Federal judge: Nonpartisan elections are unfair to minorities
...A U.S. District Court judge has rejected a challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—filled [sic] when the Department of Justice barred the city of Kinston, N.C. from holding nonpartisan elections—reasoning that lack of access to party affiliation would discriminate against minority voters who otherwise wouldn’t know how to find Democratic candidates on a ballot....
Saturday, December 31, 2011
"Black Swan" Fund Creator Explains Why Central Planning Has Doomed Us All
...Suppressing fire, creating the illusion of fire protection, leads to the wrong kind of growth, which then invites greater destruction. About 100 years ago, the U.S. Forest Service took a zero-tolerance approach to forest fires, stamping them out at the first blaze. Fast forward to 1988 when a massive wildfire at Yellowstone National Park wiped out more than 30 times the acreage of any previously recorded fire....
...Herein are pearls of great wisdom for central bankers today. Central banks are creating a tinderbox by keeping alive many very bad investments, fertilizing them with everything from artificially low interest rates to preferential liquidity to outright securities purchases. As these institutions and instruments overrun the financial landscape, they hamper the economic ecosystem and perpetuate the environment of low growth and high unemployment in which we currently find ourselves....
Why the Left Is Losing the Argument over the Financial Crisis
...Our argument is and has been that the financial crisis would not have occurred but for government housing policy implemented principally through Fannie and Freddie and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Although there were a number of such policies, the most important were the affordable housing requirements first imposed on Fannie and Freddie in 1992 and expanded and tightened by HUD through 2007.
Summarized below are the original numbers we relied on, taken from Fannie and Freddie’s own data and from the views of bank regulators—and now supplemented with additional data from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent complaints against certain officers of Fannie and Freddie. Of particular interest are Fannie and Freddie’s non-prosecution agreements with the SEC, in which they agree with facts that confirm—and in many cases go beyond—our original research concerning the scope of the GSEs’ subprime and Alt-A exposure. These are facts, and Nocera and others who might wish it otherwise should become familiar with them.
For example, in its non-prosecution agreement Freddie agreed that as of June 30, 2008, it had $244 billion in subprime loans, comprising 14 percent of its credit guaranty portfolio, rather than the $6 billion it had previously disclosed. Freddie also agreed that it had $541 billion in reduced documentation loans alone, vastly more than the $190 billion in previously disclosed Alt-A loans which Freddie had said included loans with reduced documentation.
While the SEC documents about $1.03 trillion in previously undisclosed subprime and Alt-A loans in Fannie and Freddie’s credit guaranty portfolios, an estimated $812.8 billion, or about 80 percent, were already accounted for in the totals of Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A exposures included in Pinto’s Forensic Study and Wallison’s Dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
The SEC findings add $219 billion and 1.43 million loans to our original Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A totals, bringing the combined subprime and Alt-A total to $2.041 trillion and 13.37 million loans....
...All told, after adding the SEC’s new data to our original estimates, there were approximately 28 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding on June 30, 2008, before the financial crisis, with a value of approximately $4.8 trillion. This was half of all mortgages in the United States. Of these loans, over 74 percent were on the books of U.S. government agencies and firms subject to government housing finance policies. This shows where the demand for these low quality loans came from. Fannie and Freddie were themselves exposed to more than 13 million subprime or Alt-A loans, or 65 percent of the government total....
...Our argument is and has been that the financial crisis would not have occurred but for government housing policy implemented principally through Fannie and Freddie and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Although there were a number of such policies, the most important were the affordable housing requirements first imposed on Fannie and Freddie in 1992 and expanded and tightened by HUD through 2007.
Summarized below are the original numbers we relied on, taken from Fannie and Freddie’s own data and from the views of bank regulators—and now supplemented with additional data from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent complaints against certain officers of Fannie and Freddie. Of particular interest are Fannie and Freddie’s non-prosecution agreements with the SEC, in which they agree with facts that confirm—and in many cases go beyond—our original research concerning the scope of the GSEs’ subprime and Alt-A exposure. These are facts, and Nocera and others who might wish it otherwise should become familiar with them.
For example, in its non-prosecution agreement Freddie agreed that as of June 30, 2008, it had $244 billion in subprime loans, comprising 14 percent of its credit guaranty portfolio, rather than the $6 billion it had previously disclosed. Freddie also agreed that it had $541 billion in reduced documentation loans alone, vastly more than the $190 billion in previously disclosed Alt-A loans which Freddie had said included loans with reduced documentation.
While the SEC documents about $1.03 trillion in previously undisclosed subprime and Alt-A loans in Fannie and Freddie’s credit guaranty portfolios, an estimated $812.8 billion, or about 80 percent, were already accounted for in the totals of Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A exposures included in Pinto’s Forensic Study and Wallison’s Dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
The SEC findings add $219 billion and 1.43 million loans to our original Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A totals, bringing the combined subprime and Alt-A total to $2.041 trillion and 13.37 million loans....
...All told, after adding the SEC’s new data to our original estimates, there were approximately 28 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding on June 30, 2008, before the financial crisis, with a value of approximately $4.8 trillion. This was half of all mortgages in the United States. Of these loans, over 74 percent were on the books of U.S. government agencies and firms subject to government housing finance policies. This shows where the demand for these low quality loans came from. Fannie and Freddie were themselves exposed to more than 13 million subprime or Alt-A loans, or 65 percent of the government total....
Ron Paul: Drug War In U.S. Has Racist Origins
...The reaction of the American government, and its people, to drug use was -- and still is -- a complex mix of factors, involving lobbying by the medical community, pharmaceutical companies, the alcohol industry, temperance advocates, and religious movements. Historically, the argument has played out -- and continues to play out -- amid a backdrop of racism and class antagonism. Racism and bigotry were generally not the drivers of prohibition movements, but instead were the weapons used by temperance advocates to achieve their ends. The movement to ban alcohol, for instance, gained its strongest adherents without resorting to bigotry, but when World War I broke out, the movement was quick to tie beer and booze to instantly despised German immigrants, pushing the effort over the Constitutional hump....
Saturday, December 24, 2011
"Too Big To Fail" just turned the large banks into GSEs (PDF):
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The [large complex financial institutions (LCFIs)] had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
Left wing hero Paulie Krugnuts even advocated creating a housing bubble for good left-wing economic reasons:
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The [large complex financial institutions (LCFIs)] had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
Left wing hero Paulie Krugnuts even advocated creating a housing bubble for good left-wing economic reasons:
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
Apologists For Communist Totalitarianism: I Hate Those Guys
...No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first....
...The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please.
India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing....
Friday, December 23, 2011
...It brings to mind this quotation by Vaclav Havel:
The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Significant Financial Management and Fiscal Challenges Reflected in the U.S. Government's 2011 Financial Report
WASHINGTON (December 23, 2011) - The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cannot render an opinion on the 2011 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.
As was the case in 2010, the main obstacles to a GAO opinion on the accrual- based consolidated financial statements were: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that made its financial statements unauditable, (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.
While the vast majority of the 24 CFO Act Agencies received unqualified opinions, DOD and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have consistently been unable to receive such audit opinions....
"Black Swan" Fund Creator Explains Why Central Planning Has Doomed Us All
...Suppressing fire, creating the illusion of fire protection, leads to the wrong kind of growth, which then invites greater destruction. About 100 years ago, the U.S. Forest Service took a zero-tolerance approach to forest fires, stamping them out at the first blaze. Fast forward to 1988 when a massive wildfire at Yellowstone National Park wiped out more than 30 times the acreage of any previously recorded fire....
...Herein are pearls of great wisdom for central bankers today. Central banks are creating a tinderbox by keeping alive many very bad investments, fertilizing them with everything from artificially low interest rates to preferential liquidity to outright securities purchases. As these institutions and instruments overrun the financial landscape, they hamper the economic ecosystem and perpetuate the environment of low growth and high unemployment in which we currently find ourselves....
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Scientists mark 1/3 of a century of satellite climate data
..."While [this] warming is noticeable in climate terms, it isn't obvious that it represents an impending disaster," says Christy. "The climate models produce some aspects of the weather reasonably well, but they have yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change in upper air temperatures."...
...How much of the remaining warming is due to natural climate cycles (not including volcanoes) versus humanity's carbon dioxide emissions enhancing Earth's natural greenhouse effect?
"That is the Holy Grail of climatology," says Spencer. "How much of that underlying trend is due to greenhouse gases? While many scientists believe it is almost entirely due to humans, that view cannot be proved scientifically."...
