A responsibility to the Iraqi people

Baird sees need for longer U.S. role in Iraq

Excerpt:

"I believe that the decision to invade Iraq and the post-invasion management of that country were among the largest foreign-policy mistakes in the history of our nation. I voted against them, and I still think they were the right votes," Baird said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

"But we're on the ground now. We have a responsibility to the Iraqi people and a strategic interest in making this work."

Baird, a five-term Democrat, voted against President Bush ordering the Iraq invasion — at a time when he was in a minority in Congress and at risk of alienating voters. He returned late Tuesday from a trip that included stops in Israel, Jordan and Iraq, where he met troops, U.S. advisers and Iraqis, whose stories have convinced him that U.S. troops must stay longer.


Comment: As unpopular as this war has become, my own view about early pullout mirrors Congressman Baird's.

Outrageous

Sex offender back in pulpit: Despite prison term, preacher welcomed by Baptist congregation

Excerpt:

A southwest suburban Southern Baptist congregation allowed a convicted child sex offender to preach for the last few years -- despite his past, and a warning from his previous church that he might still be dangerous, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

In 1996, Jeff Hannah was sentenced to nine years in prison for having sexual relations with four underage girls -- ages 15 to 17 -- while a married youth minister at Crossroads Church in Libertyville.

Hannah was paroled in 2001 and joined the First Baptist Church of Romeoville, where his new wife was a member. Soon after, the pastor moved on, and church members -- aware of Hannah's crimes -- asked him to step into the pulpit until a replacement was hired, according to church members, Hannah and others.

Hannah served in that role for three years and ever since has been a fill-in preacher, teacher and music minister at the church.
-------
The Rev. Steve Farish, pastor of Crossroads Church, which has relocated to Grayslake, said he considered Hannah so dangerous that he warned the Romeoville church and a regional Southern Baptist official.




I preface my remarks by saying:

1. I am a Baptist
   
2. While I am not a Southern Baptist, I know there are many good Southern Baptist churhes.
   

Comment: When the church lowers its standards to the world's level (or in this case, below the world's level!), it's no wonder that it has so little impact on society. (Matthew 5:13, "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men".)

A little leaven

Immigration, Inc

Giant Migrant Cash Pool Powering World Economy

Excerpt:

Experts tracking the phenomenon told The Associated Press they have gotten a much clearer picture since the 9/11 attacks, when authorities trying to cut the flow of cash to jihadists began taking a harder look at how immigrants move their money around.

Mass migration, they say, has spawned an underground economy of staggering proportions.

Globally, remittances - the cash that immigrants send home - totaled nearly $276 billion in 2006, the World Bank says. Remittances have more than doubled since 2000, and with globalization increasing the numbers of people on the move, there's no end in sight.

If these guest workers incorporated as a company, their migrant multinational would rank No. 3 on the Fortune 500 list, trailing only Wal-Mart and Exxon Mobil in annual revenue.

Remittances "are larger than direct foreign investment in Mexico, tea exports in Sri Lanka, tourism revenue in Morocco, and revenue from the Suez Canal in Egypt," World Bank economist Dilip Ratha said in a recent report.

And unlike the conventional economy, more cash tends to change hands in an economic downturn, political crisis, natural disaster, famine or war.

Comment: Extremely interesting (and news to me!)

Volatility Index (^VIX)

Don't be vexed by a high VIX

Excerpt:

The VIX is officially the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, and it measures the market's expectation of future volatility based on Standard and Poor's 500 stock index options prices.
--------
Turns out the volatility we're experiencing today isn't terribly unusual, even though it might feel that way after the steady run it follows. In the past decade, the VIX traded above 40 three times: During the Russian debt crises in 1998, after 9/11, and during the market downturn of 2002. The VIX's historical average going back to the early 1990s is about 19.

Wiki: VIX

CBOE VOLATILITY INDEX

Comment: Today was the first I've heard of this index! Interesting

58th Birthday

We had a small family celebration tonight for my 58th birthday. Rachel is out of town in Midland, MI and missing.

