The Road to Serfdom ?

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton suggests that the government should temporarily take control of BP.  Rosie O'Donnell & others (sign the petition?) want to seize BP altogether.  Well, Rosie ain't nobody, but the growing sentiment is scary.  Have they read The Road to Serfdom?  Likely no.

problems with public option

The proposed healthcare reform bill will penalize the current insurance companies with $67 Billion in taxes every year.   Is this true?  Then how will a public option plan be fair?  And won't that encourage companies to become self insured?

Also, will the public option employees be federal employees?  If so, will they be under a different plan?  In the private insurance market, those employees are invariably insured by the company they work for and so have a vested interest in being fair and keeping information private.

Roman Polanski

Some folks are ready to forgive Roman Polanski.  ("I don't think it was rape-rape." -Whoopi Goldberg)  Have they read the transcript of the victim's 1977 grand jury testimony? (warning: explicit content)

Mohammed Zazi

We should all have this information stored on our harddrives.

What is the TSA for?

"What is the purpose of security theatre at airports? To catch stupid terrorists?"

Good post @ POSIWID

My opinion, the TSA's purpose is the TSA, that is, self-perpetuation. I like the idea that trains are cheaper because it makes sense. There is a lot less labor involved and if the rights-of-way are already owned by the railroads, the capital expenses should be low.

Naked Shorts & Swaps

It's the naked short selling and the naked credit default swaps that caused the problem. This is gambling, no more, but less because the bond failures credit default swaps cover (insure) are not random as a roll of the dice or automobile accidents since the bonds were aggregates of mortgages where the failures are related to increasing interest rates or impending balloon payments. Naked in this sense means that you are buying insurance (default swaps) or shorting something you don't even own. Easy solution: if you make a claim for a bond failure, you should have to surrender the bond. AIG sold more credit default swaps than they could afford--there is no reserve requirement for credit default swaps (otherwise they would call it insurance). When we give money to AIG, we are paying off a bookie's gambling debts.

See our volcano

And fetch them, too. Here's a script I wrote to fetch the pictures... You can run it every day and it fetch only the new ones.

---

#!/bin/bash



page=http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/MSH/Images/MSH04/

ddir="/Pictures/Desktop Pictures/Volcano/"



for url in $(curl $page | sed -n 's/^\[large size\].*/\1/p')

do

  fname=${ddir}$(basename $url)

  if [ ! -f "$fname" ] 

  then

    echo $fname

    curl $url -o "$fname"

  fi

done  



page=ftp://ftpext.usgs.gov/pub/wr/wa/vancouver/MSH_Images/



for url in $(curl $page | awk '{f = substr($9,1,length($9)-1); printf "%s\n",f; }')

do

  fname=${ddir}${url}

  if [ ! -f "$fname" ]

  then

    url="$page$url"

    echo $fname

    curl $url -o "$fname"

  fi

done

---

Well, I hope you get the idea. It seems to get messed up in the posting.