75% of kids can't join military - are fat, have health problems, have no diploma or have a criminal history

In a study it calls "Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve," the group says Pentagon analysts have concluded that 75 percent of people ages 17 to 24 could not qualify for military service because they are obese or have some other health problem, lack a high school diploma or have a serious criminal history.

Military finds 75 percent of today's youth can't serve - mcclatchydc.com

Hey, Pentagon how about sending a few billion (or better yet more) over to education? That would help the kids and maybe some of them would even join up.

It seems pretty ominous when the military starts to complain that three out of four kids can't even join the military. It's not as if military is med school.

I am considering starting up a brand new blog with a single theme: "You know your country is in trouble when...".

California "burns" and CA politicians fiddle

If California were a business - it would have gone bankrupt already.

California politicians should be busy, very busy, making efforts to fix their economy, fix their tax revenue system and making efforts at bipartisan reconciliation.

Is that what they are doing? No.

I think Nero was born a couple thousand years too early.

Tacitus said that Nero's playing his lyre and singing while the city burned was only a rumor. Popular legend remembers Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned, but this is an anachronism as the instrument was invented a thousand years later.

Great Fire of Rome > The fire and Rome's reconstruction - wikipedia.org

Well, Wikipedia, "Nero did nothing as Rome burned." is missing something. And "Nero played his lyre while Rome burned" doesn't have any zing.

California politicians have been doing their own version of fiddling. Although this mouthful "The California governor sent a 'fuck you' message and other politicians were fixated on cat declawing as their state fell into economic ruin." defies being made into a saying.

What will the politicians in that state next focus on? Hemlines?

Variations on "lipstick on a pig"

The image is from an interactive Flash thing at memetracker.org. The quotes are here: Variants of the "lipstick on a pig" quote. And there's The top phrases from last month.

If you want to see an example (and you may not) of how the memetracker was used to help create a lengthy data-filed article here's a link - Covering the Great Recession from journalism.org.

spinn3r.com was also used in the making of the journalism.org article. The homepage title is "Spinn3r: RSS Content, News Feeds, News Content, News Crawler and Web Crawler APIs".

The article has no neato flash interactive things. It's a mass of data, graphs and charts spread out over seven pages. There's no way to put everything on a single page (The print link only allows you to print the current page).

I made it to the middle of page six before I experienced massive data overload. If I was getting paid and this was a column - I'd still provide you with summaries. But I'm not so for this you are on your own.

The site is fond - in fact very fond - of the nasty sounding term "newshole". The following definition is from way back in the net dark ages of 2001. Yet the word never caught on. I can't imagine why.

Newshole
A newshole is the amount of print-space or air-time available to report the news. The size of the newshole is affected by the amount of advertising, which not only takes up print-space, but also determines the number of pages in the paper (how much the news organization can afford). At a daily newspaper, the newshole changes each day, and editors and their reporters are given a certain number of column inches to fill. The articles that are printed are prioritized according to newsworthiness. Thus, reporters not only attempt to complete a story by the press deadline, but they also compete with other reporters to have their stories printed.

Learning the Culture and Language of the Media - ericdigests.org

Newshole seems to me to be the sort of word that isn't quite apt for what it describes. To my ears it has a ring that matches a subset of the tabloid-like (i.e. mainstream) news realm - junky video based tv news coverage.

• How we gonna fill up the newshole at the end of the show?
• Easy. Just jam the hole with that "dog that can climb trees" story.
• You can't go wrong with a feel good animal story at the end.
• Nope. You sure can't.

Wall Street & main street should be the same - if you break the law, you should go to jail

Yeah, I know. Quaint concept.

But if some judge in an American city said to a thief, rapist, mugger or whatever "I censor you and you have to pay a fine." the public would erupt. The badly named blogosphere would explode, the talking heads on tv would be rabid, editorialists would editorialize. Adjectives and tortured allegories would also run rampant.

Liberals would be emailing and phoning their congressperson and the Fox News tea baggers would - of course - be out on the street with their pitchforks and automatic weapons.

Oh, but these are bankers. The media and the public isn't exactly on fire about this story. Google search: 42 for JPMorgan "Charles LeCroy" | "Douglas MacFaddin". 42 hits if you use the names of the two people the SEC pointed out by name. That's pathetic.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has agreed to pay $75 million in fines and forfeit $647 million in fees to settle federal regulators' charges that it made unlawful payments to friends of public officials to win municipal bond business in Jefferson County, Ala.

JPMorgan Settlement: Bank To Pay SEC Over $700M Over Charges Of Illegal Payments - huffingtonpost.com

Let me introduce you to the two known (alleged) criminals involved. They both worked at JPMorgan.

Charles LeCroy was the banker who pitched the refinancing to Jefferson County. Douglas MacFaddin was the former head of the New York-based bank’s municipal derivatives desk. They made than $8 million in undisclosed payments to close friends of county commissioners.

I think it's safe to call those "undisclosed payments" what they really are: "bribes".

The bank concluded the case without admitting or denying the allegations. SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami said in a statement: "The transactions were complex but the scheme was simple. Senior JPMorgan bankers made unlawful payments to win business and earn fees."

