Video: Sleepy puppy doesn't want to go to sleep

Oh, and this video looks a bit like the way I see things out of my right eye versus my left (the left was just operated on for a cataract). Everything with the right eye, I now can tell, is cream colored (though this video is a tad more cream colored than my vision). The left eye seems the colors as they should be (though everything now seems to have a blue tinge).

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Gaius talks Climate Change on Virtually Speaking

Topic included:

■ Scientists now talking about climate catastrophe, per this post: Hugging the Monster

■ Grand Bargain and the Democrats, per this post.

You can listen to his interview here:

Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on Blog Talk Radio

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Obama nails Romney on Bain, explains why it matters

Obama was asked about Bain at the NATO summit today, and gave a great answer:

“The reason why this is relevant to the campaign is that my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience.

He's not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He's saying, I'm a business guy, and I know how to fix it, and this is his business. And when you're president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, your job is not simply to maximize profits

Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot.

Your job is to think about those workers who get laid off, and how are we paying for their retraining.

Your job is to think about how those communities can start creating new clusters so they can attract new businesses.

Your job as president is to think about how do we set up an equitable tax system so that everybody's paying their fair share, that allows us then to invest in science, and technology, and infrastructure, all of which are going to help us grow.

And so if your main argument for how to grow the economy is "I knew how to make a lot of money for investors then you're missing what this job is about." It doesn't mean you weren't good at private equity. But that's not what my job is as president.

My job is to take into account everybody, not just some.

My job is to make sure the country is growing not just now, but 10 years from now, twenty years from now.”

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Does Facebook wreck marriages?

Facebook?  I've never met anyone on Facebook.  Is this a "straight" thing?

From SmartMoney:

More than a third of divorce filings last year contained the word Facebook, according to a survey by Divorce Online, a UK-based legal services firm. And over 80% of U.S. divorce attorneys say they’ve seen a rise in the number of cases using social networking, according to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “I see Facebook issues breaking up marriages all the time,” says Gary Traystman, a divorce attorney in New London, Conn. Of the 15 cases he handles per year where computer history, texts and emails are admitted as evidence, 60% exclusively involve Facebook. The site did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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US cable internet companies to offer "free" Wi-Fi access

While the cost of internet services remains criminally high (and slow) in the US this is still a positive development for consumers. In France we have had the option to access Wi-Fi routers outside of home for years though it's strictly been through the option to access other vendors routers has not yet happened.

Cool news from cnet:

The nation's biggest cable operators are banding together to offer free Wi-Fi access to their broadband customers in more than 50,000 hotspots around the country.

On Monday, Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable announced on the first day of the Cable Show here that they'd enable each other's broadband customers to access their metro Wi-Fi hot spots. The companies are calling the new network "CableWiFi," so that subscribers will be able to find the hot spots when they're roaming outside their own cable territory.

In early 2010, Cablevision, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable began allowing their subscribers to roam onto each other's Wi-Fi networks in New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Philadelphia and Connecticut. And Bright House Networks and Cablevision have already launched CableWiFi alongside their branded WiFi networks around New York City and in central Florida earlier this month.

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Is Joe Ricketts the real victim here? I think not.

If you read John Kass' latest piece in the Chicago Trib, you're supposed to feel sorry for the kids of Joe Ricketts', the near-billionaire who tried to put together a $10m campaign to use Rev. Wright to bring down President Obama.

You see, the Ricketts family owns the Chicago Cubs, and the Cubs have just asked the city for a lot of money. And who runs the city of Chicago? The former chief of staff to President Obama, Rahm Emmanuel. Emmanuel, not surprisingly, wasn't feeling terribly friendly to the Ricketts family following the revelation of dad's secret plans regarding Rev. Wright.

Kass argues in the Trib that Emmanuel's use of his office to punish the Cubs is akin to government censorship. Kass also argues that it's unfair to go after the Cubs in any case, since Ricketts' kids run it, not the evil dad.

Yeah, but. While the kids may run the Cubs, it's not entirely clear that dad isn't part owner.

Let’s start with the Cubs. In October 2009, a trust that Joe and Marlene Ricketts established on behalf of their family acquired a 95-percent controlling interest in the Cubs and the team’s home park, Wrigley Field. Tom Ricketts, a son, is team chairman, and Pete Ricketts, Laura Ricketts, and Todd Ricketts (another son) all serve on the board.

Getting back to Kass' main point, that this is an infringement of free speech - is it?

