By The McCain Campaign's Own Definition, Palin Is A `Wealth Spreader'

from:  http://thinkprogress.org/      New web site, check it out!   -BayPointMike

Reagan chief of staff: McCain's interview with Palin was easier than getting a job at McDonald's.

Kristol mocks New York Times, before Stewart points out Kristol writes for the Times.

Go to http://thinkprogress.org/  

Watch very funny video. Scroll down to "Kristol mocks New York Times, before ...".

From: http://thinkprogress.org/

Maliki: Don't call it a `security pact'; it's `an agreement to withdraw' U.S. troops.»

Today, the AP is reporting that according to a close aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi government "wants to eliminate any chance U.S. forces will stay" in Iraq "after 2011 under a proposed security pact." But also yesterday, al-Maliki took issue with calling the agreement a "security pact":

Al-Maliki, meanwhile, met with a leading Shiite politician late Thursday to discuss the deal. Government television quoted the prime minister as describing the agreement as a framework for the pullout of U.S. forces and the regulation of "their activities within the rest of the time they're here."

"We don't call it a security pact but an agreement to withdraw the troops and organize their activities during the period of their presence in Iraq," al-Maliki was quoted as saying.

The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, said yesterday that "there is a 20 percent to 30 percent chance" the two sides will come to an agreement.

Without an agreement or an extension of the UN mandate authorizing the presence of U.S. troops, the American military "would have to suspend all operations in Iraq" after Dec. 31, 2009.

From: http://thinkprogress.org/

Syrian Ambassador: Lieberman Assured Me McCain Would Talk With Syria»

In a new interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Syrian ambassador Imad Moustapha said that Syria is "doing everything possible within our means" to stop insurgents from crossing into Iraq, and decried the recent U.S. strike into Syria as a "terrorist, criminal act." Most interestingly, Moutapha said that Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) personally assured him that a McCain presidency would open up a dialogue with Syria:

FP: U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama says that he would be willing to sit down with states that are now considered enemies of the United States. Is that encouraging to you?

IM: I have reason to believe that even if [Senator John] McCain becomes president of the United States, he will also be inclined to sit and talk with Syria. I can tell you this on the record: Senator Joe Lieberman, who is supposed to be very close to McCain, has said this explicitly and very clearly to me personally.

This is a startling revelation, considering McCain and Lieberman have attacked politicians who have sought to engage Syria diplomatically:

— McCain adviser Max Boot denounced the Israeli government for engaging Syria, casting it as a betrayal of Lebanon. "John McCain is not going to betray the lawfully elected government of Lebanon," Boot said.

— The McCain campaign attacked Daniel Kurtzer, an Obama adviser, for attending a legal summit in Damascus. McCain aide Randy Scheunemann accused Obama of favoring "unconditional summit meetings with state sponsors of terrorism."

— Lieberman joined the conservative attack machine in slamming Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria in 2007. "I believe her visit to Syria was a mistake, that it was bad for the United States of America," Lieberman said. "And I say this because we're in a war. We're in a war against the Islamic terrorists who attacked us on 9-11-01. Syria is a state sponsor of terrorism."

Just last week, ABC News reported that McCain's hero Gen. David Petraeus sought to visit Syria diplomatically, but "the idea was swiftly rejected by Bush administration officials at the White House, State Department and the Pentagon." (HT: Cernig)

--------------------BayPointMike wrote:

At the Al Smith Dinner Meeting, Sen Obama reminded Sen McCain that he agreed to attend this Meeting "without Preconditions!"

Wow! Next, Sen. McCain might meet with the French President, remember "Freedom Fries" in the U.S. Congress? VP Palin is already talking with the French President, or was that a joke? Doesn't she have anyone to screen incoming phone calls? There a huge number of Robocalls nowadays, does she answer her phone, by herself? Was the operator fired for lack of funds? Wow! "Two More Days" and she will go back to Alaska and to safely shoot bears from airplanes, her favorite form of shooting. Brown Bears, not Polar Bears, we hope, the White House just put them in the "Endangered Species" List -just in time. I am sure she does not want to be accused of "Abuse of Power", again.

Nukenomics No Longer Add Up - Expert

Past Climate Change

Causes of Change | Rates of change | The Last 2,000 Years

The Earth's climate has changed throughout history. From glacial periods (or "ice ages") where ice covered significant portions of the Earth to interglacial periods where ice retreated to the poles or melted entirely - the climate has continuously changed.

