Today, the SEC asked Berkshire Hathaway's General Re unit to provide information related to insurance products aimed at mitigating financial losses. Hmm, and the purpose of purchasing insurance would be exactly what if not to mitigate loss in the financial sense?

At Powerline as Hindrocket told Time magazine, "The world is full of smart people who have information about every imaginable topic, and until the Internet came along, there wasn't any practical way to put it together."

The distributed nature of the blogsphere yields intelligence that is successful at rates that vanquish verticality in the Intelligence Services, viz. National Director of Intelligence. Give 100 groups 5 Million $ each for a year. Allow them to freely and securely communicate amongst themselves and see what they come up with. The 500Million cost is less than one tenth of one percent of the budget of Department of Defense when the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan are added in. A mere bagatelle. At the end of the year cull nonperforming groups and add those which seem, in light of the recent product of the distributed groups, promising.

It is the outcome of Rathergate, which took 24 hours to unmask in the distributed blogsphere, that is wanted and not a vertical system which couldn't respond to islamofacists who wanted to fly but not land.

Co-Optation for Peace

Maybe we could co opt the islamofacist agenda. Say we begin with 4$/gallon gas that contains an additional $1.5 in state and federal tax, tailored/incentivised to reduce deficits and fund entitlement programs Simultaneously, disarm the grand instigator, Israel, of her nukes. Remove, in a flash, the raison-d-etre of the mullah's and sheikh's need to go nuclear. Likely you'd see less gas consumption, more outsourcing, more globalization, morbetter air, morbetter information technologies. Ayman and Osama and their friends die miserable deaths in this example. Same treatment for that small percentage ofIsraelites who will never make peace, they must be exterminated because it is in the interest of peace...killing the israelofacists is just as necessary as killing the islamofacists. Tell that to cBS. Isn't it in the interest of peace to bring Israel to the UN along with Iran. certainly that approach seems to be less costly in terms of lives lost. As long as we don't see the need to bring Israel to heel in a nuclear free zone we will never constrain those wacky mullahs.

Outcome Based Management

Also known as smoothing. FNM records 9 Billion loss that was previously hidden. FRE records 5 Billion in gains also previously hidden.

We can see that as a result of a major circle jerk in mortgage-backed derivatives that FNM has BLOWN 4 Billion (9-5).

Does that = Musical Chairs over? Is it time to rip the guts out of bonds? Suggest the prudent investor start with U$D bonds.

The Nuclear Race Is Almost Over

In 2001 Rafsanjani lost his cool at Friday prayers: "If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world", Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani told the crowd at the traditional Friday prayers in Tehran.

Mr Rafsanjani's pre-revolutionary credentials earned him a place among the trusted advisers of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He established himself as a powerful figure soon after the revolution as co-founder of the Islamic Republican Party. The party played a major role in Iranian politics until its disbandment in 1987 following internal wrangling over policy.
Mr Rafsanjani was Majlis speaker from 1980-89. In the last year of the 1980-88 war with Iraq, Ayatollah Khomeini appointed him acting commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
He is seen as the main influence behind Ayatollah Khomeini's acceptance of the UN Security Council resolution which ended the war.

Well folks, it appears that Iran has been sprinting toward a nuclear device, then cloning their new weapon. A Q Kahn, father of the Islam Bomb goes unpunished in Pakistan ( only an Afghanistan away ). Remember when militant Islam went unpunished by Carter, Reagan, Clinton?

The Lunatic Fringe takes its responsibility to come from a different angle with utmost respect. In that view: we wish to posit that nuclear exchange is quite imminent.

Who fires first is unknown but certainly one is coming. Iran's nuclear weapons program is buried in multiple diffuse sites domestically. Israel will not allow the situation to develop wherein Iran is a missle based nuclear power. Certainly not. Israelis pray that the good 'ole USofA will go in. But Israelis may be mercy to successes in Iran's nuclear weapons program. They cannot afford to miss all these hardned underground bunkers with conventional smart bombs. 20% of the bunkers survive and it's curtains for the Jews in Israel.

Israel will nuke Iran and maybe Pakistan just as soon as those wacky ayatollas get their wish: a nuclear bomb.

After that Israel will be down to just a couple hundred nukes.

"Viruses are faster spreading, they're more complex in their payloads and the way the affect machines," Mr. Bridwell said. "When a virus like Slammer can affect the globe in less than 10 minutes, it's almost impossible for antivirus products or humans to react fast enough."

This from an article on the new mo' betta' virulence of computer viruses in today's WSJ: Damage Caused by Viruses
Rose Last Year, Survey Finds

By RIVA RICHMOND

It struck me like science fiction. A fortelling of our world to come, as genetics leaves infancy. You know, the terror to come. Maybe Bush was kinda prescient about the importance of manned travel to Mars.

The Right Amount

Civil law judgements against wall st investment banks, specialists ( many owned by same investment banks ) & mutual fund companies amount to several billion U$D. This is just scratching the surface of the lemon. For decades as an independent trader, I paid mostly 1c per share. It is true that concurrently the big boys, the mutual fund investors, with real clout were paying ~5c per share on several trillions of shares per year for many years. This was business as usual, custom and usage and all that that implies. Convenient that the costs of research were shifted by fund managers to investors as commissions through soft dollar arrangements. These costs were genuine costs of business for managers and advisors --a cost of doing business surreptitiously shifted to the mutual fund consumer (us). Isn't it the case that by paying 5x what was avaliable to an ordinary professional participant ( me ), that the 4c per share is forfeit from the fund management companies in favor of their client shareholders? Next to the question of treble damages....Serious Dough.