So, my kids are watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and they have a “Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends” float.
On the float, Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
They Rickrolled me!!!!!!
Update:
The Youtube:
Another edit:
The Wiki for Rickrolling.
The Mistral Engines G-300 (paid subscription required) is a multi fuel Wankel rotary engine.
Though the term “multi-fuel” means that it can run on both aviation (100LL) and automotive (87 Octane) gasoline, it’s spark ignited, though their web site states that they are working on Jet fuel capable engines.
Obviously there are fewer parts than a conventional piston engine, there are no conventional valves in a Wankel, but it still has a reduction gear, which was the major maintenance headache in the Thielert engine.
So, I’m driving, actually riding shotgun right now, to my mother-in-law’s for Thanksgiving, with my finger in a splint.
About 6 weeks ago, I got my finger twisted opening my door, and it has continued to bug me, so I decided to immobilize it for a few days, and load up on asperine.
Look at the picture. It’s a mother-in-law joke…..Well, it cracked up the receptionist at the chiroptactor.
Visiting my Mother-in-Law for Thanksgiving.
I am starting to get the sneaking suspicion that the same people who planned the war in Iraq and the occupancy are now hard at work, planning for the Federal credit crisis bailout . . .
They claim to have dropped bonuses, but they made “retention payments” to top level executives, including, “$3 million to retirement services chief Jay Wintrob.”
Who is Jay Wintrob?
Wintrob is CEO of AIG Retirement Services Inc., the division that sells annuities. He was chief operating officer of SunAmerica when AIG bought the firm for $19.7 billion in 1998. The business he now heads may sell for about $12 billion, according to Gary Ransom, analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton Cochran Caronia Waller. Wintrob didn’t return a call seeking comment.
So, he lost about 7.7 billion for AIG, and they feel the need to pay him money to keep him.
We need to start sending these guys to jail.
The State Canvassing Board, a panel of five arbiters charged with determining the winner in the overtime election tussle between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic rival Al Franken, unanimously voted this morning to deny the Franken campaign’s request that rejected absentee ballots be included in the recount.
I still say that it will come down to the challenges.
Well, it looks like today was the day for all the stuff you wanted to dump before a 4 day weekend.
First, consumer spending fell 1%, well beyond the prediction of 0.7%.
Remember that these days, the Christmas season starts in October for a lot of people.
This is a crushing figure, and it’s not just due to falling energy prices, because people are paying down debt too.
The consumer confidence numbers reinforce this. The index is at 55.3, the lowest number since 1980, though still above the record of 51.7 in May, 1980.
Confidence not any better on the business side of things, with
durable goods orders falling 6.2% in October, and no, that’s not an annual rate, that is the shrinkage for the month.
The unemployment stats say that weekly jobless claims fell last week, but I’m taking that with a grain of salt for the following reasons:
Just in case you are wondering how bad this will get, note that Fitch just cut its ratings on Toyota’s bonds to AA from AAA.
Seriously this is a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man news.
The credit markets are freezing up, though applications for mortgages are up, largely on insanely low interest….I wonder how many applications are rejected though.
I would also note that new home sales declined to the lowest level since 1982, so its not like there are a sh^%load of buyers out there.
As a result of all this, we are seeing a number of rescue packages world wide, with the European Commission announcing a €200 stimulus plan, ]China’s central bank cutting rates.
These are probably what drove the dollar up today, and it also drove oil up
That being said, I think that the most troubling indicator is the fact that the 10-year Treasury yield fell below 3%, a new record, and this indicates that the flight to the relative safety of US Treasuries is continuing unabated.
Well, the word is out on the street, or at least the WSJ has heard, that Bush and His Evil Minions™ don’t need to pardon themselves, because the Democrats will sweep this all under the rug for him.
Read the article carefully. It doesn’t say it straight out, but with lines like:
While Vice President-elect Joseph Biden suggested interest during the campaign in pursuing a criminal probe, Brooke Anderson, spokeswoman for the Obama transition office issued a statement Monday saying, “No decisions about interrogation issues will be made before the full national security and legal teams are in place.”
It leaves very little to the imagination. They are soft pedaling this.
No Secretaries, no Under-Secretaries, no Generals, probably not even any Colonels. Maybe a Major or 2 prosecuted, but mostly enlisted men and NCOs being prosecuted for things that they were told to do by superiors.
A continuation of the Bush policy.
It’s just too icky that the previous administration are, you know, a bunch of f$ck&ng war criminals who launched the most brazen assault on the Constitution since Jefferson Davis became a bitch for slavery.
Paul Volcker will be chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Austan Goolsbee will serve as the board’s staff director and sit on the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Like me, they ask the question, “Why are Robert Rubin and other directors still employed?“
It’s a good question.
Truth be told, my guess is that the Wall Street Journal hates Bob Rubin because he worked for Clinton, and they have CDS.*
It may be further exacerbated by the fact that his policies were so completely slanted toward the financial services industry, so the cognitive dissonance makes their heads hurt.
For me, it’s because he has been consistently anti-worker, pro-Wall Street, and now we know that he’s just an incompetent with a good line of crap to feed people.
*Clinton Derangement Syndrome
Noah Shachtman writes on the likely Robert Gates reappointment as SecDef, and titles it, “Meet the New Boss…“
The Who is my favorite group. Townshend is my favorite composer.
And I missed the opportunity to highlight one of their iconic songs.
Damn.
*Owned
David Lee, writer and producer, nails the issue:
Whenever anyone justifies their bigotry with what I call DHRB (deeply held religious beliefs) we roll over as if that were the end of the discussion.