Oh, SEC, you've finally caught somebody. How are you going to punish the shark-like firm and a couple of its tiny pilot fish?

JPMorgan was censured and agreed to refrain from future violations of the securities laws. LeCroy and MacFaddin didn’t agree to settle.

What. The. Fuck.

C'mon. Censoring and fining firms is going to help fix Wall Street. People need to learn that Wall Street isn't some ethical-free zone where they can do what they want. They need to see that their actions can have decidedly negative outcomes to the one thing they are most concerned about. Themselves.

What's needed is real justice. In a word: jail.

The people, all the people, that broke the law they need jail time. It's as simple as that. And not time spent at some country club prison where the prisoners can relax as they read their books, lift weights and eat their three meals a day. I'm talking about jail, jail. Good old fashioned, don't pick up the soap in the shower jail. The federal pen. The big house where fear is tangible and not something you experience when watching a horror movie.

Bankers aren't dumb. The thought of spending years in jail scares them as much as it does you. Of course, sending just two people away would be a tiny step. But at least it is a step. I guess there's some same chance they might actually get a jail sentence. But even if that happens it certainly won't be jail, jail.

This isn’t the first time LeCroy faces allegations of making payments to politically connected firms to win work. In January 2005, he pleaded guilty in a federal corruption investigation in Philadelphia involving city bond business steered to political supporters of former Mayor John F. Street.

JPMorgan Ends SEC Alabama Swap Probe for $722 Million - bloomberg.com

Yup, you can't deter somebody if the threat of punishment is an empty threat. Even dogs getting trained can grasp that.

The UN - war's comic relief?

You know how it is when you watch an action movie. There are characters there whose sole purpose is to distract you from the one dimensionality of the stars. And they make you laugh too.

It seems that the characters at the UN play a similar role in war (time).

Spokesman Aleem Siddique said the UN would relocate about 600 of its roughly 1,100 international staff, with some being moved to safer sites within Afghanistan and the rest withdrawn from the country temporarily.

The UN said the evacuation would not disrupt its operations.

UN to pull out foreign staff from Afghanistan - dailytimes.com.pk

Oh, we're running away. That's true. But running away will not effect operations!

Head of the UN mission, Kai Eide, also issued a warning to Karzai that Afghanistan could no longer count on international support unless he cracked down on corruption and initiated reforms, AP reported.

Karzi stop being naughty! If you continue to be naughty... well... it's just not right! You must stop your naughtiness!

Even when the UN makes an offical [open air quote] resolution [close air quote] - it doesn't mean a thing.

Well, unless it involves something like them running away. When they flee - do they travel first class? Or business?

Proposed HTML 5 tag: ＜sarcasm＞

Wall $treet, Madoff and the power of presentation

There has been something in the Madoff saga and Wall-Street-hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars-money-grab that I couldn't put my finger on. Finally, today, I could scratch the itch.

Individuals, regulators, firms, regulatory agencies - so many players in brouhaha - confused what appeared to be true with what actually existed. Certainly there's loads of complexity, technology and math at play too, but (re)consider Madoff's clients.

I was reading a dull as carbon article that was focused on the computer systems Madoff used. In the middle of yawning - I noticed this:

The end result was phony trade confirmations and wholly manufactured - but official-looking - statements for 4,903 investment advisory clients.

My first thought was "official-looking"? Of course they were official-looking. What else could they be? But, I kept reading and reading and reading and then there was this:

“The statements were always perfect, neat and immaculately presented. They came on time and everything was like clockwork,” said Ambrosino, 56, a victim and now activist representing a group of about 400 Madoff investors

[print link] How Bernie Made Basket Cases of His Customers' Accounts - securitiesindustry.com

Her comment is the sort made after con artists have escaped with the goods. The victims, the marks, never suspect a thing and they put all their trust in an agent of their own destruction. They say: I would have never imagined that things weren't as they appeared.

A con based on human relationships is one thing. You can't live without trust. But this is another reality. This is about money. And serious money at that.

Madoff had nearly 5,000 clients. For a decade plus of time (longer?) Madoff was issuing "official looking" statements entirely divorced from reality. Yet how can it be that clients, regulators, people with fiduciary responsibilities - hell anybody who should have checked or was supposed to scrutinize the documents didn't notice discrepancies?

All that lack of responsibility, all those people, all those eyes, all that time, and all those statements month after month.

As for Wall Street and more legitimate *cough* *cough* activity - mcclatchydc.com currently as an entire section of its site dedicated to Goldman Sachs.

And if you think that deception is only for straight up criminals, think again. Goldman's marks, um I mean, clients, were Qualified Institutional Buyers:

DuVally said the firm sold virtually all its subprime-related securities to Qualified Institutional Buyers, a class of sophisticated investors that are afforded fewer protections than small investors are under federal securities laws. He said Goldman made all the required disclosures about risks.

How Goldman secretly bet on the U.S. housing crash - mcclatchydc.com

You can be sure that the concept "afforded fewer protections" didn't go unnoticed at Goldman Sachs. They aren't a wildly lucky, yet run of mill con artist like Madoff. They are the brightest of the bright in their field. And they know exactly what they are doing.