rocketshot

Good morning.

Stocks are surging across the board - the TSX up 3%, major US indices up 5%ish - on a combination of a long-overdue bear-market snapback rally, Fed chair Ben Bernanke's strongly-stated assurances that large banks will not be allowed to fail no matter what, and "modifications" being considered to accounting rules, which would effectively allow banks to list assets as having more value than they actually currently do.

Citigroup CEO Vickram Pandit says that his firm is both profitable and undervalued, assuming you of course ignore, as Marketwatch puts it, "four separate government interventions at a cost or commitment of close to $400 billion and a dilution of existing shareholders." And that's also if you ignore this juicy tidbit:

Citibank, Bank of America , HSBC Bank USA , Wells Fargo Bank and J.P. Morgan Chase reported that their "current" net loss risks from derivatives — insurance-like bets tied to a loan or other underlying asset — surged to $587 billion as of Dec. 31 . Buried in end-of-the-year regulatory reports that McClatchy has reviewed, the figures reflect a jump of 49 percent in just 90 days.

Karl notes that with all the Level 3 bullshit and off-balance-sheet financial statements manipulation, we have no way to actually judge any claim of profit.

The usual notes apply: 1. Don't stand in the way of this. 2. A sustained bear market rally would have some legs, enough to get you confident that the bear is dead and then whipsaw around and eat. your. brains, but 3. They're very good opportunities if you're lucky and careful. (Me, I don't play this game. But I know people who do.) Good luck.

hero factory meme

You can make one here, if you want.

unfocused anger, part I

At the recent arguments against California's recently-adopted ban on marriage, you get a protester holding up a sign congratulating Harvey Milk's murderer as a hero (scene shot here); the domestic-parntership expansion bill here in Washington State is prompting the fundamentalist right to air a huge series of complete-fabrication hate ads against it (if you live in a swing district or any district targeted by these, please call your legislators to support the expansion), and the Mormon political machine is gearing up for more anti-queer action across the country, like in Illinois.

In non-queer culture-war bullshit, the current Pope Benedict upheld the excommunication of a mother who authorised an abortion for the twins her nine year old daughter was carrying after she had been raped buy her stepfather, a pregnancy which was under any circumstances life-threatening. The rapist stepfather has not been excommunicated. If you need a bigger sign of absolute wretched contempt for women by the Catholic church hierarchy, I don't know what's wrong with you. (Oh, and if you forgot, Pope Benedict has also been busy revoking excommunications of pro-Hitler Holocaust deniers.)

The only good thing about all this is that it's driving people away from Christianity in starkly clear numbers. Reap the fucking whirlwind, you evil bastards. The evangelicals are showing slightly up numbers, but the Christian Science Monitor thinks US evangelism is on the verge of sudden collapse, noting:

Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

Yeah, and you'll be seen that way because that's what you've been. All you fucks have been doing is hating on me and people like me for decades now, and the entire religion has hollowed itself out to shrieking yahoos who don't give a rat's ass about anything other than worshipping torturers and bashing on queers and women. I mean honestly, when you have your reps talking about how he hopes the children(!) of "sexual promiscuity" die of AIDS to teach their parents a lesson, how much more wretchedly, perversely, direly, hatefully, sadistically evil do you think you need to be? I'm glad at least one of you recognises, at this late date, what you've become.

(The CS Monitor author is probably looking at the dramatic collapse in Catholic identification in New England following the continued church protection of child rapists and their protectors, like Bernard Law. "Oops, I think we're in trouble." I sure fucking hope so, you deserve to be.)

You look at this and then look in contrast to things like how in the officially Christian United Kingdom, PM Gordon Brown recently stated that "this [Proposition 8] attempt to undo good that has been done is unacceptable." And in Argentina - Argentina - you have banks running advertisements containing more overt queer respect than you see anywhere in the US. (Link courtesy cow.) And you really realise that it's the US, the Islamic fundamentalist countries, the ex-Hitler Youth pope, and a few fascists in Russia vs. everyone else in the world. It's revolting.

Don't forget to call to support SB 5688 and HB 1727, the domestic-partnership expansion bills, and, for that matter, the dead-on-arrival SB 5674 and HB 1745, which would authorise marriage outright - it only adds a few seconds to the call. The legislative hotline 1.800.562.6000.

Some of the things the Obama administration wants to move past

This came out a week ago; I wanted to sit on it for a while to let it fall out of news service headlines before reminding everybody about it.

