The world's cuddliest ex-dentist, Ayman Al-Zawahiri has been giving a eulogy for Osama bin Laden:
"People don't know that this man was tender, gentle, kind, with refined feelings, even when life was hard," Zawahiri says in the video, dressed in a white robe and turban and sitting in front of a green curtain.
We could also add "open minded" to that list of virtues, at least as of May 2nd.
Rock god Gene Simmons isn't impressed with a lot of folks in the debt crisis but unlike practically everyone else opining in public, he doesn't give a free pass to the victims:
It's so simple. If you spend more than you tax, you're out of business. MPs don't know what they're talking about.
And we created this miserable economic state. It's like fat people who think it's the bakery's fault they got fat.
No, you kept going in there and you kept eating cake. It's not the bakery's responsibility to tell you to slow down.
He's writing in the Sun, of all places. I can't imagine any article better suited to make Polly Toynbee spontaneously combust. Do go and read the whole thing (it's the Sun, it's not like there's a lot of text) especially his closing argument.
John Hempton at Bronte Capital reckons that Ben Bernanke needs a Hawaiian shirt and marijuana pipe. I'm not entirely convinced, but he makes a compelling case. If the USA wants to stick the Chinese with at least some of their financial losses in the next 5-10 years, he contends that you need to make the American people believe that Bernanke can't be trusted with their money, and they should spend it now before inflation renders it value-less.
Personally, I'd get Bernanke elected to the Senate, maybe in a Louisiana or Illinois seat. That should do the trick.
Jefferson Country, AL votes for bankruptcy after going $4.2bn in the hole, including $3.1bn for a new sewer system.
Everyone wants to know - how do you spend $3bn on a sewer system? Anyone? Bueller?
Expect some searching questions (and court actions) directed at JP Morgan's Muni department in the near future... Also expect some searching questions to be asked about who is exposed to muni default. Don't forget that state employees' pensions are paid out of county operating funds, not from purchased annuities - there's no magic protected pot of money. When the county runs out of money, its pensioners get to stand in line for the remnants.
The Streetwise Professor takes on Zero Hedge today, comparing and contrasting it with Russia Today (an obvious and up-front bit of Kremlin propagandising, albeit with substantially more appealing presenters than classic Soviet TV) and asking whether ZH's Daniel Ivandjiiski is nothing but a slightly covert Kremlin operative. It's an interesting question.
My feelings on the matter are complicated. Certainly there are any number of commentators on Zero Hedge who are outright deranged, but this goes for pretty much any blog on the Net so we shouldn't condemn them for that. Heck, you get equally deranged commentators on The Guardian's Comment Is Free, would you argue that this is a hotbed of - oh, wait, bad example. There's certainly a good range of contempt for the financial establishment, banks, governments and personalities therein, but that is also pretty well replicated worldwide; Goldman Sachs 666 for instance could not be said to be a fair and balanced view of the Vampire Squid. Indeed, you'd be hard to find a blog sympathetic to most of the financial establishment.
As with The Professor, I find ZH to be an OK news aggregator, and it has generated some interesting leads I've used to dig around and produce blogs in the past. The charts don't lie - at least, I assume they've not been photoshopped (hello, Adobe lawyers! trademarked term in common use, bite me!). The editorials and commentators seem to be rather dedicated chartists, an inclination which I personally regard as somewhat demented, and indeed there are conspiratorial hints in some articles (they're out to punish the shorts! gold margins going up shows that the CME is being instructed to punish gold bugs!) which don't really pass a sniff test; however, it seems a little thin to hang Daniel as a paid hater of Western capitalism. After all, he used to make a living from it.
That said, the commentators on the Professor's article seem so rabidly pro-Russian that he almost must be onto something - either that, or the SVR want us to believe that he is. Who knows?
The UK Financial Services Authority has been on the receiving end of a fair amount of abuse over the past few years, much of it justified. Being a kind-hearted soul, I have a modest proposal to get my mate Hector back in the good books of the public and government.
You may be surprised to learn that the strict standards in the railway safety industry (if your company is on a contract for Network Rail, they can turn up at your workplace and demand you submit to drug or alcohol testing) do not apply for FSA-registered individuals. Banks may tell their FSA-registered employees that they are subject to random drug or alcohol tests, but I assure you that this doesn't happen in practice. Heck, why would it? If as a bank you feel you can adequately monitor an individual's trading performance, why would you want to rock the boat by testing that employee unless he's making a loss and you're looking for additional grounds to fire him?
So let's have the FSA declare that a random drug and alcohol testing regime will apply for FSA-registered individuals at any UK-located branch of a financial institution with over 25 registered employees in that location, from Jan 1st 2012. The testing unit turns up having given 1 hour notice and get witnessed (yes, watched wizzes) pee samples from randomly selected 2% of the registered employees. The employer gets the results. Anyone with significant intoxicant samples goes straight to a board where they can appeal the pending loss of their FSA registration. Operating costs come out of existing FSA operational funds, so no additional operating costs to existing firms with unintoxicated employees.
The FSA gets to do something useful and popular; the programme gives a significant boost to the UK drug testing industry in time for other events; the government gets to point at something concrete being done to counter the drug-addled dipshits depicted in popular culture renditions of the City; the City gets something to point to and deflect such future criticism of their employees. What's not to like?
[It may strike the reader as incongruous that we don't similarly test Civil Service and Government members engaged in decision making of equal import compared to the railway and financial services domains. Your correspondent can only invite the reader to draw the appropriate inference for future action.]
Popular Science has an entertaining plot of rising computing power which is really good from the 1930s thru 1990 or so, but at that point misses the point entirely. It plots current day desktop computing at 500 billion (5 x 10^11) operations/sec for $2000 (about right for a 3 GHz 8-core superscalar desktop) and then at 8.5 x 10^15 ops/sec the Japanese K Computer for a cool $1.25 bn. What it omits is the ease of networking tens of thousands of desktops together in datacenters to form distributed computing systems such as Amazon's EC2 cloud or Google's Skynet (yes, they don't call it that officially but I think we all know where this is headed).
If I put together 20k desktops I'd get a raw 1 x 10^16 ops/sec for a mere $60mm (adding 50% for networking gear and datacenter-level power, cooling which seems about right). You'll note that this is more computing power than the K Computer for 5% of the cost. That is the real triumph of modern day computing - the software and networking to harness efficiently the computing potential of thousands of commodity hardware PCs. The challenge now is to shape problems in a way that such machines can help us solve them.
[For readers expecting another Greek-related tirade, my apologies - normal service will resume shortly.]
When the Greek PM decides to replace the heads of all three armed services plus the National Defence Force, eyebrows may reasonably be raised. Since this is less than 24 hours after he announced a national referendum on the Eurozone deal, followed by the opposition forcing him into a confidence vote on Friday, a tad more concern may be warranted.
As Kate of Small Dead Animals says, "It's Probably Nothing...."
It seems that Argentina is introducing exchange controls in apparent anticipation of a default. No doubt Papandreou is flying over observers...
