02.03.10
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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Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 9:41 am by George Smith
Last week the Washington Post published an extraordinary number of articles on bioterrorism. Extraordinary not because of the information they delivered, but outstanding because they were very bad. And all written by reporter Joby Warrick, seemingly synchronized to lead up to the Graham-Talent special interest group’s critique of the Obama administration on preparedness.
Today, the Post’s Fred Hiatt continues the atrocity on the editorial page.
One of last week’s particularly bad pieces of reporting concerned ex-CIA man Rolf-Mowatt Larssen’s Harvard-issued ‘study’ on al Qaeda and WMDs.
It was an example of astonishingly poor work and it was destroyed by DD here in a piece entitled The Busted Watch of US Threat Assessment.
Another copy was posted at GlobalSecurity.Org here.
The Mowatt-Larssen report — entitled Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality? could not even get the simple facts concerning a policeman’s death right in the famous case of the alleged London ricin ring. And this was information published countless times in newspapers all over the United Kingdom.
That was hardly all that was wrong with the Mowatt-Larssen report. But readers can skip back to the original posts to get the details on this shabby piece of work.
One of the major problems with such poor analysis from high places is that it continues to drive opinion, more news stories and, eventually, policy. Once it is embedded in a place like the Washington Post it becomes very damaging. It actively impedes legitimate efforts to educate the public on issues and reality in the so-called war on terror. It serves only as another citation for those writing more things asserting that one needs to be very afraid.
And today, Hiatt’s opinion piece, the WaPo man cites Mowatt-Larssen right off the bat. Mowatt-Larssen, Hiatt implies, has shown we ought to still be alarmed.
“Three thousand people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” writes Hiatt. “More than 300,000 could be dead within one week after a modest attack with biological weapons.
“For most people, the thought of such an attack is an unthinkable horror. For al-Qaeda, it is a lingering dream and one that it is working diligently to achieve … Al-Qaeda is engaged in a ‘long-term, persistent and systematic approach to developing weapons to be used in mass casualty attacks,’ writes Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs …’
“Mr. Mowatt-Larssen is not the only one sounding an alarm.”
It is a textbook pathological case of argument from authority without any vetting of that authority.
And it was part of an argument Hiatt used to belt the Obama administration over the head, chiding it to act quickly to remedy the nation’s unpreparedness so that the people would be protected from deadly bioterrorism.
This is not a new song. Played literally thousands of times in the last few years it has worn out its ability to enlighten, if it ever had much of that precious quality in the first place. Now it exists only to hector and terrorize.
Jason Sigger at Armchair Generalist sees the problem clearly, too, and it’s not us or our inability to see the obvious.
He writes, in this case addressing some information concerning the Graham-Talent special interest group:
“Bad enough that Hiatt joins those who would continue overstating the actual threat of terrorists using nuclear or biological weapons to cause mass casualties. I thought newspapers were supposed to, you know, report facts. But pinning the G-T commission’s report on the Obama administration runs counter to what the commission said – that this was a report on the government’s efforts over a period of time, not within the last year …”
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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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Posted in Phlogiston, Predator State at 9:30 pm by George Smith
Today’s unintended joke comes from Yahoo’s news service for the promotion of guilt, appreciation of parasites and furtherance of lickspittling.
Remember when you were bullied and beaten for reading books or having thick glasses or being shitty in gym?
Well, it was all your fault, ‘science’ says.
“Kids who get bullied and snubbed by peers may be more likely to have problems in other parts of their lives, past studies have shown,” read Yahoo today. (No link.)
“And now researchers have found at least three factors in a child’s behavior that can lead to social rejection … The factors involve a child’s inability to pick up on and respond to nonverbal cues from their pals.”
If you’re a parent, here’s what you to do to correct your bullied child’s errant ways:
Help the child identify the cue they missed or mistake they made, by asking something like: “How would you feel if Emma was hogging the tire swing?” Instead of lecturing with the word “should,” offer options the child “could” have taken in the moment, such as: “You could have asked Emma to join you or told her you would give her the swing after your turn.”
Create an imaginary but similar scenario where the child can make the right choice. For example, you could say, “If you were playing with a shovel in the sand box and Aiden wanted to use it, what would you do?”
Lastly, give the child “social homework” by asking him to practice this new skill, saying: “Now that you know the importance of sharing, I want to hear about something you share tomorrow.”
The studies are detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. They were funded by the Dean and Rosemarie Buntrock Foundation and the William T. Grant Foundation.
These people are indeed tricky as they couch the advice in the reverse — it is YOU, YOU — the child, who were bullying by doing something like NOT SHARING and so you got what you deserved when the ante was upped and Aiden took that shovel off you by force and hit you over the head with it.
You see, you had it coming.
True story from my youth in Pine Grove, Pennsyltucky.
My friend Dirk and I were playing in his backyard one day. Dirk was a teaser. He was teasing me about something, I forget what. It went on and on and on.
Finally, I leaned over and bit him in the face right under the eye. An inch or two up and he would have lost that orb. That teasing was abruptly stopped. It took a quick trip to the doctor and a clamp to staunch the bleeding.
He had a tiny scar on his face from that for decades. Perhaps he still has it.
About eight years later I used to get bullied a lot in gym for being small and detesting the playing of softball or touch football which is about all we were allowed to do. I was small. Did I say, that?
Of course, that was all my fault, too.
As soon as I could I started weightlifting and went out for the wrestling team. When you can bench or curl at least one hundred pounds more than your peers weigh they become like putty when within your grip. I quietly and calmly muscled those who were stupid enough to cross me in the gymnasium. (It did not, though, fix the fetish for softball.)
I support this kind of bullying and applaud if you do, too. Kids, young and old: Bite some asshole in the face, the sooner the better.
I thought Rorschach was the best character in Watchmen.
Subconsciously, perhaps this is why:
“One of the kids smashes a piece of fruit in [young] Rorschach’s face and then Rorschach takes a cigarette out of the bully’s mouth and then shoves it in the bully’s eye. Rorschach then attacks the other bully and starts biting his face. Several bystanders then try to pull Rorschach off.”
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Posted in Uncategorized at 4:02 pm by George Smith
Upon news of Blogger’s abandonment of FTP-publishing, it seems logical to see if the old WordPress can be dusted off an reused to better effect.
See here for the original news on the Blogger-apped part of the site.
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