Recovery: Housing Market Plunge Worse Than in Great Depression
January 17th, 2011Via: CBS News:
Home prices fell for the 53rd straight month in November, taking the decline past that of the Great Depression for the first time in the prolonged housing slump, according to Zillow.com.
Prices have fallen 26 percent since their peak in 2006, exceeding the 25.9 percent drop registered in the five years between 1928 and 1933, the housing data company reports.
The word comes on the heels of figures showing banks repossessed more than one million homes in the U.S. last year — and they’re expected to take back even more this year.
MLK Photographer Was FBI Asset
January 17th, 2011Via: Seattle Times:
That photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. riding one of the first desegregated buses in Montgomery, Ala.? He took it. The well-known image of black sanitation workers carrying “I Am A Man” signs in Memphis? His. He was the only photojournalist to document the entire trial in the murder of Emmett Till, and he was there in Room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel, King’s room, on the night he was assassinated.
But now an unsettling asterisk must be added to the legacy of Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated photographers of the civil-rights era: He was a paid FBI informant.
On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two FBI agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil-rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the “Original Civil Rights Photographer,” famous in part for the trust he had engendered among high-ranking civil-rights leaders, including King.
Power Out
January 17th, 2011The electricity just cut out. I think my netbook is charged. I’ll try to do some updates.
Venezuela Oil Reserves Surpass Saudi Arabia’s?
January 16th, 2011Via: Reuters / CNBC:
Venezuela has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world leader in oil reserves with certified deposits leaping to 297 billion barrels at the end of 2010, President Hugo Chavez’s government said Saturday.
Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez told Reuters that the new reserves, which pushed the total 41 percent higher than the previous year, were booked in the South American OPEC member’s vast Orinoco extra heavy crude belt.
A jubilant Chavez told parliament that Venezuela’s reserves now surpassed those of Saudi Arabia.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science
January 16th, 2011Please click through and read the whole thing.
Via: The Atlantic:
Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.
…
80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.
…
…we expect more of scientists, and especially of medical scientists, given that we believe we are staking our lives on their results. The public hardly recognizes how bad a bet this is.
Research Credit: latincognito
New York Times on Stuxnet: Israelis Tested it at Dimona, Developed with Help from Siemens, Worm Sends Fake Data to Plant Operators Indicating Normal Centrifuge Operations as the Machines Destroy Themselves
January 16th, 2011Via: New York Times:
The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.
Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.
Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.
“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”
…
In early 2008 the German company Siemens cooperated with one of the United States’ premier national laboratories, in Idaho, to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world — and that American intelligence agencies have identified as key equipment in Iran’s enrichment facilities.
Siemens says that program was part of routine efforts to secure its products against cyberattacks. Nonetheless, it gave the Idaho National Laboratory — which is part of the Energy Department, responsible for America’s nuclear arms — the chance to identify well-hidden holes in the Siemens systems that were exploited the next year by Stuxnet.
The worm itself now appears to have included two major components. One was designed to send Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning wildly out of control. Another seems right out of the movies: The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing themselves apart.
Third-Largest Maker of Solar Panels in the U.S. Moves Factory to China
January 16th, 2011
Via: New York Times:
Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.
But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.
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Although solar energy still accounts for only a tiny fraction of American power production, declining prices and concerns about global warming give solar power a prominent place in United States plans for a clean energy future — even if critics say the federal government is still not doing enough to foster its adoption.
Beyond the issues of trade and jobs, solar power experts see broader implications. They say that after many years of relying on unstable governments in the Middle East for oil, the United States now looks likely to rely on China to tap energy from the sun.
Blogger Who Opposed Congressman Gets Visit from FBI and Sheriff
January 15th, 2011Via: KSPR:
A local blogger who was critical of Rep. Billy Long during last year’s congressional campaign has been interviewed by the FBI about his encounters with the congressman.
Clay Bowler, who lives in Christian County, says he was shocked to find an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation at his doorstep. Accompanying the agent was Greene County Sheriff Jim Arnott.
The agent asked Bowler if he was a threat to Long, a notion Bowler finds laughable.
“I’m not a threat to Billy Long,” Bowler said Thursday. “I find the whole thought very funny, because I’m such an advocate for constitutional rights that I would never do anything that would put in jeopardy those constitutional rights like the Second Amendment.”
