Sorry I've been so out of it...

Sorry I've been so out of it - I was sick for a while, and then I wasn't but was so far behind on everything, and still kind of tired. So here's what I've been reading:

Platts reports that the Mexican oil situation continues to deteriourate rapidly. Do not expect improvement, tho' PEMEX hopes to stabilise the situation over the next couple of years. However, exports are dropping more rapidly than production, as the Export Land model predicts. Meanwhile, Matthew Simmons asserts that if you look at the private oil companies neutrally, it becomes clear they're in a long-term liquidation phase. Shell Oil disputes this, of course.

More detainees - again, ones released as innocent - are coming forth as torture claimants against the US. Carnivorous Conservatives dismisses it as "old news," which is a different tactic than the previous "torture is good" and "I love torture" and "it's not torture if we do it" and "it's not really torture" and "it's just a few bad apples" and "why do you hate America?" tactics previously (in reverse order) used.

In fundamentalist blowback news, thanks to abstinence-only education in Florida, Florida teens believe that drinking capfuls of bleach will prevent HIV, and Mountain Dew stops pregnancy. Yay.

I'm way behind the curve economically - which means at this point I haven't been keeping close track for, what, three days? Four? - but I'll make that a separate post.

More of me being busy

This is again mostly a post of things I read and thought worth keeping up on a tab. No theme, sorry.

Miami's real estate market is remarkable at times, with a $1.1m waterfront property receiving no bids. They stopped asking at 91% off.

American media is mostly a travesty; the economic media is proving out to be pretty damn bad too, tho' not as bad as the Court at Versailles so-called political press. But it's close. Naked Capitalism asks why the American media continues to accept Bush administration pronouncements at face value when there have been so very many obvious lies that have been proven lies - yet press behaviour remains unchanged. In this case they're talking economics, but note the parallels to the political world.

They're talking about a lot of things in that post, amoungst them the so-called reform plan which will give the Fed sweeping new powers. Note the commonality here: when there's a fuckup, particularly if it's related to a series of government failures, the Bush administration response is to grab more power, even if (in a semi-opposing view) the powers sought don't address the problem. Mish, more bluntly, calls various reforms being floated around open invitations for corporations to lie. No one seems to be suggesting that this increases transparency, which is really what's needed.

But I degress. Back on the press: one example of the problems with the American press is that it is still talking about whether there's going to be a recession, despite the fact that it's pretty damn clear we've already entered one. (407,000 jobless claims are a pretty good clue tho' only the latest.) The Australian press, on the other hand, says the Bear Stearns buy-out/bailout was necessary to avoid a Great Depression. (The Treasury came out a couple of days later and said much the same thing, but again, dancing around about the language.) The UK Telegraph talks outright about the Nordic-style nationalisation that's started in the US.

In response, Genesis over at Market Ticker is extremely angry about some of the details of the Bear Stearns deal, noticing that essentially the $30B in loans is a de facto giveaway of money which he considers illegal and grounds for impeachment of Chief Executive Mr. Bush. Mish agrees that the de facto payoff of $30B to J.P. Morgan (basically a bribe to buy Bear Stearns) was blatantly illegal, shredding it in a line-by-line deconstruction. (With further commentary here; he claims even the vote to take action was illegal, taken without a quorum.)

Meanwhile, consumer debt is in its worst condition since 1992. 70% of tax refunds are going to pay of credit-card debt, giving rise to a general impression that the tax "rebate" coming out later this year will do the same.

The smallest bit of good news can be seen in the AAA ABX, where for the first time in months, there's a tiny bit of a rally in AAA ("up" here is good), and the CMBX indicies off their highs (remember, "up" == bad here) and forming a bit of a channel at merely "horrific," and off of "end of the economy." And private commercial spreads are still high, but well off their upward spikes. But Fed commercial paper spreads are shooting back up (again, up == bad), and somebody asked for an assload of money yesterday at the discount window and didn't get it. But they could've just gone to any of the other bazillion little windows the Fed has been opening. I just don't know.

Finally, I got private mail about the Senate not extending the power of bankruptcy judges to rewrite contracts to lower mortgage payments. I'm a bit torn, in that I can see how this could provide some relief - sort of establishing a demi-bankrupcy where the house debt is concerned - but I think it could also have horrific consequences for contract law, and "law" has already taken enough hits these last few years. So I'm ambivalent at best.

Meanwhile, as for me

Here, have bullet-point life:

• I wanna see Kannazuki no Miko. I have no idea whether it's any good. I'm also totally squeeing over Princess Princess, but I think I said that already. And yesterday at anime night a character started playing a song and the first six notes were from one of my songs which kind of fruck me out. But then it became completely different. So that was better.
• Does anyone know a 501(c)(3) that could use a 3/4 ton pickup truck? Directly, I mean, not auction-and-take-the-proceeds; I know a lot of ways to do that. But with the auto market in the toilet, sales attempts are full of fail so far. (Not unlike the two stores I put up for Cascadian Mecha Militia and League of Disgruntled Software Workers swag. Snif.)
• This whole mini-RBL+our blacklist+greylist thing is full of awesome. Since I threw it online, across four accounts, I've gotten two pieces of spam handed to spamassassin. (And, of course, zero in actual inboxes.) It's so far down that I've actually reported spam to postmasters again, since in this one case it came from an actual mail server of an actual (tiny) ISP. (They have two Class Cs. OooooOOOooo. Their mail servers are named things like "fish" and "fish2" and so on, meaning we received spam from, um, fish. In Canada. Nigerian scam mail, only rebranded North Korea. The fact that the count enough is low enough for me to care again is epic win.)
• My throat is still terrible. This is really bad. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to practice again by Saturday. That'll give me a week and two days to try to whip this Beethoven thing back into something like shape. AGH HATE HATE HATE NANG DIE. I'm dosing it constantly with nasty medicinal teas and it's helping a lot - two days ago I got about 10 minutes of practice before hitting FAIL (but otherwise felt fine), yesterday I couldn't talk (but felt fine, maybe a little tired), today I can talk a bit but I'm still _{all low like this} which is weird and unpleasant. Also, I can't do much flute practice, as that seems to dry out my throat pretty seriously.
• I'm done with the extra research I wanted to do for my next article, so I start writing it tomorrow, which is good; it's not due for a week and a half, but I don't want to push it. I like being able to do drafts, let them sit for a day, and come back to them.

And that's it for today's Bullet-Point Life. Yay?

ETA: Fred is in REM sleep and twitching furiously. HOW CAN THESE CATS BE SO CUTE?! ^_^