Scientists have been able to piece together a picture of the Earth's climate dating back decades to millions of years ago by analyzing a number of surrogate, or "proxy," measures of climate such as ice cores, boreholes, tree rings, glacier lengths, pollen remains, and ocean sediments, and by studying changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun.

This page contains information about the causes of climate change throughout the Earth's history, the rates at which the climate has changed, as well as information about climate change during the last 2,000 years.

Causes of Change Prior to the Industrial Era (pre-1780)

Known causes, "drivers" or "forcings" of past climate change include:

• Changes in the Earth's orbit: Changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit (or eccentricity) as well as the Earth's tilt and precession affect the amount of sunlight received on the Earth's surface. These orbital processes -- which function in cycles of 100,000 (eccentricity), 41,000 (tilt), and 19,000 to 23,000 (precession) years -- are thought to be the most significant drivers of ice ages according to the theory of Mulitin Milankovitch, a Serbian mathematician (1879-1958). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Earth Observatory offers additional information about orbital variations and the Milankovitch Theory.
• Changes in the sun's intensity: Changes occurring within (or inside) the sun can affect the intensity of the sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface. The intensity of the sunlight can cause either warming (for stronger solar intensity) or cooling (for weaker solar intensity). According to NASA research, reduced solar activity from the 1400s to the 1700s was likely a key factor in the "Little Ice Age" which resulted in a slight cooling of North America, Europe and probably other areas around the globe. (See additional discussion under The Last 2,000 Years.)
• Volcanic eruptions: Volcanoes can affect the climate because they can emit aerosols and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
  • Aerosol emissions: Volcanic aerosols tend to block sunlight and contribute to short term cooling. Aerosols do not produce long-term change because they leave the atmosphere not long after they are emitted. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the eruption of the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia in 1815 lowered global temperatures by as much as 5ºF and historical accounts in New England describe 1816 as "the year without a summer."
  • Carbon dioxide emissions: Volcanoes also emit carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas, which has a warming effect. For about two-thirds of the last 400 million years, geologic evidence suggests CO2 levels and temperatures were considerably higher than present. One theory is that volcanic eruptions from rapid sea floor spreading elevated CO2 concentrations, enhancing the greenhouse effect and raising temperatures. However, the evidence for this theory is not conclusive and there are alternative explanations for historic CO2 levels (NRC, 2005). While volcanoes may have raised pre-historic CO2 levels and temperatures, according to the USGS Volcano Hazards Program, human activities now emit 130 times as much CO2 as volcanoes (whose emissions are relatively modest compared to some earlier times).

These climate change "drivers" often trigger additional changes or "feedbacks" within the climate system that can amplify or dampen the climate's initial response to them (whether the response is warming or cooling). For example:

• Changes in greenhouse gas concentrations: The heating or cooling of the Earth's surface can cause changes in greenhouse gas concentrations. For example, when global temperatures become warmer, carbon dioxide is released from the oceans. When changes in the Earth's orbit trigger a warm (or interglacial) period, increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide may amplify the warming by enhancing the greenhouse effect. When temperatures become cooler, CO2 enters the ocean and contributes to additional cooling. During at least the last 650,000 years, CO2 levels have tended to track the glacial cycles (IPCC, 2007). That is, during warm interglacial periods, CO2 levels have been high and during cool glacial periods, CO2 levels have been low (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Fluctuations in temperature (red line) and in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (yellow) over the past 649,000 years. The vertical red bar at the end is the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past two centuries and before 2007. Click on thumbnail for a full-size image and references.

• Changes in ocean currents: The heating or cooling of the Earth's surface can cause changes in ocean currents. Because ocean currents play a significant role in distributing heat around the Earth, changes in these currents can bring about significant changes in climate from region to region.

Top of page

Rates of Change

Studies of the Earth's previous climate suggest periods of stability as well as periods of rapid change. Recent climate research suggests:

• Interglacial climates (such as the present) tend to be more stable than cooler, glacial climates. For example, the climate during the current and previous interglacials (known as the Holocene and Eemian interglacials) has been more stable than the most recent glacial period (known as the Last Glacial Maximum). This glacial period was characterized by a long string of widespread, large and abrupt climate changes (NRC, 2002).
• Abrupt or rapid climate changes tend to frequently accompany transitions between glacial and interglacial periods (and vice versa). For example, a significant part of the Northern Hemisphere (particularly around Greenland) may have experienced warming ratesof 14-28ºF over several decades during and after the most recent ice age (IPCC, 2007).

