State governments have eliminated thousands of public employees since the beginning of the recession.
Good riddance: North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, 69, is dead.
The astonishing collapse of MF Global.
The failure of broker MF Global is a unique event in the annals of American corporate history: To my knowledge, it’s the first time a CEO singlehandedly bankrupted his firm through actions that the board of directors was not only knowledgeable of, but had indeed expressly sanctioned. “That takes some talent!” quipped Roderick Hills, a former chairman of the SEC.
The article is long, detailed, and thorough. It describes a deep corruption that should chill the spine of anyone who has money in the investment world.
I must note that I do not advocate more regulations to eliminate this corruption. Such regulations never work. Take for example this quote from the article, describing the accounting systems that are required by law to prevent a client’s funds from being misused:
As noted above, it’s a major part of the CEO’s job to put the proper systems in place. In fact, regulations implemented through Sarbanes-Oxley — a bill that Corzine co-wrote while he was a senator — require that the CEO and CFO sign off on the effectiveness of the controls over financial reporting. … If those proper “controls and procedures” were in place, a breach of segregated client funds should have set off loud, blaring, obnoxious alarms that would have alerted management to that breach.
In the case of Jon Corzine and MF Global, those controls were obviously not in place, and thus the Sarbanes-Oxley bill wasn’t worth the paper that Corzine used to write the bill.
Rather than more regulations, what works is very simple and can be summed by two words: “Buyer beware.” Investors (as well as voters considering the political ambitions of Corzine and his friends) have to be more skeptical of whom they put their trust in. You have to protect yourself. You can’t ask others to do it for you.
Islamic romance: Egyptian Muslims have been accused of kidnapping Christian girls and forcing them to convert to Islam under threat of rape.
Well duh! Deficit may be biggest threat to ObamaCare.
I always opposed ObamaCare because I oppose the use of government to run our lives. But putting that minor point aside, it made absolutely no sense for the government to add this entitlement to the nation’s balance sheet at a time when that balance sheet is so completely in the red. The only time these kinds of government programs can possible work (if ever) is when there is lots of spare cash in the bank, something we definitely don’t have right now.
Over Friday and Saturday, 61% of House Republicans and 34% of Senate Republicans voted for the omnibus megabus bill. In doing so, not only did they violate their pledge pertaining to bundled (1200-page) bills and the 72-hour layover rule and agree to fund Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, Planned Parenthood, the EPA, the PLO and the UN; they actually agreed to spend almost $9 billion more than last year. Overall, budget authority will be $33 billion higher than the House budget, while appropriations for non-defense spending will be $45 billion more. One of the members who voted in the affirmative even agreed that he had voted for a “crap sandwich.”
One reason the budget is still growing is that two-thirds of the government is still controlled by the spendthrift Democratic Party. A second reason is that there are too many wimpy Republicans willing to compromise with these spendthrifts.
Which is why we have elections. 2012 should help fix this problem.
R.I.P: Vaclav Havel has passed away at 75.
Ain’t democracy a bitch? Virginia residents loudly oppose their local government’s preparations for climate-related sea-level rise, and neither the bureaucrats or this Washington Post journalist like it!
A Spanish company has announced it will build a space hotel by 2012.
The story suggests that Virgin Galactic will providing the tourist ferry to their orbital hotel, which is puzzling as that company is only building a suborbital spacecraft at this time.
Using the spacecraft’s last drops of fuel, engineers are attempting to aim Deep Impact to a 2020 rendezvous with near Earth asteroid 2002 GT.
The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, now online.
The Battle of the Bulge, in photos.
Virgin Galactic isn’t the only one building a suborbital spaceplane: Europe plans to test fly its own suborbital spaceship in 2014.
Modern education: A elementary school has disciplined a boy for waving gun-shaped pizza slice at students.
A Democrat explains the reasoning behind the Obama stimulus package: “We didn’t know what the hell was going on.” With video.
Why am I not surprised? A slap on the wrist for the Wisconsin doctors who handed out fake sick notes during the protests last year.
Richard Branson talks to the Wall Street Journal about space.
Mr. Branson is still radiating enthusiasm. “We’ve got just short of 500 people now signed up to go, which is actually more people than have been up to space in the history of space travel, and we hope to put those up in our first year of operation,” he says, predicting the first commercial flight by “about next Christmas,” although he acknowledges that there have been many delays.
A Russian Soyuz rocket has completed its second launch from French Guiana, carrying six military satellites into orbit.
Comet Lovejoy lost its tail in skimming through the Sun’s atmosphere Thursday.
The solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have upped their prediction for the next solar maximum, calling for a sunspot number of 99 in February 2013. Their previous prediction called for a maximum sunspot number of 89 in March 2013.
Frank Fleming: “Hey, they still let us drive.”
Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety. They had different equations related to human life then: We could lose 10,000 men in a single battle in a war and call it a victory.
We’re talking foolhardy people who eventually sent men to the moon strapped to a giant rocket that had less computational power than it takes to calculate the trajectory of an Angry Bird. Their kids dangled from jungle gyms over pavement. [emphasis in original]
More bad news for the global warming crowd: Russia has announced it fully supports Canada’s decision to pull out of the Kyoto accords.
NASA faces a $325 million additional cut in the last-minute spending deal now before Congress.
These cuts will bring NASA’s budget back to what it had in 2008, hardly a disaster for space exploration.
He should have told them he was a Mexican druglord: The Tea Party Patriots leader was arrested yesterday at a New York airport for following TSA rules and checking in a lawful pistol.
Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and overseen by the Justice Department. It started under the leadership of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. Fast and Furious enabled straw gun purchases from licensed dealers in Arizona, in which more than 2,000 weapons were smuggled to Mexican drug kingpins. ATF claims it was seeking to track the weapons as part of a larger crackdown on the growing violence in the Southwest. Instead, ATF effectively has armed murderous gangs. About 300 Mexicans have been killed by Fast and Furious weapons. More than 1,400 guns remain lost.
From Bill Wittle: “EVERYBODY knows that Republicans are EVIL! What kind of Evil? Greedy, Fascist, Racist evil — the worst kind!”