Documents: ATF used "Fast and Furious" to make the case for gun regulations
...In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the "big fish." But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called "gunwalking," and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
ATF officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called "Demand Letter 3". That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or "long guns." Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.
On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:
"Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks." ...
FDR’s Noble Lie
...Most historians when pressed on the matter now grudgingly concede that Roosevelt lied when he told the American people that he would never send their boys to fight into foreign wars, but they excuse his treachery as a “noble lie,” a deception perpetrated against the public by the political elite to achieve a supposed greater good....
...Most historians when pressed on the matter now grudgingly concede that Roosevelt lied when he told the American people that he would never send their boys to fight into foreign wars, but they excuse his treachery as a “noble lie,” a deception perpetrated against the public by the political elite to achieve a supposed greater good....
UK police seize computers of skeptic blogger in England
...UPDATE: I’ve been in contact with Roger (Tallbloke) and he tells me that he is not a suspect, and that they’ll clone his hard drives and return the computers to him....
...UPDATE: I’ve been in contact with Roger (Tallbloke) and he tells me that he is not a suspect, and that they’ll clone his hard drives and return the computers to him....
Wall Street Did It?
...But based on the number of toxic loans in the system in 2008, the government was responsible for not just a simple majority, but more than two-thirds. It's quantifiable — 71% to be exact.... And the remaining 29% of private-label junk was mostly attributable to Countrywide Financial, which was under the heel of HUD and its "fair-lending" edicts....
Fannie Freddie Lawsuit and Risk Arbitrage
...To understand how casual Fannie and Freddie were about credit risk, consider the two types of activity they engage in. One, they buy and pool mortgages, issuing securities backed by these pools, a process called securitization. They’ve been doing this longer and on greater scale than anyone else—by comparison Wall Street was a newcomer to the business.
Two, they buy such securities, whether issued by themselves or others. The lawsuits just filed concern this second type of activity, the purchase of readymade mortgage securities. The main accusation is that materials pertaining to certain securities the defendants sold from 2005 to 2007 contained wrong or deficient information, “unbeknownst” to Fannie and Freddie.
At the time they bought these securities, Fannie and Freddie were competing furiously with the same banks for mortgages to securitize—-and earn fees on. They were buying mortgages as they had for decades, but now they faced growing pressure from banks seeking lucrative securitization business. This led to all-around lowering of underwriting standards and the rise of higher-risk mortgages, the race to the bottom described in Guaranteed to Fail.
Being both suppliers and buyers in the mortgage security market on a gigantic scale, Fannie and Freddie were uniquely positioned. Because they bought mortgages to securitize, they too were lowering standards and taking higher risks. For the reality underlying the securities to be “unbeknownst” to them, they had to willfully avoid knowing it. Even if they did not do the analysis themselves, they could have easily asked for third-party reports—-which existed at the time and are presented as evidence in the cases. That the GSEs were complicit does not exonerate the banks’ shoddy work, but it does show how we got to the current mess.
Fannie and Freddie appeared to mint money because government backing gave them easy and cheap capital, plus they had special tax breaks and low capital requirements. The government guarantee was initially explicit—they were was created as federal bureaucracies, as the “F” in their names indicates. Then it became implicit until the 2008 crisis made it explicit again. It was always assumed. Their extraordinarily low capital requirement meant GSEs leveraged more than adventurous hedge funds.
Lobbying and public relations made sure they retained the full panoply of special privileges. This was managing the political risk, which they appear to have done superbly and still do—-note their victim status in the lawsuits and mainstream media coverage thereof. Ensuring political protection meant that managing credit risk was less crucial....
Should Americans Support the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street?
...The subprime crisis was designed in Washington, not New York. The FHA discouraged down payments (those old fashioned “savings”), pushing them from their traditional level of 20% down to 3% - and at the start of 2008 to 0%. Everyone, regardless of whether they can afford it, should own a home! Don’t save; speculate in the hope that prices will rise!
Government sponsored enterprises Fannie and Freddie “securitized” home loans under congressional mandates to direct more funds to lower incomes. In 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development directed Fannie and Freddie to target 42% of financing to borrowers with incomes below the median in their areas, going to 50% in 2000 and 52% in 2005. Such funding was directed to financing even mobile homes, a move lauded by Rep. Barney Frank as “one of the most important things to happen to make home ownership affordable to people who might otherwise be shut out of the market.” Also, “special affordable” loans were created, with HUD directing Fannie and Freddie to target 12% of financing to borrowers earning less than 60% of the median income, a percentage that rose to 20% in 2000, then 22% in 2005. That percentage was scheduled to go to 28% in 2008....
To promote the global warming scare, Jane Lubchenco's NOAA continuously changes past temperature records to create fake warming - on a monthly basis
Climategate Bombshell: Did U.S. Gov't Help Hide Climate Data?
...Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection -- and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data.
“Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,” Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.
Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data "has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
A third email from Jones written in 2007 echoes the idea: "They are happy with me not passing on the station data," he wrote....
Climategate Bombshell: Did U.S. Gov't Help Hide Climate Data?
...Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection -- and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data.
“Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,” Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.
Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data "has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
A third email from Jones written in 2007 echoes the idea: "They are happy with me not passing on the station data," he wrote....
Occupy Group Faults Church, a Onetime Ally
...“We need more; you have more,” one protester, Amin Husain, 36, told a Trinity official on Thursday, during an impromptu sidewalk exchange between clergy members and demonstrators. “We are coming to you for sanctuary.”...
...“We need more; you have more,” one protester, Amin Husain, 36, told a Trinity official on Thursday, during an impromptu sidewalk exchange between clergy members and demonstrators. “We are coming to you for sanctuary.”...
‘Morning Joe’: ‘The press was in the tank for Obama’ [VIDEO]
...Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown agreed with Scarborough’s statement, explaining it partly as the establishment media’s fatigue with the whole Clinton “narrative.”
“I think a lot of it was about the press wanted a new narrative,” Brown said. “And in the end, Obama’s story of the first black president … trumped the exceptionalism of her being the first woman president. It was bad luck for her that happened. But it was also a much more fun idea to have this new narrative to write about. Everyone was bored with the Clintons. They didn’t want to have another Clinton story.”...
...Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown agreed with Scarborough’s statement, explaining it partly as the establishment media’s fatigue with the whole Clinton “narrative.”
“I think a lot of it was about the press wanted a new narrative,” Brown said. “And in the end, Obama’s story of the first black president … trumped the exceptionalism of her being the first woman president. It was bad luck for her that happened. But it was also a much more fun idea to have this new narrative to write about. Everyone was bored with the Clintons. They didn’t want to have another Clinton story.”...
Justice Dept. blames critics for noticing Holder’s race-card play
Under fire for leveling a racially charged attack at his critics, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has neither backed down nor revised his remarks, appearing instead to restate them.
In a front page New York Times story on Sunday, Holder alleged that some of his critics — a group he referred to as the “more extreme segment” — are motivated by racism. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said of criticism he has received for the Fast and Furious scandal, among other things. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”...
Under fire for leveling a racially charged attack at his critics, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has neither backed down nor revised his remarks, appearing instead to restate them.
In a front page New York Times story on Sunday, Holder alleged that some of his critics — a group he referred to as the “more extreme segment” — are motivated by racism. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said of criticism he has received for the Fast and Furious scandal, among other things. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”...
MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It
...Make no mistake: These bills aren't simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the "good faith" assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn't even have to be aware that the complaint has been made. ...
DeMaura and Segal: All Candidates Should Be Concerned About SOPA
During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.
The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the “Fair Use Doctrine,” the videos were pulled down.
Fast-forward more than three years, and a new piece of legislation is making its way through Congress that would make it easier for online campaign content and websites to be taken down. Even more concerning, if passed, this bill would allow opposing campaigns or campaign committees — not just the original content provider — to pull down websites harboring “infringing content.”...
...Make no mistake: These bills aren't simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the "good faith" assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn't even have to be aware that the complaint has been made. ...
DeMaura and Segal: All Candidates Should Be Concerned About SOPA
During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.
The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the “Fair Use Doctrine,” the videos were pulled down.
Fast-forward more than three years, and a new piece of legislation is making its way through Congress that would make it easier for online campaign content and websites to be taken down. Even more concerning, if passed, this bill would allow opposing campaigns or campaign committees — not just the original content provider — to pull down websites harboring “infringing content.”...
