02.03.10
Posted in Predator State, Stumble and Fail at 5:36 pm by George Smith
President In Perpetuity of the Fools’ Hall of Fame. Hint: It’s not the person on the right. She has nothing to do with this.
Today’s Los Angeles Times had a full page ad for a shindig at the Honda Center in Anaheim.
Are you a loser who believes if you sit in a vast hall and listen to a disgraced person give you a pep talk while pretending he’s a great leader, some of the greatness will rub off? And you’ll rush back into the world a new man ready to ascend the ladder of success, earn a couple million bucks and exit the dreary mess that’s your life?!
The Colin Powell, the lead speaker, is for you.
Along with Zig Ziglar, old man Lou Holtz, and Michael Phelps who’s probably using it to make up for ad revenue lost when he copped to smoking dope.
Fifty percent career motivational speakers and 50 percent famous wash-ups from the American parasite class, Colin Powell sits in the top of the latter demographic.
Really, this is so choice, it writes itself as a beautiful sneer. One could go on for ten thousand words of continuous slur, maybe even more.
The man who went before the UN Security Council and delivered a speech to the world, a speech in which everything was proven emphatically wrong. More power to him. In the days that followed, everyone in authority in the US jumped on the Powell bandwagon.
“How to Get Everyone on the Same Page” — once — is one of the tips the great Powell will dispense at this thing. (I added the ‘once’ part.)
Powell will teach you “Take Charge Leadership”!
Leadership to take the charge right over the cliff, the captain and leader of the mass of lemmings.
Only $4.95 for a ticket, with the coupon, it says.
Here’s a speech I’d pay twice that — ten bucks — to hear Powell deliver:
“How I got into the business of getting a big check every week to spout before thousands of iron-clad ninnies like you after I wrecked my career and reputation.”
“There’s no more faith in thee than a stewed prune,” someone once wrote. Perhaps he operates under the rule that it’s morally wrong to NOT take money off really stupid people.
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Posted in Predator State, Stumble and Fail at 11:27 am by George Smith
Niche publishing with a bona-fide gold-plated audience, SA sends in notice of a new book, Silent Safety: Best Practices for Protecting the Affluent.
Showing preparedness for what would be a legitimate and actual class war that has not quite yet arrived, the publisher writes:
As the nation’s financial crisis continues to make headlines, many affluent families’clear and present dangers may be flying under the radar. Wealth brings considerable attention and security exposure to families across the globe. Many take appropriate countermeasures only after costly, disruptive or embarrassing events unfold. Since the inception of Risk Control Strategies (RCS) they have provided security solutions for the high-net-worth community to include some of the most affluent families in North America. At the behest of many and driven by copious experiences it was the desire of RCS co-founders Paul Viollis and Doug Kane, to craft a true, personal security best practice reference book for the affluent and their advisors. The information to follow will crystallize the various risks families face every day. Silent Safety provides pragmatic advice and strategic countermeasures that can be immediately deployed to contain a crisis, as well as recommendations to preemptively mitigate risk. This book will provide the reader with Risk Control Strategies’ proven methodology for protecting the wealthy and providing them with peace of mind.
Richard Bradley, Editor-in-Chief of Worth Magazine, made the following comments, “After reading Silent Safety, I would rather not live in the world of Paul Viollis and Doug Kane. All too often, it is a scary place in which terrible things can happen to good people. I realized that I may not think about the dangers around us very much but Paul Viollis and Doug Kane do, and they do it so that people like you and me can sleep at night.”
DD knows menace to the rich — the high net worth community — is no joke.
In foreign countries, it is not uncommon for the natives, impoverished, deprived and starved by their government and kleptocracy economies to riot and smash, or at least attempt to smash, the precious possessions of the high net worthy. To get the rich within their grubby grasp, so to speak.
However, DD knows this doesn’t happen in the United States. When was the last time you saw a riot on TV, one in which the natives stormed some place like Wall Street and began pulling people out of their offices?
Never.