Ricketts is still free to spend his $10m smearing the President, no free speech infringement there. But it might affect his business dealings with the city. In other words, Ricketts' involvement in politics might affect his involvement in politics. No surprise there.

But let's take the city out of it. I could imagine some arguing that Emmnuel being "government" might make this case more troublesome. What if Cubs fans boycotted Cubs games because of Ricketts wanting to Swiftboat the President? Would Cubs fans also be infringing, or impinging upon, the Ricketts family's free speech rights? Or would Cubs fans simply be exercising their own free speech rights?

And let's talk a moment about the Ricketts family's free speech. $10 million is a LOT of free speech. One could argue that it's monopoly speech rather than free speech. There's no way someone like your or me could compete in a free and open market with Ricketts' $10m. So is it really "free" speech that Ricketts is exercising when his goal was to use his unique wealth to monopolize the discussion?

This is the problem I have with money in politics in general, and with super huge donors in particular. You can argue, if you like, that small dollar donations are the ultimate in democracy. But is one guy spending $10m really democratizing? Then again, I'm sure that one guy would argue that the other side's big money honchos are already spending their big bucks, so he's simply leveling the playing field.

Again, it feels sometimes like we've really let money corrupt Washington, and our entire political system, far more than any of us may realize. Read the rest of this post...

In another bad economic sign, China rejecting raw materials

The demand for raw materials in China has been slowing, but this takes matters to a new level. Defaulting is an extreme measure in a healthy economy so this does suggest problems ahead for China.

Chinese consumers of thermal coal and iron ore are asking traders to defer cargos and — in some cases — defaulting on their contracts, in the clearest sign yet of the impact of the country’s economic slowdown on the global raw materials markets.

The deferrals and defaults have only emerged in the last few days, traders said, and have contributed to a drop in iron ore and coal prices.

“We have some clients in China asking us this week to defer volumes,” said a senior executive with a global commodities trading house, who warned that consumers were cautious. “China is hand to mouth at the moment.”

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Video: Taking a chain saw to a beer bottle

While this went far better than I expected, I'm not sure it's the brightest thing to be doing without goggles on (or at all).

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JPMorgan risk overseer was fired in 2007 for failed gambles

For the smartest guys ever who know risk better than any other bank, they look like the Keystone Kops. Even more disturbing is that there still are plenty of people who continue to think that the JPMorgan team is run by brilliant people.

I mean sure, besides losing badly elsewhere and launching a regulatory probe, what part didn't sound like a great hire? Add to that the label of "trader at heart" for the senior director in charge of risk and you have a real winner. Bloomberg:

Irvin Goldman, who oversaw risks in the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) unit that suffered more than $2 billion in trading losses, was fired by another Wall Street firm in 2007 for money-losing bets that prompted a regulatory probe, three people with direct knowledge of the matter said.

JPMorgan appointed Goldman in February this year as the top risk official in its chief investment office while the unit was managing trades that later spiraled into what Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon called “egregious,” self-inflicted mistakes. The bank knew when it picked Goldman that his earlier work at Cantor Fitzgerald LP led to regulatory sanctions against Cantor, according to a person briefed on the situation.

JPMorgan’s oversight of risk in its chief investment office has become a key issue as U.S. authorities examine the incident and lawmakers debate how to prevent banks from making wagers that might endanger depositors. Goldman was given the risk- oversight job after his brother-in-law, Barry Zubrow, 59, stepped down in January as JPMorgan’s top risk official, according to a person briefed on the matter. Less than a week after the loss became public, the bank stripped Goldman of those duties, appointing Chetan Bhargiri to succeed him.

By the way, why is Jamie Dimon still on the board of the NY Federal Reserve? Why is Elizabeth Warren the only person calling for his resignation? Read the rest of this post...

"Apocalypse fairly soon" in Europe

Paul Krugman wrote a Friday column that gives us a chance to review and re-explain the current state of things in Europe. The state of the Europe is stark — poised on perhaps its last precipice.

Here's The Professor's summary (my emphasis and some reparagraphing everywhere; h/t The Stars Hollow Gazette):

Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. ...

This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality[.]

In other words, we're at a tipping point. Krugman calls it "the moment of truth." Indeed.

Krugman offers an excellent walk through the history of this crisis — how they got to this place. I'll skip that, since we've written about it before, but do hop over if you care; it's short, concise and accurate.

Let's turn instead to where we are now. Krugman:

Greece is, for the moment, the focal point. Voters who are understandably angry at policies that have produced 22 percent unemployment — more than 50 percent among the young — turned on the parties enforcing those policies. ...