What Fannie and Freddie Knew
...The Beltway story of the crisis claims that Congress's affordable housing mandates had nothing to do with it. But the SEC's lawsuit shows that Fannie degraded its underwriting standards to increase its market share in subprime loans. According to the SEC suit, for instance, in 2006 Fannie Mae adjusted its widely used automated underwriting system, "Desktop Underwriter." Fannie did so as part of its "Say Yes" strategy to "provide more 'approve' messages . . . for larger volumes of loans with lower FICO [credit] scores and higher LTVs [loan-to-value] than previously permitted."
The SEC also shows how Fannie led private lenders into the subprime market. In July 1999, Fannie and Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide Home Loans entered "an alliance agreement" that included "a reduced documentation loan program called the 'internet loan,'" later called the "Fast and Easy" loan. As the SEC notes, "by the mid-2000s, other mortgage lenders developed similar reduced documentation loan programs, such as Mortgage Express and PaperSaver—many of which Fannie Mae acquired in ever-increasing volumes."
Mr. Mozilo and Fannie essentially were business partners in the subprime business. Countrywide found the customers, while Fannie provided the taxpayer-backed capital. And the rest of the industry followed....
...The SEC says Fannie executives also failed to disclose the company's total exposure to risky "Alt-A" loans, sometimes called "liar loans," which required less documentation than traditional subprime loans. Fannie created a special category called "Lender Selected" loans and it gave lenders "coding designations" to separate these Alt-A loans from those Fannie had publicly disclosed. By June 30, 2008, Fannie said its Alt-A exposure was 11% of its portfolio, when it was closer to 23%—a $341 billion difference....
Fannie, Freddie At Heart Of Financial Crisis, Fraud Charges Show
...As recently as 2008, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman stated: "Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income."
Now, the government's own market watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, says that's false. They're going after former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd and former Freddie CEO Richard Syron to prove it.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives told the world that their subprime exposure was substantially smaller than it really was," was how Robert Khuzami, director of SEC enforcement, described it Friday.
But that's an understatement.
From 2007 to 2008, according to SEC documents, executives at Freddie and Fannie together estimated their total exposure to subprime loans at about $10 billion.
The real amount? Nearly $300 billion total.
In short, Fannie and Freddie are frauds. They systematically hid their exposure to potential losses from investors, taxpayers and regulators....
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Were Into Subprime Lending, and Lied About It
...As Cato Institute economist Mark Calabria notes, “Back in 2008, Paul Krugman went so far as to say, ‘they didn’t do any subprime, because they can’t.’ Just taking 10 minutes to read the actual statute and regulations would have revealed to him that they actually could. Krugman went on to say, ‘Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.’ Of course, just reading Fannie’s 10-K would have revealed that claim to be false. But why let facts get in the way?”...
...After James A. Johnson, a Democratic political operative and former aide to Walter Mondale, became chairman of Fannie Mae in 1991 . . . it became a political powerhouse, intimidating and suborning Congress and tying itself closely to the Clinton administration’s support for the low-income lending program called “affordable housing.” This program required subprime and other risky lending, but it solidified Fannie’s support among Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, and enabled the agency to resist privatization or significant regulation until 2008. “Under Johnson,” write Ms. Morgenson and Mr. Rosner, “Fannie Mae led the way in encouraging loose lending practices among banks whose loans the company bought. . . . Johnson led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.”. . .Far from being a marginal player, Fannie Mae was the source of the decline in mortgage underwriting standards that eventually brought down the financial system. It led rather than followed Wall Street into risky lending. . .Edward Pinto (a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae) . . . presented . . . evidence . . . showing that by 2008 half of all mortgages in the U.S. (27 million loans) were subprime or otherwise risky, and that 12 million of these loans were on the books of the GSEs....
...The Beltway story of the crisis claims that Congress's affordable housing mandates had nothing to do with it. But the SEC's lawsuit shows that Fannie degraded its underwriting standards to increase its market share in subprime loans. According to the SEC suit, for instance, in 2006 Fannie Mae adjusted its widely used automated underwriting system, "Desktop Underwriter." Fannie did so as part of its "Say Yes" strategy to "provide more 'approve' messages . . . for larger volumes of loans with lower FICO [credit] scores and higher LTVs [loan-to-value] than previously permitted."
The SEC also shows how Fannie led private lenders into the subprime market. In July 1999, Fannie and Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide Home Loans entered "an alliance agreement" that included "a reduced documentation loan program called the 'internet loan,'" later called the "Fast and Easy" loan. As the SEC notes, "by the mid-2000s, other mortgage lenders developed similar reduced documentation loan programs, such as Mortgage Express and PaperSaver—many of which Fannie Mae acquired in ever-increasing volumes."
Mr. Mozilo and Fannie essentially were business partners in the subprime business. Countrywide found the customers, while Fannie provided the taxpayer-backed capital. And the rest of the industry followed....
...The SEC says Fannie executives also failed to disclose the company's total exposure to risky "Alt-A" loans, sometimes called "liar loans," which required less documentation than traditional subprime loans. Fannie created a special category called "Lender Selected" loans and it gave lenders "coding designations" to separate these Alt-A loans from those Fannie had publicly disclosed. By June 30, 2008, Fannie said its Alt-A exposure was 11% of its portfolio, when it was closer to 23%—a $341 billion difference....
Fannie, Freddie At Heart Of Financial Crisis, Fraud Charges Show
...As recently as 2008, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman stated: "Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income."
Now, the government's own market watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, says that's false. They're going after former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd and former Freddie CEO Richard Syron to prove it.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives told the world that their subprime exposure was substantially smaller than it really was," was how Robert Khuzami, director of SEC enforcement, described it Friday.
But that's an understatement.
From 2007 to 2008, according to SEC documents, executives at Freddie and Fannie together estimated their total exposure to subprime loans at about $10 billion.
The real amount? Nearly $300 billion total.
In short, Fannie and Freddie are frauds. They systematically hid their exposure to potential losses from investors, taxpayers and regulators....
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Were Into Subprime Lending, and Lied About It
...As Cato Institute economist Mark Calabria notes, “Back in 2008, Paul Krugman went so far as to say, ‘they didn’t do any subprime, because they can’t.’ Just taking 10 minutes to read the actual statute and regulations would have revealed to him that they actually could. Krugman went on to say, ‘Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.’ Of course, just reading Fannie’s 10-K would have revealed that claim to be false. But why let facts get in the way?”...
...After James A. Johnson, a Democratic political operative and former aide to Walter Mondale, became chairman of Fannie Mae in 1991 . . . it became a political powerhouse, intimidating and suborning Congress and tying itself closely to the Clinton administration’s support for the low-income lending program called “affordable housing.” This program required subprime and other risky lending, but it solidified Fannie’s support among Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, and enabled the agency to resist privatization or significant regulation until 2008. “Under Johnson,” write Ms. Morgenson and Mr. Rosner, “Fannie Mae led the way in encouraging loose lending practices among banks whose loans the company bought. . . . Johnson led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.”. . .Far from being a marginal player, Fannie Mae was the source of the decline in mortgage underwriting standards that eventually brought down the financial system. It led rather than followed Wall Street into risky lending. . .Edward Pinto (a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae) . . . presented . . . evidence . . . showing that by 2008 half of all mortgages in the U.S. (27 million loans) were subprime or otherwise risky, and that 12 million of these loans were on the books of the GSEs....
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie, Freddie, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance (long PDF)
...Was the growth in private label MBS the culmination of the dream of the deregulation advocates of the 1980s coming to fruition, albeit two decades later? Or was it the emergence of new government-sponsored enterprises in the form of too-big-to-fail financial institutions? We argue the latter, and, with this emergence, came a battle between the GSEs and the too-big-to fail large complex financial institutions (LCFIs), and a race to the bottom in mortgage finance....
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The LCFIs had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
...Was the growth in private label MBS the culmination of the dream of the deregulation advocates of the 1980s coming to fruition, albeit two decades later? Or was it the emergence of new government-sponsored enterprises in the form of too-big-to-fail financial institutions? We argue the latter, and, with this emergence, came a battle between the GSEs and the too-big-to fail large complex financial institutions (LCFIs), and a race to the bottom in mortgage finance....
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The LCFIs had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
U.S. Agents Launder Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels
WASHINGTON — Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.
The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.
They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.
The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests....