Fat chance that’ll happen. People have been conditioned to be lickspittles to wealth for all their lives and it’s hard indoctrination to break.
Take the latest Jack In the Box commercial.
In it, the Robin Hood character is portrayed as an idiot and buffoon by Jack, who winces at the man’s fat ass. Everyone laughs. Good joke!
You can’t beat that kind of primetime messaging.
When the words populist and revolt come up, everyone thinks of Fox News and Glenn Beck.
After a year of Glenn Beck, everyone’s ready to revolt and hand out punishment for our awful state of affairs.
But it won’t be the high net-worth community, the affluent, on the receiving end — guaranteed.
Filled with populist vigor and the burning desire to set things right, we’ll riot and make sure that tax cuts are made and the government paralyzed so local offices are closed and parasites can’t apply for foodstamps, that teachers are fired or furloughed, that the local department of motor vehicles office is closed two days a week and half its staff fired, that local social worker employment is reduced by 50 percent, that ten percent of the street lights are turned off, that public transportation workers are made unemployed, that paid firemen are let go.
That’s really going after the wealthy in their armored limousines and turreted neighborhoods. We’ll show them!
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02.02.10
Posted in Predator State, Satan's Bank, Stumble and Fail at 9:44 pm by George Smith
DD returns again to his interest in OneWest, formerly IndyMac, aka Satan’s Bank in Pasadena. It sits at the corner of Lake and Walnut, across from Ralphs supermarket and DD passes right by it everyday on his stroll to pick up supplies. If I go at lunchtime, I often see some of Satan’s minions pouring out of the place in their banker shirts, striding across the way to Ralphs to buy lunch, a latte or perhaps some condoms which they will put on before commencing to screw others, not their wives, later in the week.
I’ve discussed it before here in connection with the Huffington Post’s publicity stunt campaign to fight evil banksters. In that post, I embedded a video of Bill Maher exhorting us all to end our relationships with giant evil banks and to move our money to smaller community-minded heart-and-soul banks. To do this, we were to surf out to MoveYourMoney.Info and plug our zip codes into a ‘finder’ which would return a safe list of small, community-minded allegedly not evil banks.
Of course, this turned out to be horseshit. The idea’s OK but the due diligence and rigor apparently aren’t there to make it work. DD plugged in zipcodes for Pasadena and got a short list containing OneWest.
There is now no shortage of bad news on OneWest on the web and in newspaper and magazine databases.
IndyMac did the things all the banksters are now accused of in the US. It specialized in really risky subprime lending and then went tits after the people at the top made a killing on the Ponzi scheme. Prior to the death of Lehman Brothers and the big bailout, the FDIC stepped in and saved it.
In the reorganization, some superwealthy guys took over and renamed it OneWest.
OneWest’s business model, as told in news stories on it, is to continue the certified nasty practices of the Wall Street financial giants.
That is, it profits off distressed holdings by using the taxpayer-funded government guarantees for detoxifying its subprime lending. OneWest is not small or community-oriented, unless you consider forclosing on people’s homes nationwide using taxpayer money as guarantee profit margin against what would be certain losses to be goodness for communities.
One fellow on the web explains it this way:
Several times per week, I get phone calls from attorneys. These calls all start out the same. “I am unable to get loan modifications done through a lender. What can I do???? The first question I ask is if the lender is Indymac/One West. Invariably, it is.
When OneWest took over Indymac, the FDIC and OneWest executed a “Shared-Loss Agreement??? covering the sale. This Agreement covered the terms of what the FDIC would reimburse OneWest for any losses from foreclosure on a property. It is at this point that the details get very confusing, so I shall try to simplify the terms.
Some of the major details are:
OneWest would purchase all first mortgages at 70% of the current balance
OneWest would purchase Line of Equity Loans at 58% of the current balance.
In the event of foreclosure, the FDIC would cover from 80%-95% of losses, using the original loan amount, and not the current balance.
That article is here.
It contains a demonstration using simple arithmetic.