So now what? Right now, Greece is experiencing what’s being called a “bank jog” — a somewhat slow-motion bank run, as more and more depositors pull out their cash in anticipation of a possible Greek exit from the euro. Europe’s central bank is, in effect, financing this bank run by lending Greece the necessary euros; if and (probably) when the central bank decides it can lend no more, Greece will be forced to abandon the euro and issue its own currency again.

Now a look at that through our own lens:

■ It's sweet in a bitter way that the ECB is ultimately feeling the pain of its own policies. The ECB created the current crisis in Greece by backstopping the "bond market" — code for bankers holding bad (and uncollectable) debt — and forcing all the cost of debt recovery on nations of actual humans in the form of forced "austerity."

In effect, the ECB (proxy for Big Boy Bankers) says, "We placed bets on you. You failed. You make us whole" — where in this case, "you" is a bunch of broken jobless desperate people. Nice folks, those Bigs.

This will end when the ECB decides it has felt enough pain and pulls the plug on the Greek banking system. At that point, Greece goes off the euro. The same process then plays out in Spain, Italy, and other burst-bubble countries. It's all in the hands of the ECB.

As I said, ironic — by turning the screws on the Greek public, the ECB turns the screws on itself as well. This will stop when bankers decide that their own pain is more important than the pain they're inflicting.

I'm going to call that The Sadist's Dilemma. An interesting situation if you're not involved in all that pain.

■ Krugman and others also call for higher inflation in Europe. Why? Because there must be an inflation differential between the collapsing economies of the eurozone periphery — Greece, Spain and others — and the more-or-less thriving economies in the core.

Why? Spain had a wage-and-price boom (bubble) when German banking money (with others) flowed into the hot Spanish economy. That bubble has now burst, and those wages and prices must fall relative to those in other countries. In other words, the collapsing Spanish economy means there is an inevitable wage-and-price differential between it and the Germanys of the world.

The question is how you get there. Let's say that a 3% differential between Spain and Germany (as proxies for the periphery and the core) is inevitable. You can get that in two ways:

1. 2% inflation in Germany and -1% "inflation" in Spain (in other words, depressionary deflation, the current policy); OR
   
   
2. 4% inflation in Germany and 1% inflation in Spain (in other words, slow growth).

Your call, ECB. Krugman asks what will they do, continue to back-stop the Bigs who hold now-worthless debt, in a doomed attempt to collect? Or save the euro?

I wish I could say that I was optimistic.

Apocalypse fairly soon. As I write, the euro is down to $1.27, close to its near-term low. Unless there's another cosmetic bailout attempt (which once more kicks the can down the well-trod road), this is the last round.

Real solution or a vastly different continent? Your call, ECB. Europe wasn't always a garden of peace.

Golden Dawn has 19 seats in the 300-seat Greek parliament (click here for the distribution), with new elections coming.

As I said, poised on the precipice.

GP

To follow or send links: @Gaius_Publius
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I'm back from cataract exile

I'm back.

All appears to have gone well (knock on wood) with my cataract surgery last Thursday night.  Even though it could take weeks or months before I know my final prescription, as it currently stands my distance vision rocks.

Though it's come at the price of my near vision - I was incredibly near-sighted, and I'm now terribly far-sighted.  Can't focus on anything under six feet, possibly 8 feet, with my left (post-cataract) eye.  Which is annoying.  I expected the surgery to leave me presbyopic, but didn't expect to be THIS presbyopic.  It's been a big adjustment.  Again, I know this was going to happen, but I guess I didn't realize the extent of the far-sightedness.  It's tempered my elation a bit.

Then in a few weeks we do eye number two, and that's when I'm really not going to be able to see my dinner.

Another odd development is how I see color in the post-operative eye.  I knew, from reading other's stories, that people always talk about how amazing colors are after their cataracts are removed.  My colors aren't amazing.  They're just different.  Whites are now actually white, while in my not-yet-operated-on eye the whites are, I now know, cream colored.  In fact, everything with my right eye has a creamy overtone to it.  While my left borg implant now sees the world tinged slightly blue.

In part, or perhaps in whole, this is due to the fact that your natural lens in your eye starts out clear but becomes more yellow as you age.  It's so gradual that you don't notice that the world is becoming more yellow around you.  Not until you have a cataract and a new clear lens goes in, and suddenly the yellow is no longer blocking the blue (that's the way the color wheel works), so everything seems to have a bluish tint.  I'm not sure I like the bluish world I now live in, though cream-land now feels like a bit of a lie.