New e-mails: ATF officials discussed using Fast & Furious to … push gun control
...Follow the link and read the e-mails from a participating gun dealer to the ATF asking for a letter affirming that he was only selling these weapons at the agency’s behest. He was worried that the sales were shady and wanted legal cover in case the bureau later turned around and decided that the dealers were “irresponsible” or whatever in making the sales — which was awfully prescient given the ATF’s subsequent political opportunism. But then, none of this is surprising: Congressional Democrats and even Eric Holder himself have already used F&F as a pretext to call for more gun control. I thought the sleaziest bit of White House scandal spin we’d see this year was the Energy Department asking Solyndra to hold off on layoffs until after election day in 2010. Nope: Per the new F&F e-mails, they’re actually using their own scandals now as a pretext for greater regulation. Says Dan McLaughlin, “Obama Administration once again lives down to every paranoid caricature of itself.”...
GM Chevrolet Volt: Buyers spooked by electric car fires
...It now appears the fire hazard was first discovered back in June, when GM first heard about a fire in a Volt that occurred some three weeks after the vehicle had been crash tested.
Yet, almost five months went by before either GM or the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) told dealers and customers about the potential risks and urged them to drain the battery pack as soon as possible after an accident.
Part of the reason for delaying the disclosure was the "fragility of Volt sales" up until that point, according to Joan Claybrook, a former administrator at NHTSA.
"NHTSA could have put out a consumer alert," he said, according to industry website Autoguide.com.
"Not to tell [customers] for six months makes no sense to me. They have a duty to inform people when they've rated a vehicle as 'top rated' and make it clear there's a problem."...
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Making the Klan Boring
... I’ve long argued that there’s an infuriating tendency among mainstream liberal historians to take two approaches to evils in American history. Sins are always either the result of conservatives doing conservative things or they’re the product of America’s fundamentally bigoted nature. It’s just never, ever, the case that liberalism or progressivism has something to apologize for. Liberalism is never wrong, because essential to the concept of liberalism is the idea that it must always be right. The fact that racism and other evils were commonplace, even central, to much of the progressive project is simply too jarring to contemplate and so we get either a whitewash or blame-shifting. And with Boyle, we get both.
... I’ve long argued that there’s an infuriating tendency among mainstream liberal historians to take two approaches to evils in American history. Sins are always either the result of conservatives doing conservative things or they’re the product of America’s fundamentally bigoted nature. It’s just never, ever, the case that liberalism or progressivism has something to apologize for. Liberalism is never wrong, because essential to the concept of liberalism is the idea that it must always be right. The fact that racism and other evils were commonplace, even central, to much of the progressive project is simply too jarring to contemplate and so we get either a whitewash or blame-shifting. And with Boyle, we get both.
‘Sometimes a police state is a good thing’
...That wasn’t enough for the Twittermob, however, who wanted a piece of the action. They instantly expressed their moral fury, passing judgement without pausing for thought. Almost immediately upon seeing the video, people were tweeting it to the cops and naming the potential culprit and the place where she apparently works. Even Labour Party leader Ed Miliband joined in, asking followers to help ‘identify the woman shouting racist abuse on a tram in London’. Following the arrest of a suspect, tweeters showered the transport police with praise. ‘Sometimes a police state can be used for the powers of good. Well done, @btp_uk!’, said one tweet. ‘That’s social media at work for you, an arrest in the afternoon of the video hitting the TT in Twitter!’, said another....
...That wasn’t enough for the Twittermob, however, who wanted a piece of the action. They instantly expressed their moral fury, passing judgement without pausing for thought. Almost immediately upon seeing the video, people were tweeting it to the cops and naming the potential culprit and the place where she apparently works. Even Labour Party leader Ed Miliband joined in, asking followers to help ‘identify the woman shouting racist abuse on a tram in London’. Following the arrest of a suspect, tweeters showered the transport police with praise. ‘Sometimes a police state can be used for the powers of good. Well done, @btp_uk!’, said one tweet. ‘That’s social media at work for you, an arrest in the afternoon of the video hitting the TT in Twitter!’, said another....
Declassified Memo Hinted of 1941 Hawaii Attack
...In fact, he compares the missed signals leading up to Japan's attack to 9/11, which government investigations also show that the Clinton and Bush administrations missed clear signals that an attack was coming.
"So many mistakes through so many levels of Washington," said Shirley. "Some things never change."...
...In fact, he compares the missed signals leading up to Japan's attack to 9/11, which government investigations also show that the Clinton and Bush administrations missed clear signals that an attack was coming.
"So many mistakes through so many levels of Washington," said Shirley. "Some things never change."...
Wikileaks docs reveal that governments use malware for surveillance
The latest round of documents published by Wikileaks offers a rare glimpse into the world of surveillance products. The collection—which Wikileaks calls the Spy Files—includes confidential brochures and slide presentations that companies use to market intrusive surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies.
A report that Wikileaks published alongside the documents raises concern about the growing use use of mass surveillance tools that indiscriminately monitor and analyze entire populations. The group also points out that some of products described in the documents are sold to authoritarian regimes, which use them to hunt and track political dissidents.
The details revealed by Wikileaks echo a recent report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that discussed the surveillance industry. The publication analyzed approximately 200 documents from 36 separate companies as part of a special investigative project called The Surveillance Catalog. The material released by Wikileaks corroborates much of what the WSJ reported, but includes a broader range of material.
The documents published by Wikileaks include 287 files that describe products from 160 companies. The group says that these files are only the first set of a larger collection and that more will be published in the future. The project is being carried out in collaboration with activist groups such as Privacy International and press organizations such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Washington Post....
The latest round of documents published by Wikileaks offers a rare glimpse into the world of surveillance products. The collection—which Wikileaks calls the Spy Files—includes confidential brochures and slide presentations that companies use to market intrusive surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies.
A report that Wikileaks published alongside the documents raises concern about the growing use use of mass surveillance tools that indiscriminately monitor and analyze entire populations. The group also points out that some of products described in the documents are sold to authoritarian regimes, which use them to hunt and track political dissidents.
The details revealed by Wikileaks echo a recent report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that discussed the surveillance industry. The publication analyzed approximately 200 documents from 36 separate companies as part of a special investigative project called The Surveillance Catalog. The material released by Wikileaks corroborates much of what the WSJ reported, but includes a broader range of material.
The documents published by Wikileaks include 287 files that describe products from 160 companies. The group says that these files are only the first set of a larger collection and that more will be published in the future. The project is being carried out in collaboration with activist groups such as Privacy International and press organizations such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Washington Post....
Climategate 2.0: A Sequel As Ugly As The Original.
...Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative—the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.
More damning than the substantive disagreement was the attitude the CRU circle displayed toward dissenters, skeptics, and science journals that did not strictly adhere to the party line. Dissenting articles were blocked from publication or review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requests for raw data were rebuffed, and Freedom of Information Act requests were stonewalled. National science panels were stacked, and qualified dissenters such as NASA prize-winner John Christy were tolerated as “token skeptics.” The CRU circle was in high dudgeon over the small handful of skeptics who insisted on looking over their shoulder, revealing the climate science community to be thin-skinned and in-secure about its enterprise—a sign that something is likely amiss. Even if there was no unequivocal “smoking gun” of fraud or wrongdoing, the glimpse deep inside the climate science community was devastating. As I wrote at the time (“In Denial,” March 15, 2010), Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively....
Wigley writes to Hulme and Jones: "must get rid of von Storch too"
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
Climategate II: An Open Letter to the Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
...Everyone agrees that the tone and content of many of them is a bit shrill and occasionally intolerant (kind of like University faculty meetings), but there is one repeating thread, by one of your most prestigious employees, Dr. Tom Wigley, that is far beyond the pale of most academic backbiting.
The revoking of my doctorate, the clear objective of Tom’s email, is the professional equivalent of the death penalty. I think it needs to be brought to your attention, because the basic premise underlying his machinations is patently and completely false. Dr Wigley is known as a careful scientist, but he certainly was careless here....
...Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative—the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.
More damning than the substantive disagreement was the attitude the CRU circle displayed toward dissenters, skeptics, and science journals that did not strictly adhere to the party line. Dissenting articles were blocked from publication or review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requests for raw data were rebuffed, and Freedom of Information Act requests were stonewalled. National science panels were stacked, and qualified dissenters such as NASA prize-winner John Christy were tolerated as “token skeptics.” The CRU circle was in high dudgeon over the small handful of skeptics who insisted on looking over their shoulder, revealing the climate science community to be thin-skinned and in-secure about its enterprise—a sign that something is likely amiss. Even if there was no unequivocal “smoking gun” of fraud or wrongdoing, the glimpse deep inside the climate science community was devastating. As I wrote at the time (“In Denial,” March 15, 2010), Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively....