While abrupt climate changes have occurred throughout the Earth's history, human civilization arose during a period of relative climate stability.

Top of page

The Last 2,000 Years

During the last 2,000 years, the climate has been relatively stable. Scientists have identified three departures from this stability, known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly (also referred to as the Medieval Warm Period), the Little Ice Age and the Industrial Era:

• The Medieval Climate Anomaly: Between roughly 900 and 1300 AD, evidence suggests Europe, Greenland and Asia experienced relative warmth. While historical accounts and other evidence document the warmth that occurred in some regions, the geographical extent, magnitude and timing of the warmth during this period is uncertain (NRC, 2006). The American West experienced very dry conditions around this time.
• The Little Ice Age: A wide variety of evidence supports the global existence of a "Little Ice Age" (this was not a true "ice age" since major ice sheets did not develop) between about 1500 and 1850 (NRC, 2006). Average temperatures were possibly up to 2ºF colder than today, but varied by region.
• The Industrial Era: An additional warm period has emerged in the last 100 years, coinciding with substantially increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities (see Recent Climate Change for more information).

Prior to the Industrial Era,  the Medieval Climate Anomaly and Little Ice Age had defined the upper and lower boundaries of the climate's recent natural variability and are a reflection of changes in climate drivers (the sun's variability and volcanic activity) and the climate's internal variability (referring to random changes in the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans).

The issue of whether the temperature rise of last 100 years crossed over the warm limit of the boundary defined by the Medieval Climate Anomaly has been a controversial topic in the science community. The National Academy of Sciences recently completed a study to assess the efforts to reconstruct temperatures of the past one to two millennia (see Figure 2) and place the Earth's current warming in historical context (NRC, 2006).

Figure 2: Reconstructions of (Northern Hemisphere average or global average) surface temperature variations from six research teams (in different color shades) along with the instrumental record of global average surface temperature (in black). Each curve illustrates a somewhat different history of temperature changes, with a range of uncertainties that tend to increase backward in time (as indicated by the shading). Reference: NRC, 2006. (Figure reprinted with permission from Surface Temperature Reconstructions© (2006) by the National Academy of Sciences, Courtesy of the National Academies Press , Washington, D.C.)

According to the study (NRC, 2006):

• There is a high level of confidence that the global average temperature during the last few decades was warmer than any comparable period during the last 400 years.
• Present evidence suggests that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. However, uncertainties associated with this statement increase substantially backward in time.
• Very little confidence can be assigned to estimates of hemisphere average or global average temperature prior to A.D. 900 due to limited data coverage and challenges in analyzing older data.

References

• IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning (eds.)].
• National Research Council (NRC), 2002: Abrupt Climate Change, Inevitable Surprises. National Academy Press, Washington, DC. National Academy Press, Washington, DC
• National Research Council (NRC), 2005: Radiative Forcing of Climate Change. National Academy Press, Washington, DC. National Academy Press, Washington, DC
• National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

ajc.com > Business

THOMAS OLIVER

Risk addicts were seduced by derivatives

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Our best and brightest have brought us to this brink.

It's as if a financial Manhattan Project were hatched in the last decade, in which the brightest business minds in the world gathered in some dark dungeon filled with computers whirring with mathematical formulas for credit and risk assessment.

MY OPINION: THOMAS OLIVER
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RECENT COLUMNS

• Free market needs to be politics-free 
• Trouble in housing market holds economy hostage 
• Risk addicts were seduced by derivatives 
• 'Jobless' recovery not so assuring 
• If we're wiser, we'll recover, but it'll hurt 

Unlike the whiz kids on the West Coast, whose crazy ideas produce actual products — laptops, iPhones, or GPS for your car — our business brainiacs created a shadow banking industry played out on a Playstation.

It was understood by few. Unknown to most.

It was a game built around fear.

Lenders seek to minimize risk by taking out insurance against defaults.

This insurance is called many things: hedges, futures, options, credit default swaps. They are forms of derivatives, "financial securities whose value is derived from another `underlying' financial security," according to the Financial Pipeline. "Derivatives can be used for hedging, protecting against financial risk, or can be used to speculate on the movement of commodity or security prices, interest rates or the levels of financial indices."

Insurance we can understand, even appreciate. But betting whether the insurance will be paid is akin to investing in whether your neighbor's house burns. Normal people would think that's sick.

