Update on the bank stress-tests ‘leak’

This story that I posted about a couple of months ago entitled I May Be Lazy but at Least I’m not Journalist Lazy.  In it, I chastized the major mainstream media for not doing the basics in verifying a stupid rumour posted on some right-wing nutjob blog that turned out to be plagiarized from a press release that had been sent out a week or so earlier – basically two minutes seaching google and one could have easily discreditied the whole story.

Well now, that story just got a little weirder.  This Hal Turner, who had a reputation as not just a right-wing nutjob blogger, but a white-supremacist nutjob blogger got arrested for inciting violence on his nutjob blog.

More reason for nobody to have paid attention to anything he ever wrote, right?

Well, it turns out this guy is launching a rather interesting defence. It seems Hal Turner was trained by the FBI to be an agent provocateur – posting racist loony rants inciting acts of violence in order to bring the REAL racist violent loonies out of the woodwork so that the FBI could round them up and arrest them.

No to defend racists, but isn’t that bordering on entrapment?  Never mind, I don’t really care and that’s not the point of this post.

 Whether Hal Turner was really an FBI secret agent or not will presumeably come out at his trial at some point. Even back when the infamous stress test ‘leaks’ were being posted there were forum commenters who said he was an FBI shill so the claim didn’t just arise upon his arrest.

It still does beg the yet-to-be-answered question: WHAT THE HELL was the main stream media doing taking his ’stress test leaks’ blog posting seriously in the first place?

Whether he was just another hateful whack job or an FBI plant, the idea that one of his dubious and easily discredited rantings got so much media play back in April is alarming, to say the least.

Supply side scare story on Bloomberg today, or if I were still a Londoner

I lived in London about a decade ago, but if I was still there I’d have one thing to say to these people: Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!

Bloomberg today had an article about how American expats living in London are reportedly leaving the city in droves due to a new tax being brought in on top earners.  They start with the example of a 29 year old packing up and claiming that he’s the last to leave, that he knows of. 

At any rate, the most telling part of the ideological bent of the article is here, where the main subject of the article  joined the exodus of American expatriates fleeing high taxes and the city’s shrinking financial industry. 

One can almost see Moses himself leading the newly unshackled Americanites away from the penury of  Dickensian workhouse.

Of course, this tax is levied at those who’ve been living in the UK for at least seven years, with an annual income of over £150,000.  Has the main subject of the article really been living there for that long and do all his friends really make over that amount? 

As expected (by me, at least) the numbers are rather vague.  The number of US citizens living in the UK fell by 3.8% but people move for all kinds of reasons including homesickness, job loss, a better job elsewhere, needed to look after sick parents, or for that matter, a devaluing pound.

The article then cites a woman married to a Greek man about their plans to return to Greece once their daughter is finished school. They too are fed up with all the taxes in London.  How much better the business opportunities are in Greece, naturally, go unmentioned.

The only other personal story in the article involved someone fed up with the crowds in London, whose employer-expatriate benefits had just been dramatically slashed. Oh, and business was down for them too. He probably wouldn’t have earned enough to qualify for the new tax anyway.

What’s particularly odd from strictly a numbers point of view is that London has for as long as I can remember, been an obscenely expensive place to live.  When I left in the late 90s the property bubble was only just beginning to inflate but at the height had become pretty insane.  That bubble, like inflated property prices everywhere else in the world (except Vancouver and Toronto – I’m sure it’s ‘different’ there) have fallen sharply since then. This means, that even with the higher taxes, cost of living would be presumeably offset by lower housing costs. 

But I guess not – in supply-sider world, paying out plenty more for luxury items or swanky flats is a-ok but that same amount going to the government (often to pay for the very things that enable people to get rich and keep their wealth in the first place) is an unforgivable evil.   

But the message of the article is clear regardless of how flimsy the actual facts to back it up might be: raise taxes and all the ‘talent’ will go somewhere with lower taxes and that’s really the only thing that distinguishes one part of the world from anywhere else. 

Contarary to what American news publications might suggest, they are also not the only ones capable of generating economic productivity in the world and I somehow doubt that whenever actual economic recovery does happen in Britain and elsewhere in the world that it will be any harder for companies to attract ‘talent’ than it was a couple of years ago.

I may be lazy, but at least I’m not journalist lazy

A strange news item caught my eye on the front page of CNBC.com this morning – about a blogger who allegedly has a ‘leak’ of the results of the US Bank Stress test – the results of which are supposed to be released on May 4.