We have confused respecting a persons right to hold whatever religious beliefs they chose with respecting those beliefs. The truth is there are plenty of DHRB that are simply not worthy of our respect. Can we start with the ones that have no respect for us? Can you imagine an African American respecting someone’s DHRB that the Bible justifies slavery? The right to believe it, yes. The belief itself? No way.
The fact is that there are many people out there who are not so much pro-religion as they are pro-hate, and they use religion as nothing more than a way to provide cover for that hate, and their ideas should not be granted any respect.
We capture him, we torture him for 7 years, we put him in front of what was intended to be a Kangaroo court, which promptly rules that Salim Ahmed Hamdan was not a terrorist mastermind, he was just a driver, and he should be sentenced to time served plus enough extra time to make sure that Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are out of office.
Well, it looks like Bush has given up on having his trophy, because Hamdan is to be shipped back to Yemen in the next few days.
Good for him, but this exercise that could best be described as Kafkaesque has harmed the United States and its interest at every step in the process, all because authorizing torture is the only way that Dick Cheney can get a hard on.
It appears that the FDIC just started requiring that banks deemed troubled by the FDIC must start reporting details of all its qualified financial contracts. (QFC)
What are QFC’s? Basically they are the big sh*&pile, MBS, CDS, etc.:
QFCs are contracts between a bank and a counterparty, and they include everything from securities and repurchase contracts to currency and credit default swap agreements – some of the same murky derivatives behind Wall Street’s biggest blowups.
Why does this scare banks:
Many banks still don’t know their exposure to these products or details about the counterparties, which they are also required to provide by the new ruling. The way Bair sees it, they don’t know because no one has ever forced them to know.
The bottom line:
If the FDIC rule passes, banks will have to be able to account for their exotic securities. These banks might have trouble.
Definitely, and it would have been far better that it had been done years ago.
It appears that they neglected to report extensive “in-kind” donations on the Prop 8 campaign:
….. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints failed to report money invested to organize phone banks, send out direct mailers, provide transportation to California, mobilize a speakers bureau, send out satellite simulcasts and develop Web sites as well as numerous commercials and video broadcasts.
It’s not the contributions, it’s the failure to report that is in question here.
Well, I haven’t checked my blog email for a while, but we did get a note from a representative of American Apparrel regarding my previous blog post, which I am publishing unedited (except for ####ing out some identifying information).
I will follow with a response.
from Ryan #### <####@americanapparel.net>
to msaroff2007@gmail.com
date Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 11:05 PM
subject Dov Charney
mailed-by americanapparel.netMatthew,
The reason the arbitration hearing’s outcome was predetermined was because the plaintiff gave an unsolicited confession that the accusations were fault and her attorney admitted that the charges were ‘bogus.’ American Apparel agreed to a proposed settlement only to avoid further legal fees which the case would have occurred had it went to trial. The settlement hinged on press release not because American Apparel attempted to mislead the public but because we refused a settlement that did not include public vindication.
Regardless of your opinion on the arbitration process, the company was a victim of malicious and false prosecution. I would be happy to show you the court documents in Mary Nelson V American Apparel where she was fined $7,500 by the court for falsifying evidence. It is your right to publish as you wish, but in this case, your facts are mistaken and defamatory.
Ryan ######
Truth be told, I don’t care about Dov Charney, Mary Nelson, or the legion of sexual harassment charges that have dogged the former.
I thought that I made that clear in my first post, but perhaps I did not.
My issue was about the arbitration system and it’s gleeful and knowing participation of that arbitration system in an abuse of the legal process.
If someone went into a court of law under these circumstances, where the court case was merely to confirm an existing agreement, there would likely be very well deserved judicial sanctions all around.
There are a number of potential ways to handle this which do not involve a judicial process, a sworn affidavit, a joint news conference, some combination of the two, etc.
However, to use arbitration solely for the purpose of creating a press release is an indication that the arbitration process is hopelessly corrupt.
The supporters of arbitration suggest that it is like the courts, only, “streamlined”. This case shows that it is not.
It shows that arbitration is an ethical vacuum.
After driving their bank into the ground, senior Wachovia executives in line for almost $100 million in severance packages.
In an article in the Guardian, economist Dean Baker notes that Timothy Geithner has been pretty much inside everything that has happened in financial regulation in the past decade or so, and it gives him gas:
Geithner was in the middle of all this [the Robert Rubin aggressive strong dollar policy that evicerated US manufacturing], even if not a lead actor. While this should not be forgiven – this recession and the millions of lives that are being ruined is not funny – it is not clear that Obama had very much choice.
Though he does acknowledge that there may not have been much of a choice:
In this respect, Obama faced the same sort of problem as those hoping to de-Ba’athify Iraq following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It would have been almost impossible to establish a government without including members of the Ba’ath party, since membership was a virtual requirement for holding a position of responsibility under Saddam.
Similarly, it would have been almost impossible to get to the top echelons of power, or even the middle ranks, during the Clinton-Bush years without giving lip service to the policies of one-sided financial deregulation and bubble-driven growth that were so fashionable at the time. The real question is whether Geithner has learned anything.
(emphasis mine)
I would that there are some bigger questions to ask in all of this:
Well, the US is threatening Russia over it not complying completely with the cease fire agreements, in this case my guess would be over their disinclination do withdraw from portions of Abkhazia that Georgia seized a year of so ago:
Russia is still failing to meet its ceasefire obligations with Georgia and Washington’s European allies must not overlook this and rush to embrace Moscow, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.
Matthew Bryza, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, said Moscow must pull back its forces as agreed in a French-brokered ceasefire that ended the war in August before there could be “business as usual.”
Mr. Bryza, you are a complete idiot.
No one cares what you thing. You will be gone in 8 weeks, along with the rest of your skeevy incompetent associates, and the Russians and the Europeans know this too.
Please, just have a steaming helping of STFU.