What began as an aversion to risk ended up being an addiction to the thrill of risk.

Derivatives were concocted that were bets on the bets, whether the speculators were right or wrong. And there was a whole lot of hedging and betting on those bundles of risky mortgages.

The housing bubble burst over a year ago. But the financial markets didn't freeze or the stock market crash until it was revealed that these default swaps exceeded the gross domestic product of the world — $60 trillion.

Richard Anthony, chairman and chief executive of Columbus-based regional bank Synovus Financial Corp., said, "The speculation and the betting on these swaps that created excessive speculation undermined our financial system."

Anthony says we engaged in activity we couldn't understand. That's something our parents warned us against.

Doug Williams, president and chief executive of Atlanta-based Atlantic Capital Bank, spent his formative banking years at Wachovia, before it became "Second Union," which led to its downfall. He was chief risk manager.

"The derivative market is at the nexus of the credit crunch," he said. It represents "financial engineering at its worst."

An attempt in the previous decade to regulate this "dark market" failed. Now, the SEC chairman is urging Congress to shine some light into the dungeon where our best and brightest mainlined risk.

Their addiction has become our Great Recession.

"We outsmarted ourselves," Williams said.

Let's hope more sober minds can lead us through the recovery process.

A New Media Hero is Born: Just a few years too late

By Ken Silverstein

In recent days both the Washington Post and the New York Times have lionized Brooksley E. Born, who during her 1996 to 1999 tenure as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) pushed to regulate the trading of derivatives. "A decade ago, long before the financial calamity now sweeping the world, the federal government's economic brain trust heard a clarion warning and declared in unison: You're wrong," a Post article from today opened."

That "clarion warning," said the story, was issued by Born and was "met with hostility" by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin [Obama's Advisor -BayPointMike] and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr.—"all Wall Street legends, all opponents to varying degrees of tighter regulation of the financial system that had earned them wealth and power."

If there's a silver lining to the economic crash, it's seeing stuffed shirts like Greenspan and Rubin have their reputations brought down to earth. But the current hagiography of Born is a bit ironic, given that her "clarion warning" seems to have been pretty much ignored by the press back at the time, when it mattered.

During her heroic three-year stint as head of the CFTC, the New York Times mentioned Born's role there 17 times, according to a Nexis search. Seven of those mentions came in filler items that noted her appointment or departure from the agency.

There was very little detailed coverage of Born's struggle to regulate derivatives trading. Instead, there was the usual "fair and balanced" coverage in which all points of view are given equal weight, making it impossible to draw any informed conclusions.

Typical was a Times piece on May 8, 1998, "A Federal Turf War Over Derivatives Control." It quoted Born as saying, "What we're doing is trying to ascertain whether our own regulations remain appropriate, given the changes that have occurred in the market over the last five years." That was followed by a counterpoint position from an executive at J .P. Morgan & Company. Banks and other financial institutions "opposed tighter regulation of the market, arguing that such changes threaten to crimp innovation and drive the market offshore," the story summarized.

Coverage at the "Post" was similarly sparse and neutered. "Born's supporters, including some members of Congress, believed she was willing to stand up to the likes of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin," read a 1999 piece that noted her retirement from the agency. "Born's detractors saw her suggestions as an attempt to grab more regulatory authority for her agency."

I might have missed something, but I couldn't find any editorials from either of the newspapers applauding Born's efforts at the CFTC. And incidentally, Born's name does not appear in the index of Bob Woodward's 2000 book, "Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom." Nor does the word "derivatives."

The subtitle of today's Post piece describes it as "the story of how Washington didn't catch up to Wall Street." But the media didn't do a very good job of keeping up either.

Update: A reader, Luca Menato, just alerted me to Born's Wikipedia entry. It effectively begins with the Times story about her from last week.

Delay rail bond sales

CALIFORNIA VOTERS took an incredible leap of faith in approving Proposition 1A, a $9.95 billion bond authorization to start building a high-speed rail system.

U.S. Provides More Aid to Big Insurer

The federal government announced on Monday an overhaul of its bailout of the insurance giant American International Group, saying it would purchase $40 billion of the company's stock, after signs that the initial bailout was putting too much strain on the company.

In a joint statement, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury said the move was necessary "to keep the company strong and facilitate its ability to complete its restructuring process successfully." The new measures, they said, would help the company and promote market stability while protecting the interests of the federal government and taxpayers.

