Ninja Monkie Bacchanal

Today I attended a funeral. My father’s cousin’s husband, Juan Chaves passed away due to an 11-year battle with kidney disease. My parents couldn’t make it out to the service because of work commitments and the fact they are 1300 miles away. I am only 120 miles or so. So off I went. It as a lovely Catholic mass that was well-attended.

Afterwards, everyone in the family went over to Juan’s house to feast and drink. I found myself standing in the middle of this dead man’s living room alone looking at these people. Suddenly I realized, I was related to all of them in some way. Juan’s kids are my second cousins. Their kids are my cousins (somehow or another). His nieces and nephews are my cousins as well. His mother-in-law is my great aunt’s twin sister.

As I tried to wrap my brain around all of the lines radiating out from me and my parents, my brain hurt. Then I realized that none of this really matters. Half the people in the room had my last name or had it once as a maiden name. The other half didn’t. That didn’t matter either. We were all together to celebrate the life of a great man (albeit a greatness I didn’t know personally, only through stories from my dad and uncle as well as those who spoke so highly of him today). And we were together. That is what mattered.

So I have resolved to spend more time with this previously unfamiliar branch of my family tree. I will let my kids see and experience what my father did 50 years ago when he would spend his summers running around with these people to pass the time. I know my kids will be better off because of it.

And on a completely unrelated (I am being lazy and I don’t want to do two posts - sue me), Amen to Joe Klein.

From the Freakonomics Blog at NYT:

Say you’re a credit card company. You make money every time one of your card holders carries a balance at the end of the month, because you charge interest on that debt. A lot of interest. The longer your card holder carries debt, the more money you make.

Ok, I don’t know about you, but I have had a hard time trying to figure out all of the arcane terms used in the financial industry fuck up. And I am an ardent listener of Marketplace even! Today’s WaPo has a great three-page story by Jill Drew about one particularly nasty little financial item: the collateralized debt obligation or CDO. It makes for fascinating reading:

It was Wall Street’s version of an inside joke: Take a motley collection of largely unwanted assets, repackage them into a new set of bonds, and name it after the pristine white-sand beaches of an exclusive New Jersey town where Katharine Hepburn once summered.

All I want for Christmas this year is to make January 20th come very early...like tomorrow.

Sincerely,
Chief Ninja Monkie

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

Biofuel from used coffee grounds?!?! That rocks!

By weight, spent coffee grounds have around 11% to 20% of oil remaining inside. That figure compares well with more usual biofuels like palm, rapeseed and soybean.

Sigh.

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For the record, I am fundamentally opposed to bailing out the automotive companies. I also don’t think we should have bailed out the financial industry. But recently, it has come out that UAW worker make about $70-75/hour. Ok, this is so not true:

A report from the conservative Heritage Foundation, opposing the auto industry bailout, said that members of the United Auto Workers union “earn $75 an hour in wages and benefits – almost triple the earnings of the average private sector worker.” Later in the report, it’s phrased this way: “The vast majority of UAW workers in Detroit today still earn $75 an hour.”

The problem is, that’s just not true. The automakers say that the average wage earned by its unionized workers is about $29 per hour. So how does that climb to more than $70? Add in benefits: life insurance, health care, pension and so on. But not just the benefits that the current workers actually receive – after all, it’s pretty rare for the value of a benefits package to add up to more than wages paid, even with a really, really good health plan in place. What’s causing the number to balloon is the cost of providing benefits to tens of thousands of retired auto workers and their surviving spouses.

What people are quoting as $75/hr is the companies’ labor costs, not workers’ wages. Labor costs include such thing as direct costs plus overhead, benefits, fringe, and G&A costs. The $75/hr is what is costs these companies to employ someone, not what they are paid. There are all sorts of problems with the auto industry. There is no need to make up lies (and I am looking at you Heritage Foundation). 

In the dictionary, under accountability, see this:

A new Senate report concludes the physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was the direct result of Bush administration policies and should not be blamed on guards and interrogators.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report, released Thursday, is the result of a two-year investigation. It directly links President George W. Bush’s policies after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, legal memos on torture and interrogation rule changes with the abuse that was photographed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq four years ago.

The report says administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers but called that “both unconscionable and false."

Ok, they didn’t actually say you suck. But they might has well have. From Wired.com:

EINSTEIN2, the newest iteration of the detection system, is intended to watch over the gateways to all of the government websites in real time, in order to spot intrusions or attacks quickly. But to do that, software controlled by DHS will need to peer into citizens online interactions with the government, including emails.

But sharing traffic data from government websites such as the IRS’s with the Department of Homeland Security raises privacy concerns, according to the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, though DHS’s own assessment dismisses them outright.

“Internet users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from address of their messages or the IP addresses of the sites they visit,” the program’s recent Privacy Impact Assessment (.pdf) concluded.

A friend sent me this and I just had to share.

What a douchebag!

Little in Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s background prepared the people of Illinois for the man who was revealed in the criminal complaint that dropped like a bombshell here on Tuesday. Delusional, narcissistic, vengeful and profane, Mr. Blagojevich as portrayed by federal prosecutors shocked even his most ardent detractors.