Noot is batshit crazy as well as mendacious and hypocritical. While drumming Jim Wright out of the House for his book deal, Noot was at the same time using the House computer system for his book. This is not a rumor but a fact conveyed to me by an IT tech I know who was working on the systems and saw the files containing drafts of his book on the system. What a bloviated codpiece! In any case, I am going to vote for Ron Paul in the VA primary; he’s actually got real ideas, some of which need to be discussed.

Both parties are insane - what other diagnosis could be given to two groups in a two-party system who agree to fight over trivialities while leaving the actual issues undealt with? And, with the help of the mediasaurus, the fight is represented as the most significant thing rather than the triviality that it is “if if bleeds it leads” to the point where the questions asked of politicians by the media are simply rhetorical devices designed to elicit commentary on the pre-defined narrative, that of the fight? Mark

Some of the comments on the NSA article linked above are scary - e.g. CharlesNorrie - we do like to sweep our dirt under the rug, don’t we? Mark

Pussle or Pustule? Slattern or weeping lesion? Either (or both!) works for me… Mark

"Why is a manhole cover round?” To prevent the cover from falling into the hole as the square hole is longer on the diagonal than the square cover is on any edge. Mark

Must be the ‘shrooms! :::::::::

Black on white = paper with writing/typing/printing = good

I have to agree with Jay Mcnally, in fact I went to the trouble to reverse the screen settings on my computer while reading SST, which has the effect of setting it (SST) back to black on white. Pat’s picture looks a little bizarre, though! Mark

Thus far, the US has been the only Reserve Currency able to print money to “increase liquidity”. Without asking to resolve the validity of that, what would be the effect of creating another (competing?) entity able to print money (we’re talking about an economy which if treated as a single entity is larger than the US, not a podunk narcokleptocracy)? Which would be the lender of last resort &c? I think all of this just points out the extent to which economic theory and practice fails to adequately describe reality in any meaningful fashion. Externalities? Give me an effing break! Mark

Just a thought - mass and gravity bends or warps space time and the light that passes through it, this was predicted by Einstein’s theories and experimentally verified some time ago. My question: is space time warped uniformly around a massive object like the Earth? And, if there is any local variation in the warping, could that have the effect observed in the OPERA experiment? Other than that, agree with above observations that if the results are reproduced it will have a huge impact but it will be subtle and probably will not invalidate much if any of General or Special Relativity, it will just require a new framework within which they don’t always hold true. Mark

In reply to Babak Makkinejad The amount of “notional" wealth that was created by the financial sector runs in the trillions, not billions. How exactly is wealth generated when a synthetic derivative is created - a bet on the behaviour of an instrument, between two parties neither of which (sometimes the parties are ‘bots, not humans) has any actual financial interest in the underlying instrument? Answer: It is not. But because so may parties hung their hats and impaled our collective cojones on this “wealth”, when later it was found to have been created out of whole cloth, its evaporation is our problem, in a big way. WRT to the mortgage-based CDOs I would say “show me the paper”, somewhere along the line some whiz-kid decided that the sale of a mortgage no longer required that an actual piece of paper be filed at the county courthouse. Huh? Mark

Upon hitting the link http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00d8341c72e153ef00d834527e4b69e2/post/6a00d8341c72e153ef014e8bc1cd8a970d/edit I get the message "Not Found We’re sorry, the page you were trying to load cannot be found. If you believe you’ve reached this page in error please check the address and try again.” If I take off the “\edit” it gets to where I induce you mean to go...