Pictures:

Brother (Roger) and his wife (Kathy)

Roger and me. (Mother got me geode bookends)

Kathee and me (235 lbs)

Roger w his USMC beer stein

Roger w old fedora of mine

Birthday thoughts:

1. Wow I can't believe I am 58!
   
2. If God enables me, and I am able, I hope to work until I am 66
   
3. For some unknown reason (but I am not complaining!), my back pain disappeared this week (after I think 3 months or more!). How long it will be gone? Don't know, but I am thankful today!
   
4. Psalm 90:12, "So teach us to number our days,That we may gain a heart of wisdom". Every day is a gift. Every day I must endeavor to live for my Savior.
   
5. Birthday presents: geode bookends (more properly nodules!); classical game of "Risk"; The Ultimate Film Noir Collection
   
6. Dinner: brats w sauerkraut, baked beans, red potato salad. Dessert: Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
   
   

Don't muzzle free speech

The Danger of Hate Crimes Legislation

Comment: a good read from Pastor Frank Sansone.

"match that lit a very dry field"

How Missed Signs Contributed to a Mortgage Meltdown

Business
How Missed Signs Contributed to a Mortgage Meltdown
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ and VIKAS BAJAJ
Published: August 19, 2007
There were ample warning signs that a financial time bomb in the form of subprime mortgages was ticking quietly for months.

Exerpts:

As far back as 2001, advocates for low-income homeowners had argued that mortgage providers were making loans to borrowers without regard to their ability to repay. Many could not even scrape together the money for a down payment and were being approved with little or no documentation of their income or assets.

-------------

“This was the match that lit a very dry field of risk on fire,” Mr. Malvey said. When he first heard the news coming out of Bear Stearns, Mr. Malvey recalled, he was busy writing his weekly report to clients in his corner office on the 15th floor of Lehman’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters. Now it seemed as if the broader market was catching up to what Mr. Malvey and his team had been talking about all along.

Comment: More on the subprime mess!

A "Crescent of Embrace"?

Tom Burnett, Sr. wants son's name removed from Flight 93 memorial

Excerpts:

The father of a Minnesota native killed when hijacked Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, wants his son's name withheld from a victims memorial because of renewed concerns that its design is centered around Islamic symbolism.

Tom Burnett Sr. served on a jury that picked the winning design, originally named "Crescent of Embrace," and said the request was "something I'd rather not do, but I can't get anyone to listen."

------

Nearly two years ago, designer Paul Murdoch changed the memorial's planned shape to a nearly full circle in response to critics who said the original crescent shape honored the Muslim extremists who carried out the attacks. The crescent is a Muslim symbol.

Burnett Sr., of Northfield, Minn., said he is looking for a "thorough, honest investigation" of the design and the elements discussed by Alec Rawls, a conservative blogger from Palo Alto, Calif. Burnett said many of his concerns were based on Rawls' theories.

Rawls says the planned memorial faces toward Mecca, Islam's holiest city, and contends that a planned 93-foot tower with wind chimes would act as an Islamic sundial.

Comment: My wife echoed my sentiment: "good for him"! The memorial design has since been "modified" to a "Bowl of Embrace". Will this be a field of honor or a field that mocks us? Nathan (son) said: "it would be like building a Holocaust museum in the shape of a swastika!"

Alec Rawls evidence

Alec Rawls blog

Wiki: Flight 93 National Memorial

Official Flight 93 Memorial site

Kensington Runestone

WCCO Video

Comment: Video from WCCO with the latest on the Kensington Runestone. Additional links of interest follow: Runestone museum; Kensington Runestone . We've been to the museum.

MN Fitness club test of family

Rochester judge battles what constitutes a 'family,' and who gets to decide

Excerpt:

If allowed to continue, the suit will determine whether the club must give a lesbian couple and their 11-year-old child a family membership, which would save them about $500 per year.

Comment: Should be interesting. Wide ramifications!

Go green: Online banking

Money Is Green, but Online Banking Is Greener

Excerpt:

Some 53 percent of all U.S. households (61 million) now do their banking online; nearly half of those also pay their bills via computer. But the report says that a whopping 16.5 million trees, roughly 2.3 million tons of wood, could be spared annually in the unlikely event that all U.S. households made the switch to paperless payments. Such a move would also reduce fuel consumption by 26 million BTUs, enough energy to provide residential power to a city the size of San Francisco for a year.


