watch, though, I confess, no cephalpod-human romance; but surely there are other interests in your sad, lonely lives --woops, I may be projecting

much tentacled luuv

Djinn

McCain--adulterer, spoiled baby, bully, rich kid, war-hungry bad guy

Dr evil without the cute nickname.

http://phoenixnewtimes.com/content/printVersion/848709

He ditched his first wife, who waited for him and raised his children while he was a POW, for a 25 year old billionaire heiress. But it's worse. He left wife number 1 after she had an auto accident which left her with a limp and noticeably heavier to moved in with wife number 2, 25 and an heiress, 9 months prior to the divorce. But not to worry. It appears that Cindy, wife number 1, was well paid to take the fall.

McCain did not sue his wife for divorce until Feb. 19, 1980, and he wrote in his court petition that he and his wife had "cohabited" until Jan. 7 of that year -- or for the first nine months of his relationship with Hensley.

Although McCain suggested in his autobiography that months passed between his divorce and remarriage, the divorce was granted April 2, 1980, and he wed Hensley in a private ceremony five weeks later. McCain obtained an Arizona marriage license on March 6, 1980, while still legally married to his first wife.

From the LA Times

Remind me again what we're screaming aboui John Edwards about? Did Mr. Edwards cruelly dump Elizabeth? I think not.

Campaign finance reformer? Nah. He's a crook and got away with it.

McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981.[8] Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in lawful[14] political contributions from Keating and his associates.[15] In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.[6][

From Wikipedia

The first in which may be a series.

Another Utahn

Let me present Dr. Ronald Chevalier! Hi! He's so... hot, a "Cluster Award" winner, and brings us celestial greetings! Not to mention valuable relaxating techniques and fresh cream. What more does a girl need?

No one knows where the anthrax goes.

Esp. not the FBI.

The Guardian writes about the FBI:

The Bureau is a fitting faith-based institution for the times. It has a definite and distinctive modus operandi: to decide upon unlikely suspects and then to pursue them with an unshakeable conviction of guilt regardless of the failure to win conviction. In a sadistic form of barratry, the Bureau treats each failure to secure a conviction as an opportunity to raise new and ancillary charges and all the time leaks to reporters in a way that would in most common law jurisdictions have the judge throwing the case out.

Plus more info from CargoCult with fun scientific spore details.

The only likely suspects are the ones the FBI has avoided: Dugway Utah and Battelle Memorial in West Jefferson Ohio. They had the means (they'd made the stuff before) and the motive (massive Project Bioshield contracts and expansion of the U.S. biowarfare complex).

Wall Street Journal Editorial says Ivins wasn't the Anthrax killer; and that the weaponized anthrax couldn't have been created in Ivins' lab.

Anthrax from Utah???? Pay no attention to the man splayed out in front of the curtain.

Looks like the Anthrax came from Utah. Bruce Ivins worked at Ft. Detrick, where the Anthrax was liquid, not powdered. We hounded an innocent man to death.

Knight Ridder Washington Bureau
December 21, 2001, Friday

WASHINGTON _ The investigation into the anthrax attacks on America keeps leading federal agents to a U.S. Army research center in the Utah desert, officials familiar with the investigation told Knight Ridder on Thursday.

...Scientists and law enforcement officials close to the investigation told Knight Ridder that the refined powder used in the anthrax attacks bears striking similarities to U.S. military grade anthrax manufactured at Dugway.

Investigators are looking at two pieces of evidence: the precise genetic fingerprints of the anthrax mailed to locations in Florida, Washington and New York, and its highly concentrated physical qualities.

The anthrax in the letters was the Ames strain, used by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Md. Caree Vander-Linden, an Army spokeswoman, said Fort Detrick has provided the strain to five places: Porton Down, a secret military research center in England; Dugway Proving Ground; Defence Research Establishment in Suffield, Canada; Battelle Memorial Institute, a research facility in Columbus, Ohio, and the University of New Mexico.

The Fort Detrick institute, said Vander-Linden in a written statement, "does not use dry powder preparations of anthrax. It uses liquid preparations of anthrax. Neither the skills nor the laboratory equipment required to make finely milled dry powdered anthrax are available at USAMRIID."

The FBI destroyed the strain, Ames, of anthrax that had been mailed, making it impossible to accurately match. They steamed it.

It's from Utah, baybee.

All links found in the comments at Glenn Greenwald's superb Salon blog. The commenter for the first one is named CargoCult.

The LA Times provides inadvertant collaboration. From commenter Geewhiz.

New Scientist magazine posted a story in May 2002 that reports the Institute for Genomic Research, and a team at the University of Northern Arizona found the attack strain, derived from the first victim, Roebert Stevens, "identical" to the Ames reference strains they received from USAMRIID, Dugway, and from a UK biodefense lab at Porton Down. The UK strain was non-pathogenic. The link to that article is: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2265

And I have also read, but lost the link, that Battelle after destroying the first sample in a steam autoclave, received a second sample, analyzed it, and confirmed what TIGR and UNA determined, that the attack strain was identical to the Ames reference strains they were looking at. Willman is not clear about what he means by forensic analysis "long posed a challenge..." to the FBI. They had multiple labs telling them in early 2002 that the DNA sequences of the attack strain and the Ames reference strains were identical. And Shane's article in the Sun points out that as many as 50 labs worldwide may have had cultures of the Ames strain. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1212-01.htm

From sdemetri, same Glenn Greenwald letters section.


Plus, read extra fun about how a single woman with almost experience is making all of the psychopathic comments about Dr. Ivins.

And even stranger, the FBI interviewed people from Ivins' home town under the pretense that he had faked his own death.

Magical Snakes, Octopuses (Octopi?, Octopod?), Devendra, and Fate.

What does a princess say when her demigod fails to return? We now know....

"Where are you, my ratty-assed compadre?"

This video has everything, Bollywood in Spanish, Devendra Banhart in a very low-cut sarong and bonus arms, Natalie Portman catching on fire, interspecies romance, and advice on what to say when meeting up with the goddess of destruction--"I love your dress, who makes it?" You can thank me later.

Edited for all the usual problems, grammatical errors, fury of the gods, etc.