Wigley writes to Hulme and Jones: "must get rid of von Storch too"
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
Climategate II: An Open Letter to the Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
...Everyone agrees that the tone and content of many of them is a bit shrill and occasionally intolerant (kind of like University faculty meetings), but there is one repeating thread, by one of your most prestigious employees, Dr. Tom Wigley, that is far beyond the pale of most academic backbiting.
The revoking of my doctorate, the clear objective of Tom’s email, is the professional equivalent of the death penalty. I think it needs to be brought to your attention, because the basic premise underlying his machinations is patently and completely false. Dr Wigley is known as a careful scientist, but he certainly was careless here....
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Wigley writes to Hulme and Jones: "must get rid of von Storch too"
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
The Great Global Warming Fizzle
How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen....
“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″
Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming?
And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”?
Climategate a ‘catastrophe’ for science?
...Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public’s radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government’s environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. “Green energy” has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
...Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. ...
Climate hoax promoter Michael Mann: "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."
...I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy....
Yet Another Climate-Change Scandal
...Keenan is Doug Keenan, a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. McIntyre is, of course, Steve McIntyre—the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose the flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report and brought him near-legendary status in the climate science community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place....
Newsbytes: BBC In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists, prime minister “green guru” publicly doubts climate change
...Britain’s leading green activist research centre spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves, a vast new cache of leaked ‘Climategate’ emails has revealed. The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade. They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output. BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. — David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011...
How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen....
“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″
Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming?
And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”?
Climategate a ‘catastrophe’ for science?
...Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public’s radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government’s environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. “Green energy” has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
...Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. ...
Climate hoax promoter Michael Mann: "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."
...I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy....
Yet Another Climate-Change Scandal
...Keenan is Doug Keenan, a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. McIntyre is, of course, Steve McIntyre—the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose the flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report and brought him near-legendary status in the climate science community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place....
Newsbytes: BBC In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists, prime minister “green guru” publicly doubts climate change
...Britain’s leading green activist research centre spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves, a vast new cache of leaked ‘Climategate’ emails has revealed. The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade. They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output. BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. — David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011...
Monday, November 28, 2011
Climategate scientists DID collude with government officials to hide research that didn't fit their apocalyptic global warming
...The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.
‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: ‘I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.
'They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the centre of the affair, said the group findings did stand up to scrutiny.
Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones - who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - said: 'Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden.
'I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.'...
...The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.
‘Humphrey’, said to work at Defra, writes: ‘I cannot overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the government can give on climate change to help them tell their story.
'They want their story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.’
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the centre of the affair, said the group findings did stand up to scrutiny.
Yet one of the newly released emails, written by Prof. Jones - who is working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - said: 'Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden.
'I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.'...
Sunday, November 27, 2011
The tribalistic corruption of peer review – the Chris de Freitas incident
...This is most certainly not the case in the emails that follow. There really is no hiding place for the authors, and no ambiguity. The emails will track how annoyance at the publication of a ‘contrary’ article in a journal develops into an attack on the editor, Chris de Freitas, an accomplished scientist. The attack includes a plot to see if they can get him sacked from his job at University of Auckland. Within the story, it is evident exactly what kind of ‘scientists’ the key authors are. The word scientist applied to these people has denigrated the meaning of the word....
...Also assessing copyright as the ‘other’ Soon/Baliunas paper in Energy and Env. is essentially the same as that in CR. Hans wanted to try this first, but didn’t want to tell all what he was doing. Fears a backlash if de Freitas gets removed without due cause. So let’s all try and keep the emails down, and hope we can report something to all once the correspondence Hans initiates gets replies.
Here, they are trying to get de Freitas through other means, which is copyright violation....
...Clare Goodness was in touch w/ me indicating that she had discussed the matter w/ Von Storch, and that DeFrietas would be relieved of his position. However, I haven’t heard anything. A large segment of the community I’ve been in contact with feels that this event has already done its damage, allowing Baliunas and colleagues to attempt to impact U.S. governmental policy, w/ this new weapon in hand–the appearance of a legitimate peer-reviewed document challenging some core assertions of IPCC to wave in congress. They appear to be making some headway in using this to influence U.S. policy, which makes our original discussions all the more pressing now....
...This is most certainly not the case in the emails that follow. There really is no hiding place for the authors, and no ambiguity. The emails will track how annoyance at the publication of a ‘contrary’ article in a journal develops into an attack on the editor, Chris de Freitas, an accomplished scientist. The attack includes a plot to see if they can get him sacked from his job at University of Auckland. Within the story, it is evident exactly what kind of ‘scientists’ the key authors are. The word scientist applied to these people has denigrated the meaning of the word....
...Also assessing copyright as the ‘other’ Soon/Baliunas paper in Energy and Env. is essentially the same as that in CR. Hans wanted to try this first, but didn’t want to tell all what he was doing. Fears a backlash if de Freitas gets removed without due cause. So let’s all try and keep the emails down, and hope we can report something to all once the correspondence Hans initiates gets replies.
Here, they are trying to get de Freitas through other means, which is copyright violation....
...Clare Goodness was in touch w/ me indicating that she had discussed the matter w/ Von Storch, and that DeFrietas would be relieved of his position. However, I haven’t heard anything. A large segment of the community I’ve been in contact with feels that this event has already done its damage, allowing Baliunas and colleagues to attempt to impact U.S. governmental policy, w/ this new weapon in hand–the appearance of a legitimate peer-reviewed document challenging some core assertions of IPCC to wave in congress. They appear to be making some headway in using this to influence U.S. policy, which makes our original discussions all the more pressing now....
Newsbytes: BBC In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists, prime minister “green guru” publicly doubts climate change
...Britain’s leading green activist research centre spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves, a vast new cache of leaked ‘Climategate’ emails has revealed. The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade. They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output. BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. — David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011...
...Britain’s leading green activist research centre spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves, a vast new cache of leaked ‘Climategate’ emails has revealed. The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade. They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output. BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. — David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011...
Climategate 2.0: New E-Mails Rock The Global Warming Debate
“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email.
These new emails add weight to Climategate 1.0 emails revealing efforts to politicize the scientific debate. For example, Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, authored a Climategate 1.0 email asserting that his fellow Climategate scientists “must get rid of” the editor for a peer-reviewed science journal because he published some papers contradicting assertions of a global warming crisis....
Climate hoax promoter Michael Mann: "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."
...I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy....
Yet Another Climate-Change Scandal
...Keenan is Doug Keenan, a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. McIntyre is, of course, Steve McIntyre—the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose the flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report and brought him near-legendary status in the climate science community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place....
“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email.
These new emails add weight to Climategate 1.0 emails revealing efforts to politicize the scientific debate. For example, Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, authored a Climategate 1.0 email asserting that his fellow Climategate scientists “must get rid of” the editor for a peer-reviewed science journal because he published some papers contradicting assertions of a global warming crisis....
Climate hoax promoter Michael Mann: "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."
...I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy....
Yet Another Climate-Change Scandal
...Keenan is Doug Keenan, a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. McIntyre is, of course, Steve McIntyre—the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose the flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report and brought him near-legendary status in the climate science community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place....
Climategate a ‘catastrophe’ for science?
...Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public’s radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government’s environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. “Green energy” has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
...Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. ...
...Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public’s radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government’s environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. “Green energy” has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
...Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. ...
Friday, November 25, 2011
CO2 may not warm the planet as much as thought
The climate may be less sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought – and temperature rises this century could be smaller than expected. That's the surprise result of a new analysis of the last ice age. However, the finding comes from considering just one climate model, and unless it can be replicated using other models, researchers are dubious that it is genuine....
The climate may be less sensitive to carbon dioxide than we thought – and temperature rises this century could be smaller than expected. That's the surprise result of a new analysis of the last ice age. However, the finding comes from considering just one climate model, and unless it can be replicated using other models, researchers are dubious that it is genuine....
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails
...“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”...
...In the absence of telltale manmade global warming "fingerprints" (and there have been several candidates over the years, such as the tropospheric hotspot, or elusive ocean heat sinks) contemporary temperature readings and historical temperature reconstructions were freighted with immense significance.