The name of the blogger sounded vaguely familiar. I read my share of conspiracy theory forums and sure enough, the guy’s known for being a serious white-supremacist nutjob.

Just a little further digging reveals he’s been behind several hoaxes lately:

One was about a bank run in October that, conveniently

“echoes rhetoric being used by the White House and the Federal Reserve in order to ram through the widely despised bailout bill, by using economic terrorism and the fear of total collapse of the financial system to get the message across, just as Bush, Bernanke and Paulson have been ferociously doing for the past two weeks.”

http://www.congresscheck.com/2008/10/03/hoax-bank-closure-story-peddles-bailout-propaganda/

He also claimed that the US was dumping the dollar in favour of an ‘Amero’ coin – for ‘proof’ he used a photo that was actually lifted from a website marketing novelty coins.

Even worse, this alleged leak was actually plagiarism:

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS180066+06-Apr-2009+BW20090406 from a ‘study’ issued last week by a Dr. Martin Weiss. While I make no claim either way as to his reputation, this really should be treated in the media as the ‘source’, and NOT the nutty blog that lifted it, claiming to be an ‘inside leak’.

It took me all of ten minutes doing a couple of searches in Google to conclude that this blog post was basically a steaming pile of crap.

That’s not to say that banks are all solvent and the picture is as rosy as this latest round of earnings tried to report, or that there aren’t some serious structural problems that remain.  At the same time, as one person (not me) commented on Zero Hedge,

If a scumbag like this has the ability to get insider information about the stress tests, I would much rather our economic system crash and burn to the ground.

Ironically, there is one more interesting item about this Hal Turner:

according to some sites, he works for the FBI.

Regardless of what one might think of the genuine state of the US Financial System, this particular post does NOT merit front page MSM attention.

Movie – The Watchmen

I have to admit, I never before read the graphic novel series The Watchmen, though I plan to now.  I’d also recommend, for those who haven’t seen it, to read it first.

By the end of the movie, I really liked it but until about 2/3 of the way in I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t familiar with any of the characters and only had a basic idea of what the premise was, so I found the first half pretty jumbled. Fortunately as the movie progressed, the plot made more sense and I could see the need for everything to have been kept in.

The opening credits set to Bob Dylan’s The Times They are a-changing were very entertaining, particularly with The Comedian as Kennedy’s assassin in this ‘alternative’ history. At the same time, the focus on the older generation of superheros did add to the confusion.

One of the major strengths comes with the deconstructed comic-book archetypes.  I found bitter, angry Rorschach to be the most compelling character and strangely likeable. The ethereal Dr. Manhattan’s depth came, paradoxically, from the character’s being at the same time utterly self-absorbed, seen mostly in his treatment of Laurie, aka the younger Silk Spectre – especially when he said to her, “when you left me, I left Earth. Does that not show you I care? “.

The Night Owl was that nice guy that girls always want to be ‘just friends’ with, though in this case, he does get the girl in perhaps the strangest scene in the movie, set to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

The weakest area I found, was in the casting or perhaps even just in the development of the character Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. The actor reminded me too much of one of the Kids in the Hall and his background story could have been developed more than it was.

All in all, I did think the movie was worth seeing, while still in the cinema. One word of warning, however: if you are a straight guy and squeamish about full-frontal male nudity I’d advise against seeing it in Imax.

Wow, I’m lazy

I follow The Big Picture every now and then and read one post in particular today that I wanted to comment on.

I was surprised to see that when I went to click on that area it asked for a WordPress login.

I thought to myself, I have one of those.

Of course, danged if I could remember my username and password.

I’d always meant to blog, to keep some sort of online diary of whatever random thoughts went through my head.  And really, rather than post on the dozens of internet forums I follow or news sites I read, and having to remember not only the alt I use, but the password for each place, I might as well post my random crap here instead.

The idea of a blog is nice – I have the power to decide what comments appear or not. It’s my fiefdom where I can choose to engage in a dialog or not, censor dissenting opinions or let them through. I doubt, of course that I’ll allow for trolling whargarbl, and of course anything that even remotely looks like spam will be deleted. Only time will tell to what a degree my little domain will be a tyranny.

“Art is Useless” is from an essay by one of my all-time favourite writers and thinkers.

I registered this site February, 2008 and am only now, April 2009, getting around to posting anything on it.

I’ll first of all see if I put anything else on it again before 2010.