Follow this link to the Huffington Post article on the report.

I posted my initial reaction before I have had a chance to read the report.  Follow this link to see my first response.

This response was in two pieces which I quote below.

(Geithner’s team ended up paying top dollar for toxic assets — “an amount far above their market value at the time,” the report notes.)

If anyone has a memory long enough to reach back before the Obama administration, they might remember the great conundrum of the time. If we paid the then market value for the securities, the whole financial system would collapse. That was the exact problem at the time – the securities had a market value that had fallen to far less than their initial price.

So we could have got a tremendous bargain and entered into a decades long depression or we could have paid more than they were worth, staved off a collapse, and be criticized for it at the time and in the future.

I’ll wait for cooler heads to judge what happened before I decide what reward Geithner deserves. There is no worry after all, we know that no good deed goes unpunished.

Let me see if I can put this another way.

You don’t need an entity with huge, deep pockets to step in and solve a free market problem by paying free market prices. The free market was quite capable of doing that.

The whole point of the intervention was to do what the free market could not do. That is to pump in money that made no sense for any single free market player, but made a whole lot of sense for the only entity that could protect the whole system from collapse.

That is Keynes’ great insight to what happens during a depression.

I posted a response to another comment that lamented that Wall Street did not learn its lesson because of Geithner’s intervention.

You are right. Wall Street will never learn if they don’t pay the price. The paradox was that if Wall Street got an object lesson, the rest of us would have paid a great price in enduring a financial collapse and decades of depression.

If we staved off a collapse and a depression, Wall Street would not get its object lesson.

Which of these two choices would you have picked?

Apparently, now everyone would have chosen the path of collapse.

My ability to continue to feed myself is the result of not choosing the path of collapse. Nobody else may, but I appreciate the choice that was made. We need to find other ways to give Wall Street the lesson it deserves.

After breakfast, I will try to read the actual report to see if it matches the HuffPo headline and story.

I still haven’t read the entire report, but I did find the following on page 15:

In the final analysis, the Federal Reserve and Treasury believed that the risks of not rescuing AIG outweighed the risks associated with rescuing the troubled insurance company, and on September 16, 2008, the Federal Reserve Board authorized an $85 billion credit facility for AIG.

Follow this link to read Thom Hartmann’s review of R. Crumb Illustration of the Book of Genesis. The most startling thing he says may be in the following excerpt:

According to one of the two different creation stories in Genesis, Adam and Eve gave birth to Cain and Abel, but after Cain killed Abel, he went to a nearby city and found a wife. Another city?

I don’t think my sister, the Jehovah Witness, ever told me about this version.  I am going to have to do a little research before I ask her about it.

Is there a bible expert among my readers that can confirm or refute this?

Follow this link to the Jehovah Witness’s web site to see some quotes from their translation of the bible.

Here you are actually driving me this day from off the surface of the ground, and from your face I shall be concealed; and I must become a wanderer and fugitive on the earth, and it is certain that anyone finding me will kill me.” 15 At this Jehovah said to him: “For that reason anyone killing Cain must suffer vengeance seven times.”

Who are these other people?  Where did they come from? I’m sure I’ll be sorry for asking.

Follow this link to the article by Fareed Zakaria in Newseek.

I have made a few comments on Huffington Post about this article.

As of this posting, the above comment link will take you to these maunderings of my feverish mind.

I think some people are missing the point.

Of course you cannot predict when specific innovations will occur. You cannot even predict what innovations will be (or they wouldn’t be innovations almost by definition).

However, you can figure out what factors help foster innovation as Fareed Zakaria has tried to spell out in his article.

There are some factors we can control and some we cannot. If we can figure out which ones we have some control over and then try to do something positive about them, we will get farther ahead than if we don’t.

Having government actions in this area decided by a president you’d like to have a beer with instead of someone who actually understands the value of technology and innovation is not the place to start. Having a president who puts political operatives in top science related agencies to rewrite the reports of scientists so that they are more politically palatable is not a good way to start. Deriding scientific study by our media, our citizens, and our political leaders (followers), is not a good way to start.

Cutting research funding to universities because they are bastions of liberalism, is not a good way to start. Tilting the tax structure so you can make billions in finance and only paltry millions in science, technology, and engineering, is not a good way to start.

Any other bright ideas from the peanut gallery?

By the way, how much do you think Sarah Palin knows about science and technology?

How much do you think the creationists and intelligent design people know about science and technology?

How much advantage do startup technology companies have in countries where health care is paid for outside the workplace?

It is all connected, people.

Why are people so stupid? Turns out it’s a virus spread by an Obama-hating monkey. He’s responsible for birthers, the people who equate health care reform to the Holocaust, and Rush Limbaugh.

Watch the video.

Follow this link to the HuffPo article that introduced this video to me.

Watch this video to see how Jon Stewart Catches Sean Hannity Falsifying Footage To Make GOP Protest Appear Bigger

Follow this link to the HuffPo article that brought this to my attention.

Sean Hannity To Jon Stewart “You Were Right” About Bogus Video. It was all a mistake. Watch this video.

This may turn out to be the never ending story. The following video is Jon Stewart’s response to the Hannity response:

Watch the following video:

This shows you why this liberal does not watch or listen to TV and Radio shows that are supposedly aimed at a liberal audience.

It is the hard headedness and lack of the ability to reason that keeps me from watching the right wing shows. Why would I want that crap on a left wing show?

In the first few decades of William F. Buckley, I would listen to his reasoned arguments even though I disagreed. Then he lost it and I stopped watching.

What’s old is new. Watch this video of water bouncing off a surface.

The pictures of this are interesting even if the explanation is probably somewhat off the mark. I guess it takes a physicist rather than a mathematician to explain the observation.

There is an article on softpedia.com Understanding Water Drop Back-Jet Physics that has a more physical explanation. They also completed a high-detail computer model of the phenomenon, one that comprises more than 30,000 frames per second.

Picture from above article

For even more physics there is the article Between bouncing and splashing: water drops on a solid surface.

My freshman adviser at MIT, Harold Edgerton, made a famous milk drop photograph in 1957.

Harold Edgerton was an electrical engineer and began to take photographs as scientific experiments. In his first, he tried to produce a perfect coronet from a single drop of milk falling into liquid. To do this he invented the stroboscope – a device to produce short bursts of light. This allowed him to take split-second pictures of objects in motion which could not be seen by the human eye, including bullets and hummingbirds in flight, light bulbs shattering, and athletes in action. Some of his photographs had an exposure time of less than 1/10,000 of a second.

Warning: This video has not been rated by the MPAA.

Follow this link to the article on Huffington Post.

I hope this article can help quell whatever misplaced anger there might be over the incident at Fort Hood.

Jon Stewart just loves Glenn Beck’s digestive and immune system so much, and he fears for it.

You probably had to have watched Glenn Beck to fully appreciate this video. I still found it funny even though I never have seen a Glenn Beck performance.