That thought exercise shows how OneWest uses government guarantees for distressed assets in its rescue to ensure a profit on forclosures. In essence, the US government uses taxpayer money indemnifying OneWest against loss on a distressed property it owns, indeed guaranteeing a certain good amount of profit on it. It is the very essence of vulture crony capitalism and its main purpose, socially, is profit for OneWest through capitalization of the very badness of its former self through the working over of subprime mortgage holders.
“At this point, it becomes readily apparent why OneWest Bank has no intention of conducting loan modifications,” writes the man. “Any modification means that OneWest would lose out on … additional profit.”
“Many of OneWest’s investors worked at Goldman Sachs at some point in their careers, and have made lucrative careers out of buying distressed assets,” reported ABC News here in a story on a OneWest foreclosure operation reprimanded by a judge.
“Experts say private equity firms are making a killing in this economy, as they buy failed assets at huge discounts, and then resell what they can at a profit,” continued ABC.
“Financially, this is relatively smart, but ethically it’s challenging,” said someone to the news organization. “There’s no long-term interest for OneWest in bailing out these people in Patchogue.”
Particularly when the Uncle Sam is guaranteeing and underwriting a profit on the action.
Indeed, one can even find a complaint in the comments section at The Huffington Post, ironically in a post on the economic crisis, banking and mortgage loan modification:
I have tried from the first day this loan was available to get this loan from IndyMAC/One West.
They have lied numerous times. I read the 17 page loan qualifications the first day it was out, and the I qualified for the loan.
I sent my loan docs through certified mail and they were signed off by IndyMAC., Now they say they never got them. Then, they were shipped to Houston! Then I called back. They don’t have a Houston office! Then they moved from Austin to Austin. They said they have no outside phone line and no way to reach loan officers, they said I did not have a Fannie Mae loan, but I checked and I do.
When I first tried to get this loan my mortgage and all my bills were current. I filed under a hardship clause.
I am a single mother who has made do for 20 years …. I have an autistic son who lives with me … but my other son hurt his arm and the surgeons made a mistake and did the wrong surgery and now my son has a crippled arm and a day to day, life or death, blood dyscrasia. He moved in with me from the dorms at UCSD. The medical bills have sunk me, along with IndyMAC/One West.
Now, 10 months after the surgical mistakes, I am on the brink of dominos falling. I would not be in trouble if IndyMAC/OneWest were a lender with integrity.
That post is here.
So DD once again travelled to MoveYourMoney.Info to see if the Huffington operation had bothered to remove OneWest from it’s recommended list of community-minded banks. In the socially good cause of purging evil banks, so to speak.
You know the answer already. I plugged in Pasadena yesterday and got back this.
Now Satan’s Bank OneWest is listed not once, but twice, in MoveYourMoney.Info’s returned list of community banks to move your money to in Pasadena.
That’s certainly progress!
Make a protest, do some real civic action and do the MoveYourMoney.Info thing, says Eugene Jarecki, someone said to be a famous film-maker and author, in this video clip from the Tavis Smiley show on PBS.
Displayed on MoveYourMoney.Info’s blog, Jarecki says: “[… Put it in a community bank or credit union where the people know your name like on Cheers, they care about you, they know about your kids, they know who’s got a sore throat, all that stuff …”
(You need to see the clip. To call it fatuous insults the meaning of fatuous.)
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07.13.09
Posted in Phlogiston, Stumble and Fail at 2:46 pm by George Smith
“Matthew Robson, an intern at Morgan Stanley’s London office, has lots to say about media platforms of all kinds — so much that the bank’s analysts asked him to assess the habits of his friends when it comes to TV, radio, the Internet, the works,” writes Mark Lacter at LAObserved.
For this to make sense, keep in mind Lacter contributes to the coverage LAObserved reserves for the ongoing collective nervous breakdown and collapse of journalism at the Los Angeles Times. And as part of that, and part of the media scene in LA as a whole, there’s a regular interest in the loss of readership to the freetard crowd.