The Bush Administration decided internally that it was not bound by the Constitution in any way. First amendment? Void. Fourth amendment? Void. Treaties, specified by the Constitution as law of the land? Void. Laws passed by Congress? Void. Habeas corpus? Void. For everyone. Greenwald, a week ago:

Let's underscore: these weren't just abstract theories. They served as the basis for many U.S. government actions. Military actions were, in fact, directed at American citizens on U.S. soil (that's what the NSA program was, as but one example). Both legal residents and American citizens captured on U.S. soil were put in cages for years with no trial or charges of any kind. And, of course, the U.S. instituted a systematic torture regime that led to the brutalization and even deaths of many detainees in our custody...

This is factually true, with no hyperbole: Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our "laws" were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution. The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President. Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them.

Scott Horton, writing at Harper's Magazine, notes:

John Yoo’s Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink....

Clearly it was designed to authorize sweeping warrantless surveillance by military agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency... [and] much more was afoot, including the deployment of military units and military police powers on American soil. These memos suggest that John Yoo found a way to treat the Posse Comitatus Act as suspended. These memos gave the President the ability to authorize the torture of persons held at secret overseas sites....

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it.

Well, some of us spent a whole lot of time screaming about it.

Sullivan, also from a week ago:

Just to recap: the last president believed that he had the inherent power to suspend both the First and the Fourth amendments, he had the power to seize anyone in the US or world, disappear and torture them, and ordered his legal goons to come up with patently absurd legal rationales for all of it. And much of official Washington carried on as normal - and those of us who actually stood up and opposed this were regarded as "hysterics."

Something is rotten in a country where this can happen with such impunity - and when, even now, highly regarded and respected journalists and commentators simply move on or roll their eyes or sigh world-weary sighs.

A lot of things are rotten. Still. All of this stands until it is repudiated. It has not been repudiated, and Mr. Obama has been using Mr. Bush's power theories to work in court against repudiation. (And not just in this arena; Mr. Obama is now describing the systematic problems at Gitmo as an artifact of steps "taken immediately after 9/11" and Mr. Gates's "investigation" into conditions at Guantanimo Bay has certified Gitmo as now being squeeky-clean Geneva-compliant, just like magic.) The use of those unilateral secrecy theories continues to undermine both the rule of law and the cause of human rights across the globe:

This is just a fact: the U.N. Human Rights Report is identifying as a gross violation of human rights and international obligations exactly that which the Obama administration is doing: namely, invoking claims of "State Secrets" in order to "conceal illegal acts from oversight bodies or judicial authorities" and to deny victims of torture and secret detention a judicial forum in which to seek remedies. We're not only doing that in our own courts, but also conspiring with and/or pressuring our allies to invoke claims of secrecy to conceal these crimes and prevent accountability. And that's to say nothing of the emphatic position we are still taking that we can abduct citizens from around the world, ship them off to a black hole at Bagram, and deny them any rights of any kind to challenge their detention.

Moreover, citing the Convention Against Torture -- the treaty which Ronald Reagan signed in 1988 and the U.S. Senate ratified in 1994 but which must not be mentioned in decent company these days -- the U.N. Report also reminds the United States:

States are under a positive obligation to conduct independent investigations into alleged violations of the right to life, freedom from torture, or other inhuman treatment, enforced disappearances or arbitrary detention, to bring justice to those responsible for such acts, and to provide reparations where they have participated in such violations.

These are treaties to which the US is signatory. They were signed by then-Presidents and ratified by Senates. They are, Constitutionally, the law of the land. And the US government is following none of them.

Instead, the political class natters on about how important is to "put this behind" us, and runs articles pretending nothing was new, and all this is just a partisan game and Liberal Revenge, which is a lie, but one recycled endlessly with the brainless prolificness of the practised insane, and I am beyond sick of it. The liars on their own will never stop; I simply want to know when, if ever, will they finally be challenged.

wait, what?

So, now that I have all the equipment working, I made a test recording today of a new mandolin instrumental (called "January") I've been writing, and got the equalisation drop-ins and such working, and did a stereo mixdown and export to figure all that out. And it worked, yay!

Then I threw it at a few people online to get reactions. I know the noise floor is still too high (that's why I need carpet, to build sound baffles) and it's kind of a sloppy playthrough, but I wanted to see what people thought, and how it sounded on other speakers, and, um, suddenly now ysabel is my first sponsor for my first CD, and my brain is all essploded! HI FAIRIES! Here's a shout-out!

i guess that means it's pretty good. omg