Record as I Am

Tech && Soccer && PHP Coding - More Bolivian than America expected.

Go read Christopher Buckley's explanation of his NR resigation - its a fascinating look at how one conservative thinks of the "modern conservative movement."  The latter now apparently means, think as we tell you to think, and disloyalty must not be tolerated.  A lot of people are realizing that the current Republican leadereship, with its concentration of executive power, expansion of government spending, and theocratic totalitarian tendencies is not what used to be called the "Republican Party" just a few decades ago.

Seems it probably won't work so good. Glad to see Bolivia bucking the trend here. Seems like privatizing, oops, I mean purchasing shares in a bank is more effective.

RGE - Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor

But government purchase of bad assets was the exception rather than the rule. It was used only in Mexico, Japan, Bolivia, Czech Republic, Jamaica, Malaysia, and Paraguay. Even in six of these seven cases where the recapitalization of banks occurred via the government purchase of bad assets such recapitalization was a combination of purchase of bad assets together with other forms of recapitalization (such as government purchase of preferred shares or subordinated debt).

Market forces could be used to clean up power plants in China by encouraging the use of cleaner burning coas. We need China to clean up its power sector if we want to make a real dent in global Carbon emissions. On CARMA, you can see the best publicly available data on the Chinese power sector's emissions. There are over  are 2,162 plants, emitting 3.12 billion tons of CO₂.

If you're trying to figure out why we're in the financial mess we are in, I highly recommend reading the report linked below. From what I can gather, its a systemic failure, and one cause came from relaxing lending standards. While it helped many people who couldn't afford a home afford one, a lot of them, obviously couldn't keep their homes once their adjustable rate mortgages readjusted. I think a lot of people had an interest in a few metrics focused on measuring home ownership and didn't consider other potential effects of their policies, namely the influx of speculators and flippers who took advantage of said standards.

Free Speech, and Its Discontents, by Jason Lefkowitz - go read it to understand what's expected of both publishers and readers in a society that values free speech. Some points I wanted to add (this was going to be a comment on Jason's post but then it got really long and I decided to post on my own blog. I haven't picked a side yet, just wanted to add some info.

Al Gore is calling on el presidente to rescind the Patriot Act:

He said terrorism-fighting tools granted after Sept. 11, 2001, amount to a partisan power grab that has led to the erosion of the civil liberties of all Americans.

Courtesy of my friend Sandy:

It's the story
 of Carol Mosley
 who was bringing up 3 white men on her own
 all of them
 were congressmen
 the youngest one was old
 She met a man
 by the name of sharpton
 who had three pols of his own
 and they knew
 they must somehow beat up Clark
 and that's how they became the debatey bunch

Scott Rosenberg: WMDs: Must be here somewhere!

For anyone else who is still patiently waiting to see what might turn up in the WMD hunt, the news today was not good. Someone leaked to the New York Times information about a draft of the report (now dubbed an "interim" report) by David Kay, the former U.