Other major pluses: toxic air pollutants would be cut by 3.9 billion pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents, which is comparable to taking 355,015 cars off the road; waste water would drop by an estimated 13 billion gallons (enough to fill 19,846 swimming pools), and 1.6 billion pounds of solid waste (equal to 56,000 fully loaded garbage trucks) would be eliminated. In addition, the report says, there would be 8.5 million fewer particulates and 12.6 million fewer nitrogen oxides in the air, on par with getting 763,000 buses and 48,000 18-wheelers off the streets.

Comment: Ingdirect.com has Electric Orange which is free online bill pay. Wells Fargo is one of the leaders but the service has fees. Image from Trust Texas Bank.

Compact Disk anniversary

CD celebrates 25th anniversary

It was August 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany.

Comments: I remember a friend (a weathy friend) who had a CD system way back when. It was expensive (as I recall he had paid $ 1,200 for it)! My first CD player was purchased about 15 years ago. We had a couple from the church by and listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuani Brass.

Imagine a butcher making sausages

The American Dream unravels for poor and rich alike

Comment: If the subprime mess finds you confused, don't be surprised. I was (yes it was a long time ago!) an economics and finance major (University of Cincinnati, 1971) and I find it confusing. What's a collateralised debt obligation (CDO)? This article explains - it's like butcher making sausages!

Excerpt:

Their broker urged them to get on the property ladder before it was too late, assuring them that soaring house values would soon provide a tidy profit long before the initially low interest rate of the subprime mortgage he'd arranged for them took a significant hike upwards.

Comment: There is a lot of presumption in the above: soaring home prices, tidy profits, etc. This article is not about butchers or sausages!

Subprime fallout

Californians rush to pull money from Countrywide Bank

Anxious customers jammed the phone lines and Web site of Countrywide Bank and crowded its branch offices to pull out their savings because of concerns about the financial problems of the mortgage lender that owns the bank.

Countrywide Financial Corp., the biggest home-loan company in the United States, sought Thursday to assure depositors and the financial industry that both it and its bank were fiscally stable. And federal regulators said they weren't alarmed by the volume of withdrawals from the bank.

Comment: Folk are getting nervous! Countrywide Financial Corp. (CFC)

Money Ball: What works, and what doesn't, in a credit crisis.

Excerpt:

On that score, the feds went one for two this week. On the plus side, Countrywide Financial was able to call on an $11.5 billion bank credit line when that giant mortgage lender couldn't sell its commercial paper. It also said it would move its mortgage business under its bank unit, which will give it a further liquidity cushion. Countrywide is at the center of the subprime storm, and its stock price has taken a huge hit. But it retains significant earning capacity and a solid business in safer mortgages.

The last thing anyone should want is for an otherwise solvent business to go bust because it can't meet its short-term borrowing needs. The bank credit line will be expensive for Countrywide. But as the 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot advised, in a financial crisis lend freely at a penalty rate. To the extent that Treasury and the New York Fed played an indirect role in creating this private financial cushion for Countrywide, this was effective crisis management.

Comment: This smells so much like the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s!

A journey of faith

Rejecting radical Islam -- one man's journey

Excerpt:

The path to faith often takes unexpected twists. In the case of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, the road went through three of the world's major religions -- Judaism, Islam and Christianity -- and ultimately brought him to the FBI.
-------
In 1999 he left his job at Al-Haramain for law school at New York University. Away from his co-workers, he was free to question the radical doctrines he'd learned in Oregon and meet with others about spirituality, including Christians. A year later, he converted to Christianity and was eventually baptized in the Baptist church.


Comments:

1. Image from FrontPageMagazine.com
   
2. My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir is available from Amazon
   
   

Excerpt from Front Page interview:

FP: Share with us your climb out of radicalism and conversion to Christianity.

Gartenstein-Ross: If there's one thing that working for a Wahhabi charity can do for you, it is make you step back and rethink your religious views. In the summer of 2000, after my first year of law school, I found that I missed the tolerant, idealized version of Islam that I once practiced. But by this time my views on faith had shifted: I no longer saw the purpose of religion as forging a relationship with God that felt comfortable, but instead believed that I needed to truly understand the relationship that God wanted with me. I began that summer studying the Qur'an, the ahadith (Muhammad's recorded sayings and doings), and trying to revisit whether the moderate version of the faith that I once knew was indeed viable. Midway through the summer, during a stroll through Washington Square Park, I was struck by the realization that perhaps I hadn't found the truth in Islam. When the faith seemed to answer my spiritual questions, it was because those were the answers I had been looking for. It was then that I began to examine the arguments for Christianity with a far more open mind. I became a Christian before the end of the year.

