Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

Two worthwhile posts from James Wimberley having to do with the high places of Asia: a suggestion for a China-tweaking name for the world’s second-highest peak and some excellent thoughts on Tibet, occasioned by the continuing multi-venue farce that is the torch relay.

Go, then, and read.

My guess is that the Olympic torch relay will continue to be newsworthy today when it hits San Fransisco (now that’s going out on a limb). As we watch things unfold, allow me to recommend a couple good posts on the torch and the Olympic movement, such as it is nowadays.

James Wimberly:

In contrast, the wider political message of the modern Olympics is vapid. The torch in particular, lit at Olympia by pretty girls dressed vaguely as priestesses in skimpy chitons, is a pseudo-religious fraud. The torch relay was actually invented by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics; its tainted origin lies in the racist propaganda immortalized by the twisted genius of Leni Riefenstahl. No black, Jewish, or disabled athletes needed to apply then. Paradoxically, the public legitimacy of the protests depends on a measure of acceptance of the fraud as a symbol of a real value which the Chinese and the IOC are betraying; rather in the way the Church of England grew from its origin in cynical politics into a genuine religious tradition.

Henry Farrell:

The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have involved inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders.

The post’s title refers to this guy.

Via Chas, we learn that PETA is using the hack lawyer stick on Gina Spadafori for posting that PETA killed 97% of the animals that they took in to their Norfolk facility in 2006. At issue? Not the number, but whether those animals were “in search of homes”. According to PETA, these animals were unadoptable. Sorry - doesn’t pass the smell test. Patrick suggests that the PETA death center in Norfolk VA be relicensed by the Commonwealth as a slaughterhouse - makes sense to me.

I am not one of those folks with a gut-level aversion towards Senator Clinton, but if these sorts of things keep up, I could be persuaded.

Hillary - it’s over. The plus-sized dame has yet to sing, but sing she will. Get out, or if you can’t bring yourself to do that, cut the shit (or to continue w/ the title’s metaphor, at least stop peeing in the pool).

Update - another metaphor: the Tonya Harding option.

Yet another update - looks like I’m not the only one… (not that I’m in Kleiman or Drum’s league, blogospherically speaking)

Saying Turing died of “potassium cyanide poisoning” and leaving it at that is like saying Yukio Mishima died of unscheduled steel consumption. *

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From Adam Greenfield’s Flickrstream.

I usually resist the urge to repost things featured on BoingBoing - it’s not like it’s an obscure blog and I’m sure a large percentage of my readers read it as well. However… I just can’t pass up a chance to add my voice to the pointing-and-laughing.

First, the original:

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The voice of reason:

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And when in doubt, apply lashings of LOL (Lex10 wastes no time):

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Mock pants-pissing politicos and police. Mock mercilessly. Srsly.

(BTW - this worked during the freaking blitz!)

…as I argued a few weeks ago, before the monoline crisis fully blew up in public, no business that requires a AAA rating in order to be viable deserves a AAA rating in the first place. - Nouriel Roubini * (N. Roubini:macroecon::J. Kunstler:energy policy - h/t Tom)

• Friedrich von Blowhard has an interesting analysis of the ratings theater surrounding the monoline insurers here.
• John Robb posts on MEND, Henry Okah and 4GW in Nigeria.
• Reclaiming the concept of the go bag.
• Obsolete skills. Some are funny, some are (IMHO) just plain WRONG. Funny: Swapping floppy disks. Wrong: Starting a car that has a manual choke (my ‘85 LandCruiser had a manual choke - fabulous vehicle), Map Reading (tell the S&R team that map reading is an obsolete skill).

An aside - I have this cranky-old-man theory that an entire science and math curriculum could be built around teaching/learning/doing celestial navigation. (sticks head out door - “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!”)

To mark the entry of the vainest man in American presidential politics (and that’s saying a lot) into the race today.

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Just in case anyone misinterprets - I could care less about Ralph. .38% of the vote last time? He’s just embarrassing himself.

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Dear Mayah Mumbles, Skeletor, and every other pee-pee pants fear embracer pretending to run this country,

I hope you can see this, because I’m doing it as hard as I can.

Later - yay! Also, yay!

Talks in New York with the unnamed banks are part of Insurance Superintendent Eric Dinallo’s effort to stabilize the bond guarantors and bolster the market’s finances, said agency spokesman Andrew Mais in an interview. Insurers MBIA Inc. gained 33 percent in New York trading and Ambac Financial Group Inc. soared 72 percent.

New capital may help preserve the top credit ratings for the bond guarantors such as MBIA, the industry’s largest, and halt any erosion of investor confidence in the $2.4 trillion of assets they guarantee. Ambac, MBIA’s biggest rival, lost its AAA grade from Fitch Ratings this month on concerns that losses tied to subprime mortgages may increase. *

Let me see if I’ve got this straight… Banks/financial institutions hold a lot of iffy CDOs (aka Big Shitpile/matryoshka lemons) - bundles of loans that likely contain sub-prime stuff that may default. They’ve covered themselves against the possibility of the loans going bad by buying insurance from monoline insurers (MBIA and Ambac are the ones in the news). Now, loans are going bad - it’s hitting the fan. The worry shifts to the insurers - how are they going to make good? Because folks are thinking that the MBIAs of the world aren’t going to be able to cover the CDO losses, their stock price tanks. Low stock price = even less capital in reserve at the insurers. If the monoline insurers go tango uniform (toes-up tits-up - de-bowdlerized by audience request), the balance sheets of the institutions holding the CDOs take awful hits. So, lets have the banks (some of whom have got to be holding the paper in question) bail out the people who are insuring them.

Seems a bit circular to me - my guess - only a matter of time before I, as a taxpayer, have the privilege of bailing out Wall Street…

Update - check the comments if you are interested in the topic. Prof. Kleiman replies to my email query:

…if the monolines’ guarantees are seen to be worthless, the shitpile grows. (I love “matryoshka lemons,” by the way.) And they could suffer from a kind of “run on the bank” even if they’re actually solvent. So it’s possible that pumping more equity capital in would actually stabilize the situtation, whether it’s the banks’ capital or someone else’s. But the banks have an especially strong reason to want to stanch the bleeding.