Weekend roundup: sweeping bitesized paranoia!

Scooter Libby & Paris Hilton prove that important people are above the law. Classic pardon fallouts of the past. Keith Olbermann pounds away for impeachment - not bad!



Lead off with the weird news: S&P, Moody's Mask $200 Billion of Subprime Bond Risk:

Bloomberg - Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are masking burgeoning losses in the market for subprime mortgage bonds by failing to cut the credit ratings on about $200 billion of securities backed by home loans.

The highest default rates on home loans in a decade have reduced prices of some bonds backed by mortgages to people with poor or limited credit by more than 50 cents on the dollar and forced New York-based Bear Stearns Cos. to offer $3.2 billion to bail out a money-losing hedge fund. Almost 65 percent of the bonds in indexes that track subprime mortgage debt don't meet the ratings criteria in place when they were sold, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

That may just be the beginning. Downgrades by S&P, Moody's and Fitch would force hundreds of investors to sell holdings, roiling the $800 billion market for securities backed by subprime mortgages and $1 trillion of collateralized debt obligations, the fastest growing part of the financial markets.

``You'll see massive losses from banks, insurance companies and pension managers,'' said Joshua Rosner, a managing director at investment research firm Graham Fisher & Co. in New York and co-author of a study last month that said S&P, Moody's and Fitch understate the risks of subprime mortgage bonds. ``The longer they wait, the worse it's going to be.''

So the big indexes are pretending these bad debts are better, because if they get downgraded all the index funds and everyone else will dump this shit, and its heavily leveraged value will accelerate the system's imminent (and immanent) ruptures. Another fine example of how the market can't self-regulate by downgrading batches of shitty securities. See also: London fund latest subprime victim.

I am putting together a grand index of Minnesota political blogs for the day job so I had the opportunity to cruise the vast rambling digital wasteland (for pay) while everyone else enjoys this nice weather. Here's a good aggregator for your convenience and also MN leftyblogs! Working with Drupal? Read this!

I also went on a wild-goose chase, as the State Department has been unable to get my dad his passport for a good 13-14 weeks. They sent it to a street address in Minneapolis, which I visited (and attempted to find the other three SW / NE / NW quadrant equivalents as well). No luck all around. I am going here in a week.

Catching up with Scott: The Grand Dean of academic conspiracy research is Peter Dale Scott, who has doggedly checked out the 'deep politics' of America, the secret stuff from JFK to Watergate and now 9/11 and Iraq-related matters. He comes from the same cadre as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and the other classic leftie critics. He's saying here that he is not really part of the left anymore, and how the ongoing political battles among nasty factions like the oil lobby are sort of invisible to the Chomsky-style 'structuralists' who apply outdated concepts of the Ruling Class vs. the Oppressed &etc. Here's an 8-minute clip about 9/11, 'left gatekeepers' and Scott's general approach to 9/11 after researching JFK and Iran-Contra for decades.

Scott is one of those guys who insists on looking at individual personalities and all that kind of thing, not just the dull economic structures that old lefties dwell on. Here's another 9 minute clip about Cheney and 9/11, how Cheney sort of seized control of the 'shadow government' on that day. He's connecting 9/11 actions with Oliver North's old weird schemes in the 1980s - FEMA, the National Programs Office, going into the Patriot Act, etc.

Global schemes to divide ethnicities: One interesting neoconservative angle is how you can combine "freedom for small ethnic groups" and "ethnic groups are pawns we play against each other." The dissolution of Yugoslavia & the application of Albanians & the KLA as an (al-Qaeda-linked) anti-Russian proxy force is a pretty good example. Some similar stuff happens around Africa near Rwanda and the Congo. Clearly Elliot "the original pardoned henchman" Abrams' efforts to get the Palestinians fighting amongst each other have gone forth, if somewhat backfired. Many around the mideast suspect that dividing up Iraq was the plan all along. Now the think-tank geniuses are floating plans to partition Iraq, and not surprisingly the Conspiracy Front sees a conspiracy. I accept most of the articles they cite as examples of this policy in Iraq though.

Global schemes to erase North American borders: On the flip side the same guys are crowing about an elite plan called the North American Union, basically an EU + NAFTA style plan including foreign-bank-owned super-tollways. Sounds like a bad idea but I haven't yet discovered where the I-35/Minnesota angle lies. There is also a bunch of paranoia about radical Mexicans trying to dissolve the United States. The mayor of Oklahoma City wants to make Interstate 35 into an instrument of the global scheme. See the video! Along similar lines, the EU inspires nervousness about sovereignty in the UK.

Govt eyes bullet trains for Russia. Trans-Siberian bullet train?

More about the Chinese quality control problem.

Everyone is supposed to dwell on the wisdom of former terrorists working on TV but that's kinda dumb. Yep.

4 4th of July links: from a Canuck, bob someone, Chinese flags, and some more.

Recent Brit terror plotters "known to police and MI5" aka domestic intelligence services. A typical but generally suppressed angle to many, many stories about "terrorists" in the West.

Google gets tied up in SiCKO - definitely a big story this week. More on this later.

iPhone cracked by DVDJon: some work accomplished on unlocking standard iPhone features. Google for more info on that, his blog is called 'so sue me'. Appropriate for the guy that originally came up with key parts of the DVD encryption crack, a great defeater of the DMCA worthy of top accolades.

In Iraq private contractors collect intelligence which of course will tend to create self-sustaining cash&doom loops. Faked evidence of Iranian munitions in Iraq?

The mutually fatal attraction between Israel & the United States. Hard to argue with this. More blather from the establishment. Here's how the Elliot Abrams plan fell apart - thanks McClatchy for "truth to power" (is that a new slogan?)

The WaPo Cheney article series is weird. Authoritarian rhetoric over Cheney.

2008 campaign notes: Peace activist / 2008 Prez candidate Dal Lamagna went to Jordan to talk with the insurgents. A dicey move, but i wonder why it's considered an 'evil' gesture to try to communicate? Paging Habermas... Ron Paul outdraws the regular candidates in Iowa and of course has more cash-on-hand than McCain now. Check out Paul on recapturing independence for the 4th.

Somalia intervention by the U.S. and Ethiopia has backfired - basically another hopeless disaster.

Norm Coleman Stonergate hits the internets all over the place. The Norm Weasel Meter at mnblue.com. More here. The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics has a listing of how marijuana trouble can fuck up your life in different states. Minnesota's in the middle.

Jonathon Sharkey AKA the vampire just filed to run for Prez.

Corn is really a big deal, more than you'd think.

OverheardInMinneapolis.com . Simple eh?

Lifeblogging = people in your head: This Pittsburgh Mac user named Justine elected to basically wear a webcam all day & put her life online via video at tastyblogsnack.com and ijustine.com. Somehow thru this process she gets to fly around and visited Minneapolis for the iPhone release. I am not sure if it is a promotional gig or what. The whole thing is strange but very modern eh? Everyone stumbles into the panopticon - i.e. Little Brother.

How to make some money outta the Internets: This is some stuff I've been looking at for work. It's helpful to anyone though. Check out DoshDosh.com: 7 blogging strategies, 4 reasons to write sweet articles, lazy ways to get content, social proof optimization, direct ad sales, long-tail keywords and search traffic. Google Keyword tool, SEObook keywords, blog niches, Google Suggest, SEOdigger. This page about dealing with Drupal Views and home pages is pretty good stuff.

That's all for now, should provide some interesting material for next few days anywhoo...