A Veneer of Certainty

With the strange and likely harmless flight of Air Force nukes over the continental US, I can't help but put "Dr. Strangelove" in my Netflix queue.

Normally the Air Force is super-paranoid about nuke security, naturally, so I'm wondering what happened this time. If it was truly a mistake you can fully expect a few Air Force careers to come to a screeching halt. Was it saber rattling, reminding geopolitical undesirables that we still have bombers and megatons of tough love? Sort of a dial-a-yield Urkel moment of "Did I do that?"

At the very least, the US government can finally state with authority that it CAN find some weapons of mass destruction.

Car thief Turd Bobby Davis is out of detention, released to the supposedly airtight supervision of his family and "30 relatives and neighbors who live within 20 miles of the teen's home". Sporting a jaunty eyepatch and wife-beater, he left juvie in the company of his mother, grandfather and usual coterie of "Bobby ain't dun no wrong" supporters. Convention wisdom says Turd Bobby boosted a car for the trip back to the Baytown trailer park, maybe even tried to "catch some air."

I wonder how long these thirty people so concerned for Turd Bobby Davis will stick around after the Davis' family lawsuit against the railroad gets dismissed. As a smart woman told me yesterday, "When you hit the lottery you rediscover how many friends and relatives you have."

There is a nice writeup at CNN-Money.com that lays out a proposed blame schedule for the subprime mortgage debacle. On the surface it seems pretty accurate, given the available data so far, but I find it difficult to get behind a couple of their assumptions.

Wall Street's eagerness to bundle & securitize the subprime loans, while probably not as transparent as investors would have liked, was a fine way to spread risk. The Street is always looking for new instruments and collateralized debt obligations were the flavor du jour.

The article lays the Fed blame at the feet of Greenspan who used housing as a major monetary prop after 9/11. It's always dicey to focus on a single sector but it seems like it was a Hobson's Choice for Greenspan since housing-related sectors comprise about 40% of the GDP my guess is he was looking for the biggest bang for the buck.

Personally, I'm castigating the brokers, lenders and borrowers who, knowingly or not, were playing a fast and loose game with easy credit.

Recently I've taken an interest in the process of death. My own, that is. When the time comes to shuffle off this mortal coil I want it to be as painless for others as possible, at least in a fiduciary sense. So to that effect, I've been looking over the options and costs of pre-need funeral plans, and have found that the human side of dying ain't all that simple.