With that comes the regular appearance of what DD calls, “Let’s ask what one of the Lords of the Flies thinks!”
See here for an earlier treatment.
Translated, it’s called the “ask the teenager!” exercise. Or, in this case, the poxy fifteen-year old.
However, DD freely admits that at the age of fifteen he was a bona fide douchebag, like almost all fifteen year-old boys. And he liked shit that was free, even though there wasn’t an Internet to ease the mooching.
So, in Lacter’s piece, readers are directed out to a ‘study’ put out by Morgan Stanley, one in which “Matthew Robson,” fifteen years old, spills the beans on stuff even your dog or cat probably knows.
From an older blog entry on this old tactic:
DD has now been in cyberspace for almost two decades and has seen a variety of teenagers come and grow into not-teenagers along with stories in which journalists seek their wisdom in order to divine the future. The results have always been the same, just like reading unmoderated comments pages or the old Usenet: You get a kick in the nuts and your glasses broken, gratis.
One thing DD can tell from the Morgan Stanley report, which is here. Their banks analysts and bosses are not just really cheap. They also enjoy playing their clients for fools.
Banksters taking clients for a ride. How novel.
Take this emission from the fifteen year-old wanker, on TV habits: “Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average. This is due to programs coming on in seasons…”
“That’s brilliant!” to paraphrase the cartoon guy in the old Guiness commercial.
“Teenage boys usually watch more TV when it is the football season …” it continues, in case you thought such nuggets of precious nose gold were a fluke.
“No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarized on the Internet or on TV,” reports Robson.
It’s not hard to imagine the sound of the voice. It’s the Lord of the Flies tone, the one used to explain how ‘you’, Piggy, will be getting no meat at the pig roast.
Did DD say he was a fifteen-year old douchebag, too? And I didn’t read the newspaper, either.
There was one key difference. My opinions were not collected by a business consultancy, for free, to be resold as advice to the easily hoodwinked.
“Young Robson stands out because his findings are attracting such attention — even as they seem so anecdotal and flimsy,” writes Lacter at LAObserved.
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Posted in Cyberterrorism, Stumble and Fail at 8:16 am by George Smith
Today, a column at the Motley Fool flails around because it can’t figure out what stock to recommend as a result of the Pathetic War. Other than the usual defense contracting giants like Lockheed Martin. Since the Pathetic War doesn’t immediately seem to lend itself to windfalls of opportunity in financial speculation and carpet-bagging, this is a matter of some dismay.
The Fool asks for a magic wand in cyberspace — the ability to immediately identify precisely who is launching the attack. Since that’s not going to happen anytime soon, it opens the door for a lot of charlatans who say they can do it. All they have to do is send their press releases to the Motley Fool.
See here.
Business sections are also mad for anyone who can show a Pathetic War ‘job-creation’ angle, as evidenced by this bit of fluff at the Washington Post.
IT jobs! That’s the ticket! Company’s are always hiring! They can’t fill the positions fast enough!
Here’s the pail-of-fail truth: You’re middle-aged or old and one of the half million/per month who’s been fired for the last half year. You’ll need another degree to get into the market. So forget it, unless your parents or someone else will again bankroll your continuing education. Besides, fours year later, you’ll be that much more an old-looking flat tire compared to the new college grads.
Second pailful of fail: You already have the training, but you’re still screwed. No one wants you when they can have a young whipper-snapper for less than what you were earning when you were fired. Plus, everyone knows kids are the only ones who know about hacking. And that’s a permanent pail of fail.
“Austin-based 21st Century Technologies signed a $1 million cybersecurity contract with the U.S. Air Force,” reports the Austin-American Statesman.
“The company said the Air Force will use its Lynxeon intelligence analytics software to strengthen the government’s ability to head of cyberattacks.
“The contract runs from June 2009 to December 2011. The system will be used at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.
“The company said between 20 and 100 jobs are expected to be created over the life of the contract.”
“Yippie!!!!” writes one astute commenter. “$10,000 a year jobs created by Obama. Great piece of news Austin American. That should pay a lot of rent and utility bills.”
