Barney Frank & Elmer Fudd

This comment made my day:

"Elmer Fudd needs to go away."

Quote of the Day

"It's ... like including a Heroes DVD with every guidance missile system we sell." - Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), 30 Rock, Season 3 Episode 7

Awesome show!

An American Carol :-)

This is a really funny movie! I don't get it why it's only rated 4.9/10. Anyway, I guess it depends on your type of humor...

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OK, just finished watching the movie. Still comedic, but in a sly way, the underlying message is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are justified, and that we should always be scared of Islamist terrorists. The issue is too complex to get into here, but it's still a funny movie even if you don't agree with America's foreign policy.

Financial Crisis 2008: Who is to blame? Whose fault was it?

The media, as always, will (and has) blame(d) Wall Street and greedy Republicans. But the facts are quite different. To better understand who is to blame for the crisis, we should listen to those who have a lot to lose in a financial crisis and those who were inside the banking industry. Hedge fund managers, whose financial well-being is directly proportional (or perhaps exponential might be a better word) to their performance, have a lot riding on guessing the performance of companies, commodities, and the financial system as a whole.

I found these two great insights into what happened, first by Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of hedge fund Blackstone Group, and Noel Sheppard, editor of NewsBusters who worked in the banking industry during and after the 1980s S&L crisis.

Schwarzman: "It’s a perfect storm. It started with Congress encouraging lending to lower-income people. You went from subprime loans being 2% of total loans in 2002 to 30% of total loans in 2006. That kind of enormous increase swept into the net people who shouldn’t have been borrowing.... Those loans were packaged into CDOs rated AAA [by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac], which led the investment-banking firms [buying them] to do little to no due diligence, and the securities were distributed throughout the world, where they started defaulting." [Read full article here]

Sheppard: He quotes the Investor's Business Daily, which pinpoints the start of the crisis to Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act, which forced banks to lend to uncreditworthy borrowers, mostly in minority areas. Then, "Despite warnings from GOP members of Congress in 1992, Clinton pushed extensive changes to the rules requiring lenders to make questionable loans." [Read full article here]

So it wasn't too much regulation of the private market that caused the problem, it was too little regulation of the quasi-government entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and unsound laws passed in the name of equality for everyone.

India Malnutrition / India's First Unmanned Moon Mission

Shouldn't you guys try to feed your people first?


India's Undernourished Children: Executive Summary
India’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) needs to undergo significant changes to address the current malnutrition crisis in India, according to a World Bank report. The prevalence of underweight children in India is among the highest in the world, and is nearly double that of Sub-Saharan Africa, the report says. It also observes that malnutrition in India is a concentrated phenomenon. A relatively small number of states, districts, and villages account for a large share of the burden – 5 states and 50 percent of villages account for about 80 percent of the malnutrition cases.
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India to Launch Its First Unmanned Moon Mission
NEW DELHI -- Amid its first economic slowdown in three years, India is getting ready to shoot the moon.

On Wednesday, the country is scheduled to launch its first unmanned moon mission, when lunar spacecraft Chandrayaan-1 blasts into space aboard an Indian-made rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in the country's south.

The launch will put India into an Asian space race, which last year saw Japan and China launch lunar orbiters. Sites in those countries are regularly used for launching commercial satellites.

The Chandrayaan-1 mission is the Indian Space and Research Organization's first attempt to propel a spacecraft beyond the Earth's atmosphere, although India has been launching suborbital satellites since 1975. About 1,000 scientists and engineers have worked on the lunar project for four years.
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