I've suddenly lost all faith in colors all together.  When I edit my photos in the future, will they look funny to any of you pre-cataract people (for lack of a better word, we'll simply refer to you as the pre-assimilated), since they'll be edited for a post-assimilation eye?  I'd never expected to have an existential crisis over color.

Things are also somewhat brighter with my borg eye.

Now a word about the surgery.  Don't let them fool you with all the talk of it being "out-patient."  I've had out-patient surgery before.  This was different.  My previous outpatient surgery involved things like sitting in a chair and have my retina zapped with a laser in order to cauterize a small hole or a large tear.  I wasn't supposed to feel a thing.  It was excruciating.  But at least I was sitting in a chair, in my own clothes, and pretty soon it was all over.

Not so much with the cataract surgery.

You start fasting around noon.  Get to the hospital around 6pm (I was late due to NATO/Occupy traffic backup from Chicago).  And then wait until 9pm for your surgery.  In the meantime, you have to go downstairs and be admitted, and get one of those funky wristbands with your name on it (in case they accidentally kill you, and then lose your body, I guess).  Then you go back upstairs, talk through all your current medications with a nurse, and then go back into what looks like an emergency room with lots of people wearing surgical gear, and patients wearing those nasty little gowns they make you wear for surgery.

The entire experience felt very very surgery-like.  And not very out-patient like.  Also, I don't think they told me when they were beginning the anesthesia.  All I know is they were telling me they were ready, next thing I know I'm groggily seeing the last minute of surgery.  And I don't recall much of the post-surgical hours either.  It's a small point, but I wish they'd told me I was about to get the anesthesia.

Now, all of this is to make sure the area is sterile - bacterial infections post cataract surgery can be very serious, and ultimately blind you.  So I'm not knocking the whole operation-room chic of the experience.  But I wasn't expecting it.  I honestly thought I was gonna sit in some guy's office and he was going to sit me back and zap my eye like he might a wart.

Two funny moments pre-surgery.  The first was when I asked the nurse if I could keep my iPad with me (the hospital has free wifi) in case the surgery was going to be a while.  She looked at me, in total seriousness, put her hand to her eye, and said "why do you have an eye pad, you're going to put it against your eye?"  We both got a chuckle when I very politely explained what an iPad was, just in case she was from Mars.

The second somewhat humorous moment was when the anesthesiologist asked me, in front of my mother, "do you drink?"  Not really.  "Do you smoke?"  No.  (Though I did think it odd she was asking me this in front of mom - I know people who aren't out to their parents about smoking.)  Then, sensing what was coming next, I jumped in and said to her, "are you seriously going to ask me if I do drugs in front of my mom?"  Not without cause - these were the three questions the other nurse asked me when we were going through my list of medications.

All in all, I'm pleased the surgery appears to have gone well, and so far I don't seem to have an of the dreaded complications.  But I'm honestly still a bit freaked about my near vision now being this bad (though, as I mentioned, it still may get better as my eye heals, though I'm doubtful).  I'm not sure what I was expecting - maybe that I'd be able to focus two feet away from my eyes, which is pretty much what I can do with my contacts.  But with my generation, and younger, we spend so much time with our gadgets, and at our desks, that I worry about needing glasses for every little thing.

Then again, I've been wearing glasses (or contacts) full time since I was 6.  So it's not like wearing glasses is a new thing.  Still, it's a bit unsettling.  And I'm not entirely sure why. Read the rest of this post...

Convicted Lockerbie bomber dies

Obviously while sick, he wasn't quite as sick as everyone was led to believe when he was released in 2009 by the British government. Whether the release was a deal related to oil drilling rights for British companies or the sometimes debated issue of innocence is not yet clear. British PM David Cameron has rejected calls for an inquiry so it may be a number of years until we fully know the truth.

As it stands today, a convicted murderer was wrongly released. Megrahi, while very sick, enjoyed the luxury of living out his final years in the comfort of his own home rather than rotting in prison. The 259 people aboard the Pan Am flight never had such an opportunity and were then sold out by the political class.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence official who was sentenced to life in prison in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, has died, the Libyan government said on Sunday. He was 60.

The bombing of the Dec. 21, 1988 Pan Am transatlantic flight to New York from London as it flew over Lockerbie, Scotland killed 270 people--259 people on board and 11 people on the ground--making it the world's deadliest act of terror until the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Megrahi, the only person convicted in connection with the bombing, had long maintained his innocence. He was sentenced to life in a Scottish prison in 2001. Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, another Libyan intelligence official charged in the bombing, was found not guilty.

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