A.I.G. reported a loss on Monday of $24.47 billion, or $9.05 a share, in the third quarter, after a profit of $3.09 billion, or $1.19 a share, a year ago. The results included pretax losses of $18.31 billion from the declining value of A.I.G.'s investments.

Neel T. Kashkari, the assistant secretary of the Treasury who heads the Office of Financial Stability, said in a speech Monday morning that the new A.I.G. plan "was necessary to maintain the stability of our financial system."

A.I.G. shares were 8 percent higher, to $2.28 near the close of trading Monday. In the revised bailout, the Treasury Department will use the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion financial system rescue plan, to buy $40 billion of newly issued A.I.G. preferred shares.

The government created an $85 billion emergency credit line in September to keep A.I.G. from toppling and added $38 billion more in early October when it became clear that the original amount was not enough. As part of the revision, the Federal Reserve said it would reduce that credit line to $60 billion.

When the reorganized deal is complete, taxpayers will have invested and lent a total of $150 billion to A.I.G., the most the government has ever directed to a single private enterprise. It is a stark reversal of the government's assurance that its earlier moves had stemmed the bleeding at A.I.G. But Fed officials said the $40 billion investment would allow them to reduce their exposure to $112 billion from $152 billion, and improve the condition of the collateral for its loan. The revised deal will probably intensify the debate in Washington over why some companies should be saved while others are left to wither.

Congress had authorized the Treasury to use the $700 billion to shore up financial companies. But just this weekend, Democratic leaders in Congress called on the Bush administration to drop its opposition to using some of that money to rescue Detroit automakers.

The government's original emergency line of credit, while saving A.I.G. from seeking bankruptcy protection for a time, now appears to have accelerated the company's problems. The government's original short-term loan came with a high interest rate — about 14 percent — which forced the company into a fire sale of its assets and reduced its ability to pay back the loan, putting its future in jeopardy.

The Fed said Monday that it would reduce the interest rate on that credit facility to three-month Libor plus 3 percentage points from the current rate of three-month Libor plus 8.50 points. Libor, the London interbank offered rate, is a commonly used index that tracks the rates banks charge when they lend to one another. The fee on undrawn funds will be reduced to 0.75 point from the current rate of 8.5 points.

Federal Reserve officials said they had held discussions with A.I.G. management since they struck the original deal in mid-September. At the time, the government did not have the authority to make direct investments in financial companies. Now that they do, they say they believe that the approach is a more prudent way of stabilizing companies.

The new deal makes the government a long-term investor in A.I.G., something that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. had said he hoped to avoid.

The government will also spend $30 billion to help A.I.G. buy up a type of security called collateralized debt obligations that the company had agreed to insure against default. The securities are now held by institutional investors.

As their insurer, A.I.G has been forced to put up large amounts of cash as collateral as the global economy has soured and the securities seemed increasingly likely to default.

The new arrangement calls for A.I.G. to put the securities into a new entity, effectively removing them from the company's balance sheet.

A.I.G. would contribute $5 billion to the entity, which would buy $70 billion of the securities at 50 cents on the dollar, or $35 billion. The remaining $30 billion of the purchase price would come from the government.

The goal of both programs is to create separate entities to buy and hold the most toxic assets A.I.G. had promised to insure, so that if their value continues to fall A.I.G. will not have to include those losses in its bottom line. The company has argued that the securities' falling value does not necessarily mean it has suffered a financial loss.

Once A.I.G. buys the securities back from its trading partners, it will no longer have to provide cash as collateral under the terms of its insurance contracts — and collateral has been eating up more of A.I.G.'s cash than anything else since the broad financial crisis began.

A.I.G. negotiated the original $85 billion revolving credit line with the Federal Reserve after its efforts to raise money from private lenders failed in the panic of mid-September. The amount that it needed ballooned in a few days, as counterparties to A.I.G.'s insurance on complex debt securities laid claim to whatever collateral they could get.

People briefed on the negotiations said before the announcement Monday that the $85 billion was thought at the time to be the maximum amount that A.I.G. would need, including a little extra for a cushion. In exchange for making the loan, the Fed was promised a 79.9 percent stake in A.I.G..

The Fed and the Treasury Department said Monday that the federal government "intends to exit its support of A.I.G. over time in a disciplined manner consistent with maximizing the value of its investments and promoting financial stability."