So the mewling infant that we call Climate Science – a 40-year-young offshoot of meteorology – has been thrust into a political role long before it’s capable of supporting the claims made on its behalf. From the archives we can see the scientists know that too, and we can read their own reluctance to make those claims, too.
“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation?” muses one scientist. “They’ll kill us probably.”...
University hit by new climate leak ahead of talks
...Although their context couldn't be determined, the excerpts appeared to show climate scientists talking in conspiratorial tones about ways to promote their agenda and freeze out those they disagree with. There are several mentions of "the cause" and discussions of ways to shield emails from freedom of information requests....
‘Climate-gate’ resurfaces after hacker releases new round of e-mails
...In one round of 2005 e-mails, researchers discuss whether an early draft of what became a 2007 IPCC report has accurately depicted the temperature rise in the lower atmosphere. An official from the U.K. Met Office, a scientific organization which analyzes the climate, writes to the Climate Research Unit’s then-director Phil Jones at one point: “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary [...]”
Later, the official adds, “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.”
Another missive written by Stephan Singer, who heads the European climate and energy policy team for the advocacy group WWF in Brussels, said when it came to publicizing the state of climate science, “we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and b) in order to get into the media the context between climate extremes/disasters/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and energy.”...
...Some e-mails appear to show researchers’ push to close ranks. In one, Jones writes about enlisting reliable researchers to join the team writing the IPCC’s summary report.
“Getting people we know and trust is vital,” he writes, referring to a group charged with studying tornadoes. Jones was not immediately available for comment....
Al Gore’s global warming claims on Kilimanjaro glacier – finally dead and buried in the Climategate 2.0 emails – even Phil Jones and Lonnie Thompson don’t believe it
...And now today, here’s indication in the Climategate 2.0 emails that I was right.
5315.txt
date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones
subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff”
Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them....
Sorting Through the Stolen UEA Emails
...<5131> Shukla/IGES:
["Future of the IPCC", 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be
willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the
projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and
simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.
<1939> Thorne/MetO:
Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]
<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
<1611> Carter:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by
a select core group.
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]
<4755> Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s
included and what is left out....
...<5111> Pollack:
But it will be very difficult to make the MWP go away in Greenland....
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac shell out big bonuses
...The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates the mortgage giants that are now under government receivership, has approved $12.79 million in bonus pay for the performance of 10 executives at Fannie and Freddie last year despite both companies posting losses in all four quarters, Politico reported.
The executives were rewarded with Wall Street-style incentives for meeting modest performance targets tied to modifying mortgages in jeopardy of foreclosure, according to Politico. Among the compensation deals was a $2.3 million bonus awarded to outgoing Freddie Mac CEO Ed Haldeman for 2010, a figure that is more than double his salary of $900,000. Fannie Mae CEO Michael Williams got $2.37 million in performance bonuses....
...The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates the mortgage giants that are now under government receivership, has approved $12.79 million in bonus pay for the performance of 10 executives at Fannie and Freddie last year despite both companies posting losses in all four quarters, Politico reported.
The executives were rewarded with Wall Street-style incentives for meeting modest performance targets tied to modifying mortgages in jeopardy of foreclosure, according to Politico. Among the compensation deals was a $2.3 million bonus awarded to outgoing Freddie Mac CEO Ed Haldeman for 2010, a figure that is more than double his salary of $900,000. Fannie Mae CEO Michael Williams got $2.37 million in performance bonuses....
Theologian Attempts Censorship After Losing Public Debate
..."Theologian John Haught publicly debated prominent evolutionary scientist and atheist Jerry Coyne at the University of Kentucky back in October. Before the debate, both parties agreed to the debate being video-taped. Coyne is of the opinion that he convincingly won the debate over Haught. But we'll never know, because Haught, with the assistance of staff at the University of Kentucky, who sponsored the debate, is banning publication of the video of the event. They are even refusing to release the half of the debate containing Coyne's comments and questions."...
..."Theologian John Haught publicly debated prominent evolutionary scientist and atheist Jerry Coyne at the University of Kentucky back in October. Before the debate, both parties agreed to the debate being video-taped. Coyne is of the opinion that he convincingly won the debate over Haught. But we'll never know, because Haught, with the assistance of staff at the University of Kentucky, who sponsored the debate, is banning publication of the video of the event. They are even refusing to release the half of the debate containing Coyne's comments and questions."...
Making College More Expensive: The Unintended Consequences of Federal Tuition Aid
As Congress debates the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, it should heed Friedrich Hayek’s warning that democracy is “peculiarly liable, if not guided by accepted common principles, to produce over-all results that nobody wanted.” One result of the federal government’s student financial aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nation’s colleges and universities. Basic economic theory suggests that the increased demand for higher education generated by HEA will have the effect of increasing tuitions. The empirical evidence is consistent with that—federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation’s colleges and universities.
The diversity of objectives, resources, and types of governance among the thousands of colleges and universities makes it difficult to adequately measure the exact amount by which tuitions rise in response to federal student assistance. Therefore, estimates of the amount vary in the literature. Congress can at best know that its policies increase tuitions and that some portion of the federal assistance ends up being captured by state governments and by the colleges and universities.
Also, when large numbers of students begin to rely on the federal government to fund their higher education, and the federal government uses this financing to affect the behavior of state and private institutions, we should be concerned about how the resulting loss of independence of our colleges and universities affects the ability of voters to form opinions about public policy that are independent of the government’s position....
Study Sez: Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid
...Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid....
Developer with shotgun scared off Oakland rioters
Oakland developer Phil Tagami is used to working behind the scenes to broker some of the biggest deals in town. Late Wednesday, he was using different persuasive skills - holding a loaded shotgun to scare away rioters trying to get into a downtown building.
"We had people who attempted to break into our building," the landmark Rotunda Building on Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall, Tagami said Thursday. He grabbed a shotgun that he usually keeps at home, went down to the ground floor and "discouraged them," he said.
"I was standing there and they saw me there, and I lifted it - I didn't point it - I just held it in my hands," Tagami said. "And I just racked it, and they ran."...
Unable to win fair and square, Big Labor pushes 'ambush elections'
...Currently, there is about a five-week window between when union organizers petition the NLRB to conduct a secret-ballot election, and when the vote actually happens. That time between announcement and vote allows both sides abundant opportunities to make their case, so workers can cast informed ballots on whether to form a union. But the problem for Big Labor is that informed workers are increasingly choosing to keep their freedom to work without paying union dues. Union membership peaked at 26 percent of the work force in 1953. Today, only 9.6 percent of workers are union members. In the private sector, less than 7 percent of workers are unionized.
The NLRB regulation to be adopted next Wednesday is designed to reverse that trend. Union organizers would be empowered to force hurry-up, or "ambush," elections in less than two weeks. At best, this compressed schedule would significantly reduce the time business owners and managers have to make their case against unionization.
Worse, in typical Obama fashion, the rule of law is being tossed out the window to facilitate this latest union power grab. The board received more than 65,000 public comments when it published the first version of this proposal in June. Federal law requires that the board explain how it will take account of such comments, then publish a proposed final version that incorporates the response. No such explanation has been offered, yet the board plans to hold a final vote on the main provisions of the proposal anyway -- an apparent violation of the federal Administrative Procedures Act. Coincidentally, the recess-appointment by Obama of former SEIU lawyer Craig Becker to the board expires Dec. 31. Without Becker, the NLRB would lack the quorum necessary to vote on anything, much less a major change in union election rules....
Bloomberg to OWS: Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks
...Lenders faced a nightmare regulatory threat and so began to “bend” their lending standards to demonstrate compliance. Congress helped by authorizing Fannie and Freddie to buy up subprime mortgages at a higher rate in order to incentivize compliance. That opened the floodgates, as Fannie and Freddie essentially ended any risk for lenders in the subprime market, and it also opened up a significant incentive for so-called “predatory lending.” After all, why not give consumers more credit than they could handle if the original lender didn’t have to bear the cost of failure?...
Smoking-Gun Document Ties Policy To Housing Crisis
...At President Clinton's direction, no fewer than 10 federal agencies issued a chilling ultimatum to banks and mortgage lenders to ease credit for lower-income minorities or face investigations for lending discrimination and suffer the related adverse publicity. They also were threatened with denial of access to the all-important secondary mortgage market and stiff fines, along with other penalties.