With a facility for arithmetic, the man gets to the nut of the matter. Most of the money is for software, installation, maintenance and consulting through a small shop, not job creation per se.
Rob Rosenberger
tees off on the GOP ninny — Pete Hoekstra,who recommended retaliation for the affront of the
Pathetic War.
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07.09.09
Posted in Stumble and Fail at 11:23 am by George Smith
Good news, lads, good news!
“565K new jobless claims, lowest level since Jan,” crowed the AP headline.
New claims for unemployment insurance plummeted by 52,000 to a seasonally-adjusted 565,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s significantly below analysts’ expectations of 605,000 for the week ending July 4, according to Thomson Reuters. The last time new claims were below 600,000 was week of Jan. 24.
“This is not as positive as it looks,” Jennifer Lee, an economist at BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a note to clients. “There are a number of special factors at play here, including the fact that the holiday-shortened week skewed the data.”
Now there’s a good word to use — plummeted. Let’s try a few examples on for size.
The fortunes of 565,000 Americans plummeted last month.
The chances that you’ll be able to keep up your mortgage payments now that you’ve been fired have plummeted.
Do you think your credit rating will have plummeted by this time next year?
How many more people do you think will have plummeted to their deaths from the San Francisco Bay Bridge than usual this time next year?
The public’s belief in what is printed in the business sections of newspapers has plummeted.
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06.18.09
Posted in Phlogiston, Stumble and Fail at 2:23 pm by George Smith
Indirectly proven by science in this piece from the New York Times.
It’s about the summer swimming seaon and diarrheal illness.
DD managed a swimming pool for four years in his undergrad days. At this time, admittedly many many years ago, the Pine Grove Community Swimming Pool was not a vector for disease. Checks for fecal coliforms, which would not detect cryptosporidiosis — not an observable problem in the Seventies, were regularly performed.
Because of a rise in cryptosporidiosis, a parasitic illness, health experts now feel compelled to issue advice which seemed obvious thirty years ago.
“In addition to not swimming while ill with diarrhea, health experts say people should shower before swimming and never use the pool as a toilet,” reports the Times.
Yes, defecating in the swimming pool is crass and bad. Also obvious and sickening.
There is no stealthy shitting in a busy public swimming pool, unlike sneaking the other thing, which everyone does. DD did not realize that Americans now had to be warned not to do the former.
“Parents should wash young children before they enter the pool and take them on frequent bathroom breaks. Children in diapers require vigilant attention.”
Yes, people, give your lifeguards a break this summer! They’re only making minimum wage.
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06.17.09
Posted in Predator State, Stumble and Fail at 2:13 pm by George Smith
DD figures 99 percent of the country is still in denial about what’s here, or most certainly coming, for the majority. And this is probably because no one can get their heads around what approximately half a million being fired a month for a year or two will mean for the country.
In the last few months, for example, DD has seen virtually EVERYONE he once knew well in the Lehigh Valley fifteen years ago lose their jobs.
And here in Pasadena, the signs of collapse are everywhere when you care to look: Abandoned car dealerships on Colorado, zombie banks at the intersection of Lake and Colorado, the destruction of the Pasadena Coffee Company — a business which had been a comfortable landmark on Sierra Bonita for sixteen years, at least; abandoned and blighted apartment buildings on the south side of the freeway, cordoned off with fencing and tarpaulins so passers-by are hindered from seeing how bad they really look (the block I have in mind appears irredeemable), a next door neighbor with two SUV’s, now quietly reduced to saying he ‘works from home,’ a continuous trudge of scavengers from the west side of the city to the east, climbing through dumpsters (you can hear them checking the bin fifty yards from where I’m typing this every five hours or so).
What’s the answer?
Old-timey America and the down ‘n’ out had it. They knew.
Voila!
Most people think Pasadena is very upscale, a place where it’s hard to find bum wine.
Not true!
In at least one spot, made up of two small markets at the intersection of North Wilson and Villa, Thunderbird and Night Train Express are in stock.