Edward Liddy, the insurance executive brought in to lead the company out of the crisis, initially said he believed the Fed money would be like water pouring into a bathtub — a lot might be needed at first, but eventually the tub would be filled and the faucet could be turned off.

Since then, A.I.G. has needed more money than expected, and it has not been able to sell subsidiaries quickly enough to pay down the loan as required.

In addition to the $85 billion Fed loan and the $38 billion special lending facility, A.I.G. recently said it had been granted access to the Fed's commercial-paper program, which is available to all companies that issued commercial paper before the credit markets seized up. A.I.G. can borrow up to $20.9 billion under the program.

On Sunday night, Mr. Paulson briefed a representative of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team on the revised plan, according to senior Treasury officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The officials said the $40 billion A.I.G. investment is separate from the $250 billion the Treasury has earmarked for buying stakes in banks.

That leaves the Treasury $60 billion to work with, as the first allotment of the $700 billion program was $350 billion. The officials said they had chosen to freeze the A.I.G. bonus pool, rather than eliminate bonuses altogether, because the company needed the flexibility to retain its existing management.

The officials also said they had heard from insurers and companies in other industries about possible capital injections, and that they did not rule out making such investments. But they said that A.I.G., as a systemically important company, was clearly a special case.

Even as the government works to solidify A.I.G.'s finances, elected officials have been demanding a fuller accounting of the company's business practices and executive pay structure. The arrangement announced Monday requires that A.I.G. limit executive pay and perks and freeze the size of the annual bonus pool for the top 70 company executives. In October, the New York State attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, reached an agreement forcing A.I.G. to freeze payments to former executives.

"I find it hard to conceive of a situation that you could justify a performance bonus for management that virtually bankrupted the company," Mr. Cuomo said after the agreement was made.

The move followed the revelation, in a Congressional hearing convened by Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, that the former head of A.I.G.'s troubled financial products unit, Joseph Cassano, had been put on a retainer of $1 million a month after being dismissed in February.

Mr. Waxman and Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, have demanded that A.I.G. provide a more detailed accounting of its credit derivatives business.

from: http://www.physorg.com/news145636894.html

 

Taiwanese Researchers Introduce Blink of the Eye Transmission Speed System On A Chip

by Mary Anne Simpson, Technology / Engineering

System On A Chip (SOC) - Credit: Central News Agency

(PhysOrg.com) -- A world-wide expert on wireless communications, Professor Jri Lee of the National Taiwan University (NTU) and UCLA PhD conferred has created a system on a chip (SOC) with transmission speeds 100 times faster than WiFi and 350 times faster than 3.5G cell phones. Professor Jri Lee's team broke the speed record with the SoC design which is about 1/10th the size and cost of existing chips. Preliminary figures indicate the SoC chip can be massed-produced for less than $1 per unit.

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A demonstration of Professor Lee´s SoC chip was conducted recently at NTU. The system on a chip combines Front-End Circuits and an antenna array to reach the ultimate transmission speed. In practice the SoC chip can download a 4-GB video in about 10 seconds. The same video would take up to 2-hours using WiFi, 1.5-hours using ADSL and 4.5-hours using Bluetooth to complete the download.

According to Professor Lee, as reported by Taiwan News, the new chip can be used to connect to all domestic audio-visual components like television, stereo, video recorder and transmit to TV screens anywhere in the home instantaneously. In airports and train stations, the SOC could download an entire movie to a cell phone in a couple of seconds and upload thousands of pictures from a digital camera to a computer in a blink of the eye.

Professor Jri Lee´s team at the National Taiwan University Graduate Institute of Electrical Engineering introduction of the SoC chip edges out U.C. Berkeley and IBM´s researchers who are working on a similar solution. The SoC can be used by cell phones and digital cameras as long as the corresponding hardware is developed.

NTU and Professor Lee´s team is in the process of applying for a patent. Professor Lee´s academic career began at NTU. He achieved a combined Master´s degree and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. His work experience includes Cognet Microsystems in Los Angeles and Intel Corporation where his work included the SONET OC-192 and OC-48 transceivers. Since 2004, he has been Assistant Professor of electrical engineering at NTU and serves on various committees pertaining to broadband data communication, solid state circuits and other interest areas.

 

---------------------------------------BayPointMike wrote:

In the last eight years American Hi-Tech companies have sponsored over 100,000 scientists and engineers for 1B Visas -per year. All the visas are taken up within 2 days every year.

If you don't see the problem, perhaps you will in a year, or two.