The threat was codified in a 20-page "Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending" and entered into the Federal Register on April 15, 1994, by the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending. Clinton set up the little-known body to coordinate an unprecedented crackdown on alleged bank redlining....
..."HUD is authorized to direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to undertake various remedial actions, including suspension, probation, reprimand or settlement, against lenders found to have engaged in discriminatory lending practices," the official policy statement warned.
The regulatory missive, which had the effect of law, advised lenders to bend "customary" underwriting standards for minority homebuyers with poor credit.
"Applying different lending standards to applicants who are members of a protected class is permissible," it said. "In addition, providing different treatment to applicants to address past discrimination would be permissible."...
Met police using surveillance system to monitor mobile phones
Britain's largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.
The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan police from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under government protocol as "Listed X", it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person's movements in real time....
Britain's largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.
The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan police from Leeds-based company Datong plc, which counts the US Secret Service, the Ministry of Defence and regimes in the Middle East among its customers. Strictly classified under government protocol as "Listed X", it can emit a signal over an area of up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person's movements in real time....
Surprise! No warming in last 11 years
...Despite the fact that the world’s nations continue to spew CO2 with no significant decline (except perhaps in the Great Recession period of 2008-9), the temperature record is remarkably stable. In fact, it looks similar to the period between 1945 and 1970 on the top chart. If global temperature increases really correlated directly to CO2 emissions, we wouldn’t see this at all; we’d see ever-escalating rates of increase in global temperatures, which is exactly what the AGW climate models predicted at the turn of the century. They were proven wrong.
And in fact, Curry explains that the failure of those models finally has some scientists going back to the drawing board:
‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’ …
‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’
In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.
They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago....
...Despite the fact that the world’s nations continue to spew CO2 with no significant decline (except perhaps in the Great Recession period of 2008-9), the temperature record is remarkably stable. In fact, it looks similar to the period between 1945 and 1970 on the top chart. If global temperature increases really correlated directly to CO2 emissions, we wouldn’t see this at all; we’d see ever-escalating rates of increase in global temperatures, which is exactly what the AGW climate models predicted at the turn of the century. They were proven wrong.
And in fact, Curry explains that the failure of those models finally has some scientists going back to the drawing board:
‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’ …
‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’
In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.
They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago....
Matt Ridley's Rousing Defense of Climate Change Skepticism
...So what’s the problem? The problem is that you can accept all the basic tenets of greenhouse physics and still conclude that the threat of a dangerously large warming is so improbable as to be negligible, while the threat of real harm from climate-mitigation policies is already so high as to be worrying, that the cure is proving far worse than the disease is ever likely to be. Or as I put it once, we may be putting a tourniquet round our necks to stop a nosebleed....
Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague
...The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.
But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.
Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.
Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers....
...In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.
‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’...
...However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified....
Uh oh, global warming loons: here comes Climategate II!
Breaking news: two years after the Climategate, a further batch of emails has been leaked onto the internet by a person – or persons – unknown. And as before, they show the "scientists" at the heart of the Man-Made Global Warming industry in a most unflattering light. Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Keith Briffa – all your favourite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be....
...<3066> Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.
<1611> Carter:
It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by
a select core group.
<2884> Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]
<4755> Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s
included and what is left out.
<3456> Overpeck:
I agree w/ Susan [Solomon] that we should try to put more in the bullet about
“Subsequent evidence” [...] Need to convince readers that there really has been
an increase in knowledge – more evidence. What is it?...
Climategate 2.0 emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!
...<3115> Mann: By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year
reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that
reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.
<3940> Mann: They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic
example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted
upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a
bit.
<0810> Mann: I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s
doing, but its not helping the cause...
JAMES HANSEN AND THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE
It recently came out that James Hansen, one of the two or three most prominent global warming alarmists on whose work the IPCC reports rest, “forgot” to report $1.6 million in outside income, as required by his government contracts. Is that significant? Well, yes: A handful of scientists, including Hansen, have gotten wealthy on climate alarmism. They have an enormous financial interest in the faux science they have done so much to perpetrate. It is more likely that the Pope would renounce Christianity than that Hansen, Michael Mann, etc., would change their minds about global warming, regardless of the evidence. (I say that because the Pope has far more intellectual integrity than the climate alarmists.)...
Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income
NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.
This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.
Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.
Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee. This is despite NASA ordering him to return at least some of the money, with the rest apparently unnoticed by NASA. This raises troubling issues about Hansen’s, and NASA’s, compliance with ethics rules, the general prohibition on not privately benefitting from public service, and even the criminal code prohibition on not having one’s public employment income supplemented. All of this lucrative activity followed Hansen ratcheting up his global warming alarmism and activism to be more political which, now to his possible detriment, he has insisted is part of his job. As he cannot receive outside income for doing his job, he has placed himself in peril, assuming the Department of Justice can find a way to be interested in these revelations....
It recently came out that James Hansen, one of the two or three most prominent global warming alarmists on whose work the IPCC reports rest, “forgot” to report $1.6 million in outside income, as required by his government contracts. Is that significant? Well, yes: A handful of scientists, including Hansen, have gotten wealthy on climate alarmism. They have an enormous financial interest in the faux science they have done so much to perpetrate. It is more likely that the Pope would renounce Christianity than that Hansen, Michael Mann, etc., would change their minds about global warming, regardless of the evidence. (I say that because the Pope has far more intellectual integrity than the climate alarmists.)...
Dr. James Hansen’s growing financial scandal, now over a million dollars of outside income
NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA.
This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests. As specifically detailed below, Hansen failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties — including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even for his past testimony and other work for NASA.
Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen nonetheless regularly refused to report this income.
Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee. This is despite NASA ordering him to return at least some of the money, with the rest apparently unnoticed by NASA. This raises troubling issues about Hansen’s, and NASA’s, compliance with ethics rules, the general prohibition on not privately benefitting from public service, and even the criminal code prohibition on not having one’s public employment income supplemented. All of this lucrative activity followed Hansen ratcheting up his global warming alarmism and activism to be more political which, now to his possible detriment, he has insisted is part of his job. As he cannot receive outside income for doing his job, he has placed himself in peril, assuming the Department of Justice can find a way to be interested in these revelations....
Saturday, October 29, 2011
New Police Drone Near Houston Could Carry Weapons
...The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office in Conroe paid $300,000 in federal homeland security grant money and Friday it received the ShadowHawk unmanned helicopter made by Vanguard Defense Industries of Spring.
A laptop computer is used to control the 50-pound unmanned chopper, and a game-like console is used to aim and zoom a powerful camera and infrared heat-seeking device mounted on the front.
"To be in on the ground floor of this is pretty exciting for us here in Montgomery County," Sheriff Tommy Gage said.
He said the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) could be used in hunting criminals who are running from police or assessing a scene where SWAT team officers are facing an active shooter.
Gage said it will also be deployed for criminal investigations such as drug shipments.
"We're not going to use it to be invading somebody's privacy. It'll be used for situations we have with criminals," Gage said....
Officers Jeer at Arraignment of 16 Colleagues in Ticket-Fixing Investigation
A three-year investigation into the police’s habit of fixing traffic and parking tickets in the Bronx ended in the unsealing of indictments on Friday and a stunning display of vitriol by hundreds of off-duty officers, who converged on the courthouse to applaud their accused colleagues and denounce their prosecution....
State treasurer of MA absolutely shreds RomneyCare, which “has nearly bankrupted the state” and is surviving solely because of federal aid
...Cahill said the law is being sustained only with the help of federal aid, which he suggested that the Obama administration is funneling to Massachusetts to help the president make the case for a similar plan in Congress… “…I would argue that we’re being propped up so that the federal government and the Obama administration can drive it through” Congress.
Commonwealth Connector, the independent state agency established to help residents find the health insurance, has “totally failed,” to create competition and connect people with affordable insurance, Cahill said, pointing out that 68 percent of the residents it serves receive subsidized care.
“We haven’t done anything about driving down costs,” Cahill said. “We haven’t helped small business. We haven’t changed the way we pay for health care and the way we deliver it"...
Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong
...Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many different sets of parameters that seemed to fit the historical data. And that made sense, he realized--given a mathematical expression with many terms and parameters in it, and thus many different ways to add up to the same single result, you'd expect there to be different ways to tweak the parameters so that they can produce similar sets of data over some limited time period.
