This video of today’s re-entry by the ESA’s Jules Verne (unmanned) spacecraft is amazing. (Yes, it was supposed to burn up). Beautiful, really.
Photo: ESA/NASA
Category: EU Page 3 of 5
let’s call the whole thing off:
In the interview, McCain is asked about Hugo Chavez, the situation in Bolivia and then about Raul Castro. He responds to each of these with expected answers about standing up to America’s enemies, etc. Then the interviewer switches gears and asks about Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister. And McCain replies — very loose translation — that he’ll establish close relations with our friends and stand up to those who want to do us harm. The interviewer has a double take and seems to think McCain might be confused. So she asks it again. But McCain sticks to the same evasive answer.
(This is what happens when you’re an old and confused man.)
Update: I don’t really believe that McCain doesn’t know that Spain is in Europe, as posited by some. He’s old and of poor judgment, but he’s not stupid. I do, however, believe that he had no idea who the Prime Minister of Spain was, and that’s pretty telling. To be fair, I guess, Spain’s never come up as a possible bombing target, so why would McCain be interested? Maybe Spain needs to hire a lobbyist to take a place on the McCain staff to make sure it stays that way . . .).
Update II: Head over to TPM for the rest of the story. It’s just . . .Christ. There are people who are going to vote for this man.
Update III: McCain’s advisers try to claim that McCain *did* know who Zapatero was, and that he was intentionally avoiding committing to meeting with Spain’s Prime Minister. This, of course, is bullshit, unless McCain’s advisers want to acknowledge that McCain thinks that Spain is a Latin American country. It does give you some insight to the McCain campaign, though, that rejecting our own NATO allies is the *preferrable* option here.  Can we just get to November already?
Update IV: Bienvenido, lectores de Cadenaser.com
And I’m not even going to make the “and lots of it!” joke. * Interesting article concerning Europe’s credit card companies completing the transition to a “chip and PIN” system for their credit cards.  That is, Euro-issued VISA/Mastercards/etc. now require a PIN to complete a transaction (much like an American bankcard). An ever-increasing number of retailers have begun to accept these types of credit cards exclusively, which leaves American travelers trying to pay with plastic out in the cold.  Something to keep in mind your next time over.
*Because.
Let me admit up front: while I understand the mechanics of the parts involved in the Fannie/Freddie rescue, I’m not fluent enough in the involved markets to truly appreciate the various big picture results.  So I’m turning to sources that I trust to understand these things better than me. The first place I go is the Wall Street Journal – their Op-Ed page may be run by poo-flinging monkeys, but their financial reporting is consistently excellent (and their general reporting is reliably good, too). So here we get the outline of the rescue plan:
[C]ontrol of [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go] to their regulator and allow[s] the Treasury Department to purchase billions of dollars of the firms’ senior preferred stock.
The plan, offered jointly by the Treasury Department and Federal Housing Finance Agency, also gives the Treasury authority to purchase mortgage-backed securities from the firms in the open market and a lending facility through the Treasury from its general fund held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Again, I understand the mechanics, but need a little help on the meaning. Jerome a Paris provides quite a bit of help. He explains what the second paragraph above means:
This is huge. This is the federal government taking over the “toxic waste” in a way that will have an impact not just on Freddie and Fannie, but on the whole market. By “buying” mortgage-backed securities instrad of taking them as collateral, the Treasury does two things at the same time:
- it takes off the assets and liabilities off the balance sheet of the two companies in a definitive way (rather than temporarily) and assumes, for sure, the associated risk;
- it sets a price on these securities. This has been the biggest problem to solve the credit crisis: nobody has been willing to set a price on these assets, because of the uncertainty on the real value of the underlying assets (or because everybody could see that they were falling by the day). By setting such a price, the government creates a highly significant precedent – and, in all likelihood, provides a floor to these prices, ie an implicit commitment (or at least the expectation of a commitment) to buy more such securities.
I quite recommend reading both articles, but the takeaway is:
This would seem to be an incredibly ambitious gambit: a nationalisation, an attempted bailout of ALL the banks, and an open-ended commitment of taxpayer money to save the financial world.
US Treasury Secretary Paulson’s no idiot, but neither is he much of a public servant. This is worth worrying over.
The US has Total Information Awareness (whatever the latest name is), the UK is going full speed ahead with its own database surveillance society, and now it looks like France isn’t going to be left behind:
The decree creating the “Edvige” electronic database appeared in the official gazette on July 1, when the country was winding down for the summer, but news of its content has been gradually filtering out and is now stirring fierce criticism.
[ . . . ]
The decree says the aim is to centralize and analyze data on people aged 13 or above who are active in politics or labor unions, who play a significant institutional, economic, social or religious role, or who are “likely to breach public order.”
The information that can be collected includes addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, physical appearance, behavioral traits, fiscal and financial records, and details about people who have personal ties with the subject.
Okay, SuperFrenchie, time to stop admiring Sarah Palin and tell me what the French think about this.
I expected that the Russia-Georgia confrontation would bring out some warmongering pronouncements from old men eager to spill young blood, but I didn’t realize that so many would lose all sense of perspective and reality over it.
So try to ignore these fools who seem to so desperately want us back in military confrontation with Russia, and learn a bit about the moving parts yourself. There is no clear and easy answer, and the facts on the ground keep changing. But reading up through the linked articles here and here would be a good start to your understanding of it.
That’s a title I have to say that I didn’t expect to be writing about with any seriousness. Yet here we are, with Russia and Georgia facing off over South Ossetia:
The president of the separatist region, nestled in the Caucasus mountains, said 1,400 people had been killed. Moscow said its troops were responding to a Georgian assault to take back the region.
This is a big deal, and the US is rather involved with things there. US-Georgia relations are generally pretty good, and Georgia has been seeking NATO membership for a while (something that – were it in place now – conceivably require a US military response to the Russian movements, today). Not sure where the best news source for this is yet, but if I find one, I’ll post it here.
Update: Understandably, Georgia’s taking 1,000 of its troops out of Iraq and bringing them home. The discomfitting bit? The US is the one doing the transportation. Wired’s (excellent) Danger Room blog gives us some general background on the Georgia-US military relationship:
Since 2002, the U.S. military has been providing Georgia with a serious amount of military assistance, beginning with the Georgia Train and Equip Program in 2002. I first visited Georgia’s Krtsanisi training range in fall of 2002, when the Georgian military was still little more of a militia, with some of the troops wearing sneakers and surplus Soviet uniforms.
[ . . . ]
Officially, SSOP was supposed to prepare Georgians for service in Iraq. But Georgian trainees I spoke to in 2006 at the Krtsanisi training range saw things a bit differently. A female sergeant told me: “This training is incredibly important for us, because we want to take back Georgia’s lost territories.â€
There are no innocent actors here, and the US public should keep its eye on this (even if its President is busy playing games in China).
Never expected to see Radovan Karadzic on trial.
Update: Wow. This is the website he kept, advertising his alternative medicine practice. It boggles.
Update II: That is most probably not a website for him. The best clue is the registration date. Ah well. Count me in as a hot news sucker. But, at the end of the day, he’s still going to rot for the rest of his life. And that’s what’s important. (Thanks to M.E. for the tip off.)
I try not to spend too much time thinking about George Bush these days, but he’s really outdone himself today:
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock
Some very smart commentary over at the Agonist.