Adam Skinner's Bookmarks

Hugh Sunday explains the predators’ techniques in A short rough primer on leveraging and derivatives: “Leveraging means something like this. You sell $10 million in stock. You use this money as the basis to take out a loan so you can buy $100 million in mortgages. Now say you issue mortgage-backed securities based on these and sell them. Now you have a $100 million in cash so you go out and buy more mortgages only this time you use your $100 million to buy a billion dollars of them. You have just leveraged your initial $10 million 100 times.”

Can anyone do this? No. “This works if you, your banks, and the buyers of your paper are all sufficiently greedy. Why would banks loan you $100 million on $10 million collateral? The short answer is they wouldn’t for you or me, but they would and did to financial companies because of the fees and interest they made off of such transactions and because they ‘knew’ those companies were good for it. . . .”

The First Raiders will spend 2009 as the first active-duty military unit attached to the U.S. Northern Command since it was created. They will be based in Fort Stewart, Georgia, and focus primarily on logistics and support for local police and rescue personnel, the Army says.

The plan is drawing skepticism from some observers who are concerned that the unit has been training with equipment generally used in law enforcement, including beanbag bullets, Tasers, spike strips and roadblocks.

New York governor Eliot Spitzer wrote:

Credit, they say, is the lifeblood of the economy, and without credit no one can make a move.

But credit is the lifeblood of the economy only because people are broke. Purchasing power in the U.S. has collapsed, and it is getting worse as the recession which has now begun worsens.

A long term recession and depression are inevitable, and they are expected by those in the know. In fact, there has been a plan in the works for a very long time to bring down the U.S. economy, and it will be happening over the coming months.

This is why the government is also preparing to implement martial law, or something close to it, in case public unrest breaks out. We will likely also see a clampdown on free speech, the right to protest, and use of the internet. Federal facilities are being prepared all around the country to backstop state prisons and local jails that are already bursting at the seams.

What They Tried to Sneak By

At face value, “bailout plan” sounds well and good to those who have no objections to socialist economic policies. Ah, but the plan was not so benign. The law contained the following insidious and downright frightening provision: “Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” Translation: Henry Paulson can do whatever the hell he wants. To a lesser extent, so can his agency at its “discretion.” But beware-discretion is soon to be the new fascism.

"You're
being detained by the Department of Homeland Security," the
woman snapped.

"Am
I under arrest?"

"You're
going to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now." She
didn't say, "or else," but it was implied.

"I
would like to contact an attorney," I said. "I would like
to know what I've been charged with. I would like to see some form of
identification from both of you."

The
two agents exchanged looks.

"I
think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,"
Severe Haircut woman said. "I think you should do that right
now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found
you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack
this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things
don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can
be very, very sorry. Now, what is this for?"

"You
think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!"

"Just
the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic
kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly
stuff on the public Internet."

"I
would like to speak to an attorney," I said.

Severe
haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. "You're under the
mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a
crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a
potential enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If
I were you, I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that
you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark
holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes,
holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me
young man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files
in its memory. I want you to account for yourself: why were you out
on the street? What do you know about the attack on this city?"

The Glove works by cooling the body from inside out, rather than conventional approaches that cool from outside in. The device creates an airtight seal around the wrist, pulls blood into the palm of the hand and cools it before returning it to the heart and to overheated muscles and organs. The palm is the ideal place for rapid cooling because blood flow increases to the hands (and feet and face) as body temperature rises.

"These are natural mammalian radiators," said Dennis Grahn, who invented the device with Stanford colleague Craig Heller.

Their first "aha" moment in cooling came after they talked their assistant Vinh Cao into doing his regular workouts in the lab instead of at the gym. His routine included 100 pull-ups. One day, Grahn and Heller started using an early version of the Glove to cool him for 3 minutes between rounds of pull-ups. They saw that with the cooling, his 11th round of pull-ups was as strong as his first. Within six weeks of training with the cooling breaks, Cao did 180 pull-ups a session. Six weeks later, he went from 180 to 616.

"I'll never forget the number 616," said Heller. "He tripled his capacity in six weeks. We were like, 'Wait a minute, this is crazy!' "