The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward--and sure enough, his calibrated model produced terrible predictions compared to the "reality" originally generated by the perfect model. Calibration--a standard procedure used by all modelers in all fields, including finance--had rendered a perfect model seriously flawed. Though taken aback, he continued his study, and found that having even tiny flaws in the model or the historical data made the situation far worse. "As far as I can tell, you'd have exactly the same situation with any model that has to be calibrated," says Carter....
The Government is CONSTANTLY Pestering Google For Your Personal Information
...Google released its "transparency report" today and America ranks ahead of all other nations when it comes to asking the search giant for your personal info. In fact, U.S. officials ask for three and a half times more data than India the nation that ranks second in government requests for user data.
U.S. Government officials requested personal data 5,590 time for criminal investigations during the first half of 2011–an increase of 29 percent over the last six months of 2010. And Google reports that it complied in whole or in part with 93 percent of these requests....
...Google released its "transparency report" today and America ranks ahead of all other nations when it comes to asking the search giant for your personal info. In fact, U.S. officials ask for three and a half times more data than India the nation that ranks second in government requests for user data.
U.S. Government officials requested personal data 5,590 time for criminal investigations during the first half of 2011–an increase of 29 percent over the last six months of 2010. And Google reports that it complied in whole or in part with 93 percent of these requests....
And the below differs from Enron's "we control it but we don't technically own it so its debt isn't our debt" games, the ones proving how corrupt capitalism is, exactly how?
Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie, Freddie, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance (long PDF)
...By far, the most important legislation affecting Fannie Mae was its conversion into a private company in 1968. It was primarily for accounting purposes. The Johnson administration wanted Fannie Mae privatized, so as to remove its debt from the federal government's books, thereby reducing the size of the national debt. In addition, a change in federal budgeting procedures at the time would have counted Fannie Mae's net purchases of mortgages as current government expenditures, which would have meant that those net purchases would have added to recorded federal budget deficits—something that any presidential administration would want to avoid doing during its own term.
The privatization meant that Fannie Mae was spun off to the private sector and became a publicly traded company, with its shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). However, Fannie Mae retained its federal charter and the special status and privileges that went with the charter. Fannie Mae also had its own special regulator: the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had been created as a cabinet-level department in 1965 and retained some regulatory powers over Fannie Mae. Another prominent indicator of the specialness of Fannie Mae, despite its apparent structure as just another private (publicly traded) company, was the power of the President of the United States to appoint five board members to the Fannie Mae board of directors. No other company that was listed on the NYSE had presidential appointees on its board....
Godzilla Hedge Fund Fannie Mae Was ‘Guaranteed to Fail’: Books
For Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the figure to remember is 79.9 -- the percent ownership that the U.S. Treasury took in each when it seized control in 2008. If the stakes were 80 percent, the mortgage companies would land on the federal budget, as we’re reminded in “Guaranteed to Fail,” a valuable book on how two quasi-public companies became “the world’s largest and most leveraged hedge funds.”
Kiss all the political posturing about the U.S. public debt ceiling goodbye: With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debts tacked on, the total would lurch to $15.84 trillion, well over the current limit of $14.29 trillion, the authors say....
Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie, Freddie, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance (long PDF)
...By far, the most important legislation affecting Fannie Mae was its conversion into a private company in 1968. It was primarily for accounting purposes. The Johnson administration wanted Fannie Mae privatized, so as to remove its debt from the federal government's books, thereby reducing the size of the national debt. In addition, a change in federal budgeting procedures at the time would have counted Fannie Mae's net purchases of mortgages as current government expenditures, which would have meant that those net purchases would have added to recorded federal budget deficits—something that any presidential administration would want to avoid doing during its own term.
The privatization meant that Fannie Mae was spun off to the private sector and became a publicly traded company, with its shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). However, Fannie Mae retained its federal charter and the special status and privileges that went with the charter. Fannie Mae also had its own special regulator: the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which had been created as a cabinet-level department in 1965 and retained some regulatory powers over Fannie Mae. Another prominent indicator of the specialness of Fannie Mae, despite its apparent structure as just another private (publicly traded) company, was the power of the President of the United States to appoint five board members to the Fannie Mae board of directors. No other company that was listed on the NYSE had presidential appointees on its board....
Godzilla Hedge Fund Fannie Mae Was ‘Guaranteed to Fail’: Books
For Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the figure to remember is 79.9 -- the percent ownership that the U.S. Treasury took in each when it seized control in 2008. If the stakes were 80 percent, the mortgage companies would land on the federal budget, as we’re reminded in “Guaranteed to Fail,” a valuable book on how two quasi-public companies became “the world’s largest and most leveraged hedge funds.”
Kiss all the political posturing about the U.S. public debt ceiling goodbye: With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debts tacked on, the total would lurch to $15.84 trillion, well over the current limit of $14.29 trillion, the authors say....
2 teachers union lobbyists teach for a day to qualify for hefty pensions
Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found....
...Preckwinkle's one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He's 59, and at age 60 he'll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.
His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.
His pay for one day as a substitute was $93, according to records of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System....
Two lobbyists with no prior teaching experience were allowed to count their years as union employees toward a state teacher pension once they served a single day of subbing in 2007, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found....
...Preckwinkle's one day of subbing qualified him to become a participant in the state teachers pension fund, allowing him to pick up 16 years of previous union work and nearly five more years since he joined. He's 59, and at age 60 he'll be eligible for a state pension based on the four-highest consecutive years of his last 10 years of work.
His paycheck fluctuates as a union lobbyist, but pension records show his earnings in the last school year were at least $245,000. Based on his salary history so far, he could earn a pension of about $108,000 a year, more than double what the average teacher receives.
His pay for one day as a substitute was $93, according to records of the Illinois Teachers Retirement System....
Love the divine capitalization of "Authority".
WHOOPS! Vatican Lets Slip Plans For One World Government
...A supranational Authority of this kind should have a realistic structure and be set up gradually. It should be favourable to the existence of efficient and effective monetary and financial systems; that is, free and stable markets overseen by a suitable legal framework, well-functioning in support of sustainable development and social progress of all, and inspired by the values of charity and truth. It is a matter of an Authority with a global reach that cannot be imposed by force, coercion or violence, but should be the outcome of a free and shared agreement and a reflection of the permanent and historic needs of the world common good....
WHOOPS! Vatican Lets Slip Plans For One World Government
...A supranational Authority of this kind should have a realistic structure and be set up gradually. It should be favourable to the existence of efficient and effective monetary and financial systems; that is, free and stable markets overseen by a suitable legal framework, well-functioning in support of sustainable development and social progress of all, and inspired by the values of charity and truth. It is a matter of an Authority with a global reach that cannot be imposed by force, coercion or violence, but should be the outcome of a free and shared agreement and a reflection of the permanent and historic needs of the world common good....
The Sins of the Flash
...That's right — code on a remote computer somewhere decides whether or not random web sites can spy on you. If someone changes that code, accidentally or deliberately, your own computer has just been turned into a bug, without any need for them to attack your machine.
From a technical perspective, it's simply wrong for a design to outsource a critical access control decision to a third party. My computer should decide what sites can turn on my camera and microphone, not one of Adobe's servers.
The policy side is even worse. What if the FBI wanted to bug you? Could they get a court order compelling Adobe to make an access control decision that would turn on your microphone?...
...That's right — code on a remote computer somewhere decides whether or not random web sites can spy on you. If someone changes that code, accidentally or deliberately, your own computer has just been turned into a bug, without any need for them to attack your machine.
From a technical perspective, it's simply wrong for a design to outsource a critical access control decision to a third party. My computer should decide what sites can turn on my camera and microphone, not one of Adobe's servers.
The policy side is even worse. What if the FBI wanted to bug you? Could they get a court order compelling Adobe to make an access control decision that would turn on your microphone?...
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Godzilla Hedge Fund Fannie Mae Was ‘Guaranteed to Fail’: Books
A number, like a picture, can be worth 1,000 words. In England, 1066 means the Norman Conquest. The world over, 3.14159 screams pi.
For Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the figure to remember is 79.9 -- the percent ownership that the U.S. Treasury took in each when it seized control in 2008. If the stakes were 80 percent, the mortgage companies would land on the federal budget, as we’re reminded in “Guaranteed to Fail,” a valuable book on how two quasi-public companies became “the world’s largest and most leveraged hedge funds.”
Kiss all the political posturing about the U.S. public debt ceiling goodbye: With Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s debts tacked on, the total would lurch to $15.84 trillion, well over the current limit of $14.29 trillion, the authors say....
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