Posts from — August 2007

Dean is set to slam into the Antilles as a Cat 2 with 95 mph winds around dawn tomorrow. The center in now set to hit Martinique with Dominica to the north also affected, but it is moving at a brisk 25 mph to the west. The wind map indicates is still has a tight core, so the hurricane force winds do not extend out very far.

Before Reagan there were all kinds of pesky rules around that said things like: banks are banks; insurance companies are insurance companies; stock brokerages are stock brokerages. Obviously such restrictive rules prevented American business from prospering, so they were done away with and with a general “who cares” attitude about regulations we saw wonders like the Resolution Trust bailout of savings & loans, the Enron accounting frauds [with multiple clones], and all kinds of good things like soaring salaries for CEOs and outsourcing for the rank and file after the pension fund was looted.

Atrios and Whig provide some basic background of what’s going on, and R. Neal covers the impact on the South.

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Everyone is now aware of the meltdown in the housing market and the associated slump in the stock market as the number of foreclosures soar and the mortgage lenders experience the Coriolis effect associated with sanitary drains.

According to Southwest Florida’s Herald Tribune people think Sarasota is the drain:

SARASOTA — Readers of the famously salmon-sheeted Financial Times woke up Friday morning to a story linking the global credit crunch and stock market dip to the sandy shores of Southwest Florida.

“Like the proverbial butterfly that flaps its wings and sets off a tidal wave on the other side of the world, Sarasota, Florida is the centre of the U.S. housing bust that sent shockwaves through global markets,” said the London-based newspaper’s story by Eoin Callan.

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Blogiversaries™:

• Ellroon at Rant From The Rookery – one year
• Whig at Cannablog – one year
• Quiddity at Uggabugga – five years

And Cookie Jill at skippy the bush kangaroo wrote the 13 millionth comment on dKOS.

Who says nothing ever happens in August.

Hurricane Dean is not simply the first hurricane of the season, it is on track to become a major hurricane. It will smack into the Lesser Antilles around Dominica as a Cat 2 Friday morning and continue to strengthen as it crosses the Caribbean. It threatens the south coast of Hispaniola and will probably be a Cat 3 at Jamaica. On the current track it will be a Cat 4 smashing into the Yucatan Peninsula around Cozumel and exit into the Gulf as a Cat 1 hurricane.

Erin came ashore around Lamar, Texas and is moving to the northwest as a rain event, and Flossie losing strength in the cooler waters west of Hawaii.

It occurs to me that if the US declares Iranian special forces terrorists, another country is then free to call US special forces terrorists.  It’s like torture – if the US does it, then every one else can do it without penalty using the US as their example.

They are describing America for the rest of the world and the result is not pretty.

Update: Local officials in Nineveh province now put the death toll at 500. There are only an estimated 100,000 Yazidi in Iraq.

Juan Cole notes that the series of car bombs that killed 200 in northern Iraq was a continuation of the attempts to eliminate minority populations. This time the Yazidi, a Kurdish religious sect, were the targets. In July it was Shi’ia Turkmen.

The Sunni Arabs want to force all other groups out of the area. The “noise” about al Qaeda in Iraq is is the official military agitprop. This is more probably part of the civil war than of the resistance to occupation. This would have happened with or without the US presence or foreign fighters.

Outside of the regular military of Iran is the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, AKA the Revolutionary Guards or Pasdaran. The Special Forces unit of the AGIR is the Quds Force which has an interesting history:

The Quds Force was created during the Iran-Iraq war as a special unit from the broader Pasdaran forces. After the war, Quds Force continued to support the Kurds fighting Saddam Hussein, during the war it had helped the Kurds fight the Iraqi military. The Quds also expanded their operations into other areas, most notably aiding Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance against the Soviets during the Soviet war in Afghanistan and then helping Massoud after the war against Taliban forces. There were also reports of the Quds forces lending support to Muslim Bosnians fighting the Serbs during the Yugoslav wars.

The US supported the Kurds. The US supported the Northern Alliance against the Soviets and the Taliban.

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Via Melissa at Shakesville , Scout at First Draft notes that the Gulf Opportunity Zone (GO Zone) Tax Credits that were sold as an encouragement to investment in rental housing in the areas devastated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita are actually being used in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama, for luxury condominiums rented to people attending the home football games.

Tuscaloosa is 200 miles from the coast and experienced a thunderstorm as the result of Katrina, but that’s where the tax credits are being used.

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Most of you have no idea what it was like connecting to the Source or Compuserv at 110/300/1200 baud. The baud rate is approximately ten times the character rate, so the 110 baud modems actually sent and received information at 10 characters per second.

Trying to work on the ‘Net with an effective throughput of 120 characters per second means that most things time-out before they are finished. You have e-mail, but you really hate the attachments on spam which come down in minutes not milliseconds.

People who are stuck on dial-up today are connected at 56,000 baud, 5,600 characters per second, which makes a lot of sites pretty unusable for them.

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Tropical Storm Flossie had the power sucked out of her by wind shear and cooler water as she was about to beat up on the big island of Hawaii, but they got some rain and 20-foot waves. As a consolation, TBogg reports there was 5.4-magnitude earthquake centered 25 miles south of Hilo.

Tropical Storm Erin seems poised for a Thursday night landfall around the Texas-Mexico border with 50-mph winds and rain.

Tropical Storm Dean is scheduled to be a Cat 1 hurricane when it moves through the lesser Antilles around the island of Dominica on Friday. What it does afterwards is the dependent on how strong the ridge above it is. In any case, the reduced wind shear and warmer water in the Caribbean ensures strengthening, probably to Cat 3 status.

Update: Here’s an example of the truth that half of personal bankruptcies are caused by medical bills, and of that half, three-quarters of the people have insurance. A single mother with health insurance driven into bankruptcy by the bills for cancer treatment.

In a post about Nancy Pelosi coming to Mississippi, Ana Maria noted that in the House: “A subcommittee of and the full Finance Committee have passed the bill that would expand the federal flood insurance program to include wind.”

I’ve been meaning to get back to the insurance industry and this is a good point of entry.

One of the things that early guilds and service organizations provided was a form of social insurance. If you were a member in good standing and fell on hard times, the group offered support. Many of these groups have continued this tradition. This was an extension of family support where one generation supported the next.

The same concept of coming together for mutual support was behind many of the original insurance companies. The premiums were used to pay the losses of members and the funds not needed were invested, often eliminating the need for further premiums. You still see the word “mutual” as part of the name of many of these early companies.

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Update: Bloody Hell! Mattel is recalling 18 million toys world wide for lead paint and pieces that fall off posing a choking hazard.

The Associated Press is reporting that Mattel has another recall pending over toys from China that have lead paint.

Whig notes that CNBC anchor Erin Burnett thinks that lead paint on toys and tainted food from China is fine because it keeps prices low. Somehow I don’t think Mattel, which just took a multi-million dollar hit on the last recall, or the people with poisoned children and/or pets would agree.

A little economic primer that Ms. Burnett and the readers at home can verify for themselves: after Wal-Mart has established its dominance in a market and wiped out the competition, it raises prices. The “every day low prices” scam is only to get you hooked on a store and to take out people who don’t have the deep pockets to compete, which includes the majority of national governments.

Yeah, right, just your average middle-class Americans, the Bushies.

Cécilia Sarkozy is not apt to drop in at a neighbor’s for hotdogs when she avoided most of her husband’s victory celebration. The Times may write Cécilia, you’re breaking all the rules, but it is extremely doubtful that she cares. Her husband is the politician and has obligations, she didn’t agree to anything.

[the first link is to Youtube, if you’re on dial-up]