HMM: Government Stress Tests For Banks May Hurt Recovery. “: Federal regulators have ordered Bank of America and other large banks to undergo stress tests to prove they’re financially sound. But the source of their stress is government.”
UPDATE: A reader emails: “Is this why my blue chip client with the over 800 credit score took 3+ months to close a BOA mortgage for a home she bought in a blue chip neighborhood in Oakland County, MI?”
HEH: Corporations (except GE, NYT…) out of politics.
“Clean elections” is a huge cause for the Left, and I saw campaign finance regulation as the closest thing to a main policy proposal of Occupy Wall Street, when I was up there in early October.
In that vein, MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan, who’s a bit Left and a bit Right, and on whose show I appear nearly every Wednesday, is pushing for a constitutional amendment to “Get Money Out” as he puts it. His amendment bans all donations directly or indirectly to campaigns or to even pay for independent ads promoting or opposing candidates.
But what about the media? Should I be prohibited from writing critiques of Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama? Should Bill O’Reilly be prohibited from calling for Obama’s defeat? How about Jonathan Chait and Andrew Sullivan boosting Obama? All of that speech involves corporations and money in order to get from journalists’ brains to the eyes and ears of regular Americans.
Indeed.
#OCCUPYFAIL: No Second Act for OWS. “Much as it would be absurd to hope for a ‘Woodstock without the music festival,’ perhaps it is as much a category mistake to try to organize an ‘Occupy without the occupation.’ That is the challenge that those who would continue the movement will face. It is possible that the curtain has gone down on the Occupy movement and will not rise again.”
THE KINDLE FIRE gets a review from James Lileks.
JOHN TIERNEY ON WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT GIVING THANKS:
Thanksgiving may be the holiday from hell for nutritionists, and it produces plenty of war stories for psychiatrists dealing with drunken family meltdowns. But it has recently become the favorite feast of psychologists studying the consequences of giving thanks. Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked, which helps explain why so many brothers-in-law survive Thanksgiving without serious injury.
But what if you’re not the grateful sort? I sought guidance from the psychologists who have made gratitude a hot research topic. Here’s their advice for getting into the holiday spirit — or at least getting through dinner Thursday.
Read the whole thing.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Savings Drop Off as More Parents Feel Pinched. “New figures for the nation’s 529 plans are in from Boston-based Financial Research Corp., and there was a $354 million outflow in the third quarter. The last time parents pulled cash out of college-savings plans, rather than putting in: The fall of 2008, when the financial crisis was at its height.”
Plus this: “That tectonic shift, away from parents trying to foot all of the college bills, is not necessarily a bad thing, according to Stuart Ritter, a certified financial planner with T. Rowe Price in Baltimore. After all, college savings should not be the foremost priority of cash-strapped parents; retirement, emergency funds and insurance should all take precedence. He makes the analogy of airplane travel with kids: ‘You need to put on your own oxygen mask first.'”
WHEN A MODEL IS JUST too darn beautiful.
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN if an asteroid hit U.S. banks? “Ever wondered what the U.S. economy might look like should there be another Lehman Brothers-style bank collapse? Well, it would not be pretty. Unemployment could jump to 13 percent, recalling the breadlines of the 1930s. The Dow Jones industrials might plunge 50 percent to 5,668, a level last reached before the dot.com boom in the mid-1990s. At the depths of a brutal year-long recession, output might shrink at an 8 percent annualized rate, wiping out two whole years worth of growth.”
Luckily, with this team of experts in charge, there’s no danger of anything like this happening.
UPDATE: Fitch Downgrades Portugal To Junk On General Strike Day.
MORE ON CLIMATEGATE PART DEUX: “As with the first ClimateGate release, I have yet to see anything in these e-mails that disproves, or even seriously undermines, the basic claim that human emissions of greenhouse gases have contributed to a gradual warming of the climate and will continue to do so in the future. They do, however, further confirm that “mainstream” climate scientists have contributed to the politicization of climate science and allowed political concerns to influence scientific judgments, exaggerating the reliability of climatic projections and downplaying scientific findings that undermine the claim that climate change presents an apocalyptic threat.”
CLAYTON CRAMER spots a disturbing trend.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: The CBO Quietly Downgrades Obama’s $825 Bil Stimulus.
HMM: When you search for an iPad 2 on Amazon, one of the things you get back is this comparison with the Kindle Fire. It doesn’t get in the way of buying an iPad 2 if you want one, but . . . .
#OCCUPYFAIL: Army records at odds with Occupy veteran’s claims. “The claims of a dedicated member of the Occupy Buffalo movement that he saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are not supported by Army records. Christopher M. Simmance has told several media outlets, including The Buffalo News, that he served as many as three tours of duty in those war zones and that he was severely injured in Afghanistan. Service records obtained from the Army, however, show he was stationed at Fort Lewis, Wash., for three years and he left the active-duty Army in January 2001 — before the 9/11 terror attacks.”
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste writes: “Have you noticed that when men lie about this, they nearly always claim to have been in the special forces?”
Yeah. I assume that’s so their fallback position can be that everything they did was classified. By the way have I mentioned my secret missions to Cambodia in 1968?
On the other hand, there’s this. Tom Harkin never claimed to be special forces.
READ BEFORE IGNITION: Turkey-Frying Advice From Popular Mechanics.
JOHN GALT WAS UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT: ‘Company Policy: We are not hiring until Obama is gone’. I suspect a lot more feel that way, but won’t come out and say so. “Looman made it clear, talking with 11Alive’s Jon Shirek, that he is not refusing to hire to make some political point; it’s that he doesn’t believe he can hire anyone, because of the economy. And he blames the Obama administration.”
LEGAL EDUCATION UPDATE: Law Student Debt Grew $475 Million in 2008-2010.
IT’S CALLED THE “OBAMA TUBE:” How A Self-Inflating Tire Works.
SO JENNIFER LOPEZ USED A BODY DOUBLE IN THAT FIAT AD? “Shooting in one city and making it look like another is nothing new – it’s done all the time in movies, television shows, and all manner of videos. But given how the commercial is written in such a personalized manner, and given how much of lightning rod the campaign has been within the advertising and marketing community, this latest development isn’t likely to win the campaign any more respect.”
AT AMAZON, GIFT CARDS GALORE.
MOCKING CALIFORNIA POLITICS at CalWhine.com. There’s much to mock.
UPDATE: Well, hell, it was there before.
CHATTANOOGA IS TRYING TO lure geeks with wads of cash. It’s a nice town, if, you know, you can’t live in Knoxville for some reason . . . .
More:
When we think of American tech innovation, places like the Silicon Valley and Seattle tend to come to mind more readily than Chattanooga. But maybe we should give Tennessee’s fourth largest city a bit more credit. Last year, the city-owned Electric Power Board (EPB) brought the country’s first gigabit-per-second fiber optic network to more than 150,000 households and businesses in a 600-square-mile radius.
Jack Studer of Lamp Post Group, a “venture incubator” backing the Gig Tank, told Wired.com that his parents, who live on a farm 35 miles outside of Chattanooga, have access to the network. If you’re suddenly feeling very envious of a couple of farmers in rural Tennessee, you should be — according to The New York Times, the gigabit network allows for connections 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America.
Read the whole thing. Hey, it’s a lot cheaper to live in Chattanooga than Palo Alto.
#OCCUPYFAIL: The Entire Occupy Movement Summarized In One Sign. Okay, but the “It Is Time For A Cultural Revolution” sign deserves a giggle. Or a volley, depending on how seriously you take it. . . .
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