Afghan President Hamid Karzai met recently with members of the country’s clerical councils to get their assistance in persuading insurgents not to hide explosives in suicide bombers' turbans or in other religious or cultural symbols.
The Taliban, however, appear to have responded by hiding a bomb in a mosque in Kandahar province.
In the last five weeks, suicide bombers have killed the mayor of Kandahar and a senior cleric in the city with small amounts of explosives hidden in their turbans.
Nature’s default method for dealing with failure is natural selection. It subjects individuals to a survival test and if they fail, they die. Having died they remove themselves from the gene pool (and probably the meme pool as well) and are heard from no more. Left to themselves the brood of the Welfare State would fare poorly. Without skills, having torched their surroundings and having, in the words of one Australian self-confessed Leftist “shit on their own doorstep” they would pick their surroundings clean and then perish from basic starvation.
Meanwhile the markets continued to fall as investors fled to gold and ironically — Treasury Bonds. The Los Angeles Times notes that the Dow Jones average fell 600 points by midday on a Monday opening. “The appetite for Treasury bonds suggests that the Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the U.S. has not shaken the faith of investors in U.S. bonds.” It also suggested that the market’s skittishness was related to the general weakness of the economy rather than just being an outcome of the downgrade.
The NASCAR Effect Web actions begin to solve the problem of the NASCAR effect, where many sites today are completely littered with social buttons and share widgets. Like race cars slapped with promo stickers, blogs and businesses have filled their footers, sidebars, and whitespace with buttons for saving and sharing posts or pages on each and every remotely popular social site.
via flatfrogblog.com
Having Standard & Poor's downgrade the creditworthiness of the U.S., and warn the country about further downgrades, is a little like having the Catholic Church lecture Scout leaders on the proper behavior toward boys. The moral authority seems to be wanting. S&P, you may recall, is one of the ratings agencies (the others being Moody's and Fitch) that greased the skids of the financial crisis by awarding AAA ratings to tranche after tranche of mortgage bonds called collaterized debt obligations, or CDOs.
CNN reports that Timothy Geithner is will attend a teleconference meeting with G7 finance ministers. “The talks expected to occur before Asian markets open for Monday trading follow Friday’s downgrade of the U.S. credit rating to AA+ from the top rank of AAA. It was the first time in history the nation was rated below AAA.”
Events are now moving faster than the stately pace of jet travel can keep up with.
If Germany is now against this, which appears to be the case, it pretty much means, well, game over.
Add the uncerainty over the unwind of the Europe rescue "gamechanger" as one of the more naive CNBC anchors said yesterday, and Monday is now guaranteed to be a bloodbath.
As for those saying China will gladly step in and fund a $5 trillion EFSF shortfall, they may want to read the following article from Reuters
The smartest administration in the history of the world conceived of this plan.
The plan was to just let thousands of weapons flow to murderous drug cartels.
And then take those cartels down.
But they didn't take the cartels down, because they didn't track the guns.
They instead were to follow the money, but they also didn't do that.
A US border agent was killed due to the illegal arms sent to a neighboring sovereign country in this massive covert operation.
Jason’s main point is Canada bit the fiscal bullet in the mid-1990s and so has been in a better position to weather the current economic storm. While much remains to be done to bring taxes and government spending down, by reducing spending 16 years ago (and not ramping it up outrageously since), we are coming out of the recession faster than the States. And, of course, the Liberals deserve the credit for the belt-tightening of 1995 that help leave us in such a good position today.
Imagine that you have lung cancer. It has been in remission, but tests show the cancer has returned and is likely to be terminal. Still, there is some hope. Chemotherapy could extend your life, if not save it. You ask to begin treatment. But you soon receive more devastating news. A letter from the government informs you that the cost of chemotherapy is deemed an unjustified expense for the limited extra time it would provide.