The top one million Hi-Tech jobs are now filled by our new residents -legal residents. Are there One Million jobs that are "Top Hi-Tech Job Position"?

 

Recently, local college students were asked in Political Science class if they favored increasing college funding by more than ten percent, most of them voted against it. Now, do you see a problem?

Crisis Hits Tech Sector With Layoffs as Sales Slump

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

The historic Clock Tower at the heart of Sun Microsystems Agnews campus in Santa Clara, Calif., on Friday. Sun Microsystems announced a broad restructuring that could see up to 6,000 employees lose their jobs.

Telecom warily waits on 'wired' president

Iraq Quietly Dismisses Its Anticorruption Officials

New Jobless Claims Reach A 16-Year High, U.S. Says

Watch and Weep

This video was presented by the Program NOW in PBS.org  It is hard to believe, except I was studying the subject in Los Angeles when they promised that electric cars woul have to be two percent and a couple of years later, TEN (10) Percent of ALL cars in California, according to state rules.

Do any, none or all Congress members know about it?

http://media.pbs.org/ramgen/media4/now/223/electric-car-lo.rm?v1st=F06B2B9ED4842719

Go to PBS.ORG and the Program NOW for Video.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/446/index.html

Click on the photo of Stiglitz "A Gun At Our Heads"

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talks about misplaced priorities in handling the economic meltdown, and what we should do next.

Learn all that you ever wanted to know about our current Economic Crisis, how it came about and what can be done to avoid it.

He speaks in regular English, not like an Economist.

When he says about banks "gambling" he means "Derivatives", the term preferred by Economists to keep us from knowing what they are saying.

Ms. Born, by herself, tried to place an initial regulation on them but Chairman Greenspan, with the support of Sect. Rubin, prevented her.

These Derivatives (Bank "bets") represent more than the total Gross National Product of all the nations in the world. Over $540 Trillion.

Mr. Stiglitz ends with some well reasoned advice for Pres-elect. Obama.

August 20, 2008

Bombardier Wins Hybrid Locomotive Contracts Worth $485 Million

Bombardier has won orders worth $485 million to supply hybrid locomotives for the transport bodies in New Jersey and Montreal, Thomson Financial News reports, (via Forbes).

The new dual-powered locomotives will be capable of operating under both diesel power and alternating current electric power from overhead sources – a first in North America.

New Jersey Transit Corp. awarded the company a $262 million-order, which includes orders for 26 locomotive for passenger trains with options for 63 more.

The Agence Metropolitaine de Transport de Montreal awarded the company a $233 million-order, which includes orders for 20 locomotives with options for 10 more.

In July, Bombardier's aerospace division in Northern Ireland announced it has slashed CO2 emissions by 69 percent since 2001.

November 24, 2008, 8:30 am

Citigroup Therapy

Sen. Barack Obama Pledges Space Advocacy
By Patrick Peterson
FLORIDA TODAY
posted: 8 August 2008

TITUSVILLE - Sen. Barack Obama promised not to cut NASA funding and said Saturday at a town hall meeting he will rely on Florida Sen. Bill Nelson and revered astronaut and former Sen. John Glenn to help form his space policy.

Five Recent Medical Findings

Groups of monks and working people took a vaccine and both reacted to the vaccine and produced the anti-bodies to fight the virus from the vaccine, monks made more anti-bodies, earlier and faster.

People with stomach cancer were found to have a virus; a drug was used to kill the virus but, later, they found that many people also had the same virus but, it did not caused cancer in them. Analysis of patient data showed they had been under severe stress and that altered the virus into producing cancer. No explanation was given on why the patient's stress data was collected! Did they suspect stress data could be important? Why? Other data in other studies?

The Soviet started a study in the evolution of Silver foxes and selected those that showed a calm temperament for breeding. But, Communism fell and the U.S. paid to continue the study. In 30 years, they had a dog-like Silver fox with a single color replaced their spotted fur and barked instead of biting to intimidate and stopped baying; this is surprising to those that assume evolution is extremely slow.

A recent Radiocarbon study showed the age of the oldest human, in South Africa, is Fifty percent older than previously thought, around 180,000 years old, while initial generations lived about 20 years.

Many Norwegians with breast cancer, had no traces of it a few years later, without any treatment -at all. New data showed in Nov. 25^th, 2008, the lowest level of all kinds of cancer rates in the U.S. -ever.

For extra points, how is the above related to the following?