These beverages served and serve a purpose. They’re for when you’ve really hit the skids. And because they are fortified with about 18 percent alcohol by volume, they’re bona fide painkillers.
Yes, it’s been a very bad year here in Pasadena and it looks to only get worse. So if it’s like that where you live, I’m giving you a consumer head’s up because at some point, maybe soon, you’re going to want a lot more for a lot less than that frou-frou bottle of chardonnay furnishes, no matter how bad the solution tastes. You’re going to want to take advantage of one of the more lasting things this country still makes. And that corporate America hasn’t, and presumably can’t, outsource to China for contamination and adulteration.
You are, in short, going to want to acquaint yourself with a knock-out shot for enduring disaster. You’ll need something after ‘national health care reform’ goes through and instead of achieving universal coverage, we’re all dunned by health insurance companies who’ve been given the power to empty the pockets of those they’ll deny coverage to, anyway. Almost like usual, only even worse. You’ll want these drinks after the tenth employer has turned you down for a minimum wage job because they insisted on running a credit check and your score is a hash because you’ve been unemployed and in areers for so long.
You bum! Someone should put you in jail soon!
But back to the consumer report.
Calling Thunderbird a wine is — well … wrong. It’s light yellow and has a medicinal taint, many acrid notes and a potentially headache-provoking (depending on the individual’s hardiness) sweetish primary taste/odor. Three quarters of the way through a bottle left DD’s eyes burning, my eyelids drooping. The next morning, there was dull lower back pain, right in the kidneys. There was no severe hangover, but two bottles would be more than enough to ensure an unpleasant and perhaps very dangerous misadventure.
You should call it a night after your first bottle of Thunderbird. If you’re establishing a habit, carve out that baseline and stick to it.
Night Train Express was, however, my favorite of the two. It is recommended to be served very cold.
Night Train actually looks like wine although it, too, immediately impresses one with its medicinal smell and off but very sweet flavor. DD put a bottle in the freezer and after about two hours it had turned almost completely to red ice. Since there is so much sugar in Night Train, it thaws quickly under a stream from the faucet. Don’t thaw it entirely. Leave it in a reddish slurry and then pour. The slurry will disappear in your glass leaving it very cold, indeed.
The colder the serving, the more the consumer is insulated from the poorer qualities in the flavor of Night Train.
When a bottle of Night Train is had in this manner, its taste is tolerable and you’ll probably be able (or be urged) to drink it much faster than you should. Fight that urge. Take an hour and a half for that bottle. Stay in your apartment or house, if you still have the latter. And go to bed.
The Night Train morning after is fairly eventless, except for a desire to drink a lot of water. The alcohol content in bottles of it and Thunderbird guarantee your metabolism gets dried out pretty good.
The experience did awaken some old engraved muscle memory. Back in the good ol’ Eighties, the early days of grad school, DD spent Friday nights in Pine Grove, listening to new records at a friend’s home on Wideawake Street. He always had something like Night Train, sometimes T. J. Swan, or combinations of these and Black Velvet or Seagram’s Seven. The morning’s after tended to be much worse, though.
Cisco was also on sale at the same corner of Pasadena. However, the colors and advertised flavors just weren’t appealing to DD.
If you’re near the intersection of Wilson and Villa in Pasadena, you can find the small 375 and and full 750 ml bottles of Night Train and T-Bird. Cisco is furnished in only the smaller volume. Personally, if cruising by, go to the market with no obvious name. You can recognize it by the LA Times newspaper vending machine on the sidewalk, Times’ employees being now among the most needy for the effect of strong bum wines. Even though they haven’t yet admitted this to themselves.
Although Bumwine.com sometimes advises starting with the smaller bottle, DD has done the testing and can tell readers — that’s pointless! Don’t buy the half tank of gas and wish you’d had a fill up half an hour later! The half measure is not what you want; always go for the standard serving as not only do you get much more, you also save at least a dollar and some change/volume with both brands.
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