When the smoke clears

Cramer's 'Mad Money' Recap: Wells Fargo Will Keep

Excerpt:

Calling it a stock for "when the smoke clears," Cramer said he believes it will "own the mortgage market" and be in better shape than its peers.

The company is known to offer a "great" dividend, and Cramer is a fan of its diversified holdings. He'd buy some "in a week or two" should the price fall into the $32 to $34 range.

Comment: Wells Fargo (WFC)

Bio-Fuels Boondoggle

Bio-Fuels Boondoggle Backfires, Badly

Excerpt:

A new study that concludes that rainforests absorb more CO2 than can be saved by clearing the land for biofuel crops. Razing rainforests for bio-fuels? Surely not! Uh-huh. U.S. and European government legislation mandating huge increases in ethanol consumption is already amping-up ethanol production in developing countries


Comment: Answers: Small cars! Think Europe (where the cost of fuel (because of taxes) is high enough to encourage: less driving, smaller cars, public transit)! Also small diesels would be better than ethanol fueled vehicles.

Earlier Cold Fusion Guy comments on Ethanol

Image is of rain forest clearing in Indonesia

"Special Force 2"

Hezbollah video game: War with Israel

Excerpt:

Raid Israel to capture soldiers, battle tanks in the valleys of southern Lebanon and launch Katyusha rockets at Israeli towns -- a new Hezbollah computer game puts players on the frontline of war with the Jewish state.
------
Designed by Hezbollah computer experts, players of "Special Force 2" take the role of a Hezbollah fighter, or Mujahid. Weapons and points are accumulated by killing Israeli soldiers.
------
The game retails at about $10 in Lebanon and is produced by volunteers. Hezbollah is expecting strong demand for the game at home and abroad. Hundreds of copies have been reserved in advance in Lebanon.

The 3-D game forces players to think and use their resources wisely, reflecting the way Hezbollah fights, Daher said.

"The features which are the secret of resistance's victory in the south have moved to this game so that the child can understand that fighting the enemy does not only require the gun.

"It requires readiness, supplies, armament, attentiveness, tactics."


Comment:

See earlier posts about Farfour.

The hook in Sennacherib's nose

Kathee and I are reading through the Old Testament and this week came to 2 Kings 18 & 19. Oh how I love the Kings!

2 Kings 19:28, "Because your rage against Me and your tumult Have come up to My ears, Therefore I will put My hook in your nose And My bridle in your lips, And I will turn you back By the way which you came"

2 Kings 19:32-34

 32 “Therefore thus says the LORD concerning the king of Assyria:

      ‘He shall not come into this city,
      Nor shoot an arrow there,
      Nor come before it with shield,
      Nor build a siege mound against it.

 33 By the way that he came,
      By the same shall he return;
      And he shall not come into this city,’
      Says the LORD.

 34 ‘For I will defend this city, to save it
      For My own sake and for My servant David’s sake.’”

How this blessed me: This text demonsrates the absolute sovereignty of God over the nations! How it comforts my heart!

Image from www.livius.org

Classic Investing Theory

Remembering a Classic Investing Theory

Excerpt:

Right now, the stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index have an average P/E ratio of about 16.5, which by historical standards is quite normal. Since World War II, the average P/E ratio has been 16.1. During the bubbles of the 1920s and the 1990s, on the other hand, the ratio shot above 40. The core of Wall Street’s reassuring message, then, is that even if the mortgage mess leads to a full-blown credit squeeze, the damage will not last long because stocks don’t have far to fall.

Comment: The worst thing an investor can do it look at the stock market every day! Buy value ... invest for the long haul! When the stock market goes up 10% ... just remember it is only "on paper". When it goes down 10% ... remember "it is only on paper". As for Security Analysis, I had not heard of it before today. I'll probably pick it up!

Stock quote for Citicorp.

Tip: Use online financial tools to look for the P/E ration! If the P/E is "N/A" (eg , Ford), the company is not making a profit.