"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. 1. Be Proactive, 2. Begin with the End in Mind, 3. Put First Things First, 4. Think Win/Win, 5. Seek to Understand, Then to be Understood, (St. Francis Prayer?) 6. Synergy (Creative Cooperation), 7. Sharpen Saw (Balanced Renewal).  Mr. Covey also wrote "Principle-Centered Leadership".

"Principles are Intellectual Habits"-Aristotle 350 BC.

A problem with habits is that few wonder how we got them and, some, assume they were "inherited". Music schools have "genius" players polish their skills, daily, for many hours -a few notes at a time.

The Bible says God created man -not how. "The Bible teaches how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go."-Cardinal Beronius. Possible Implications of the four Medical Experiments listed:

Stress changed the DNA of a virus into one that causes cancer, serenity promotes the production of healing anti-bodies and peaceful behavior changed the DNA and inherited habits of Silver foxes. Can attitude improve our health? Should we seek peace and serenity?

The "Immune System" in the brain detects any type of a new infection or virus and fights it with the exact chemical that kills it or alters its DNA to make it produce stomach cancer -or not! Our brain copes with many illnesses, like "colds" or bite poisons from animals and insects and send the appropriate cure.

There were no pharmacies for the first 180,000 years and people depended on healing from herbs, bark, roots, leaves, flowers, etc.

The first medical textbook, a compilation of herbs and other cures was by Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037, Persian, born in current Afghanistan).  European  Schools of Medicine used his textbook for 500 years, the longest use of a Science textbook anywhere. The Arab Empire had the first Medical Schools. The bible is not a scientific textbook.

If we take drugs, could that interfere with the detection and responses of our "Immune System"?

Brain links (tubes thinner than hair: "synapses") send drugs and electric signals -we have 100 Trillion. There is no instrument fine enough to cut one, and only one synapses.

In an MRI study subjects worked the same problem before and after sleep and the MRI showed they used different parts of the brain each time -the brain, doctors said, "restructures itself" while we sleep.

Link cuts (lobotomy, still legal in some states and nations) is pointless, no function of a single link has been identified. Results are judged on the basis of patient self-evaluation (or not) ignoring that there are no pain sensors within the brain, or on the basis of cost or convenience. Nations that practice lobotomies on the mentally ill, assert there is much comfort for the patient and a reduction in the cost of caring for them.

Studies show our brain is more active while we sleep than when we are awake. What's it doing?

A complete but brief slide show on how, and why, the Economic disaster we have gradually came about in the last few years.

Everything is there to be seen. All we need to know!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2008/10/15/GA2008101502860.html

Susan Elizabeth Rice, a key adviser on foreign policy to Barack Obama during his campaign for the presidency, is a member of the advisory committee for the Obama transition and has been mentioned for several positions in President-elect Obama's administration, including deputy national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations.

Ms. Rice spent eight years at the White House and the State Department under President Clinton. She was a member of the National Security Council staff, first as director for international organizations and peacekeeping, and then as a special assistant to the president and senior director for African affairs. From 1997 to 2001, she was assistant secretary of state for African affairs. She has special expertise in the problems posed by weak and failed states, global poverty and transnational security threats.

A protégé of Madeleine K. Albright when Ms. Albright was secretary of state, Ms. Rice catapulted over more veteran officials in 1997 when she was given the job as assistant secretary of state. She also has had experience with Al Qaeda — Ms. Rice was the top diplomat for African issues during the 1998 terrorist bombings of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

She has been a member of Mr. Obama's inner circle for more than two years. She showed early loyalty to him despite her ties to the Clinton administration, signing on with Mr. Obama at a time when Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was presumed to be the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

She potentially faces tough questioning, however, because of her role in American policy toward Rwanda during the 1994 genocide when she was a member of a Clinton administration team that kept the United States on the sidelines. She told The Atlantic Monthly in 2001 that she had learned a lesson: "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required."

She and Condoleezza Rice, the current secretary of state, are both female African-American foreign policy experts who have ties to Stanford University, but they are not related.

She was born on Nov. 17, 1964, and is the daughter of a former governor on the Federal Reserve Board. She earned an undergraduate degree from Stanford and both a master's degree and a doctorate in international relations from New College at Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. After the Clinton administration, Ms. Rice was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was also a foreign policy adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign in 2004. She is married to Ian Cameron, the Canadian-born executive producer of ABC News's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." They have two children.