Bowler published a blog in 2010 — Long Is Wrong — and said he campaigned against Long because he didn’t think the Springfield businessman would be a good representative for southwest Missouri. Bowler took down the site after the November election, when Long defeated Democrat Scott Eckersley to replace outgoing Rep. Roy Blunt.
Bowler acknowledges confronting Long at some campaign events, but says he did not threaten Long.
Do I Suggest Opening an Account with the Bank of China?
January 15th, 2011WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
The Bank of China is now allowing Americans to open yuan denominated accounts out of its New York and Los Angeles branches. Over email, several people have asked me what I think about this.
I think that keeping some portion of one’s savings in yuan makes A LOT of financial sense. The yuan is not likely to decrease significantly against the dollar. Rather, the concern among the Chinese is that, if it was allowed to fluctuate on a free-market basis, it would increase sharply in value against a number of currencies, but especially the dollar. They are keeping a lid on it, for now.
My mantra has always been diversification, diversification, diversification, so, yes, it would probably make good financial sense to park some money there.
Personally, though, I can’t bring myself to do it.
Tiananmen Square
I don’t want to spend a lot of time going through all of the reasons why not. The Chinese regime represents naked, extreme, maniac fascism of the highest order and the largest scale. Let it suffice to say that voluntarily handing over money for deposit with that regime is over the line for me. As it is, no matter how hard my wife and I try, it’s damn near impossible to avoid buying Chinese goods. The other options are to go without the things, which we do, or go with an inferior product that costs more, but that’s not made in China.
Welcome to fiat currency Hell. This is a place where, in an attempt to hold on to more of their hard earned money, well meaning, moral people are calmly considering going to the Bank of China with their savings!
Anyway, yes, it probably makes financial sense. No, I’m not doing it.
Tunisians Drive Leader from Power in Mass Uprising
January 15th, 2011I’m not particularly sure of what actually happened in Tunisia. I’d like to think that the Tunisian people won’t go on to “freely elect” some U.S. puppet in the future, after throwing out the dictator who ran the place for over the last 23 years.
Come on, Kevin, why piss on the parade?
At times like this, it’s generally a good idea to keep a copy of The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives by Zbigniew Brzezinski handy:
As the imitation of American ways gradually pervades the world, it creates a more congenial setting for the exercise of the indirect and seemingly consensual American hegemony. And as in the case of the domestic American system, that hegemony involves a complex structure of interlocking institutions and procedures, designed to generate consensus and obscure asymmetries in power and influence. American global supremacy is thus buttressed by an elaborate system of alliances and coalitions that literally span the globe.
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American supremacy has thus produced a new international order that not only replicates but institutionalizes abroad many of the features of the American system itself.
He writes that two steps are required for the, “Formulation of American geostrategy for the long-term management of America’s Eurasian geopolitical interests.”
First, to identify the geostrategically dynamic Eurasian states that have the power to cause a potentially important shift in the international distribution of power and to decipher the central external goals of their respective political elites and the likely consequences of their seeking to attain them; and to pinpoint the geopolitically critical Eurasian states whose location and/or existence have catalytic effects either on the more active geostrategic players or on regional conditions;
Second, to formulate specific U.S. policies to offset, co-opt, and/or control the above, so as to preserve and promote vital U.S. interests, and to conceptualize a more comprehensive geostrategy that establishes on a global scale the interconnection between the more specific U.S. policies.
In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.
In this context, “democracy” needs to be an insidious sham that serves U.S. national interests. It makes for better public relations than ugly dictatorships.
Via: Christian Science Monitor:
A day after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned Arab states that they risked “sinking into the sand” if they did not clean up corruption and quicken their glacial pace of political and economic reform, those sands took one of the Arab world’s long-reigning leaders.
Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Friday fled the North African country he ruled in autocratic fashion for 23 years, chased away by a month of street protests that started in provincial cities but engulfed the capital, Tunis, this week. The country’s prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, assumed temporary power.
In a statement Friday afternoon, President Obama hailed the “courage and dignity of the Tunisian people,” and said the United States joined the rest of the world in “bearing witness to this brave and determined struggle.” He called on the Tunisian government to “hold free and fair elections in the near future that reflect the true will and aspirations of the Tunisian people.”
Few Days Old: Tunisia’s Protest Wave: Where it Comes from and What it Means
