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NY Times: Seeking Relief, Banks Shift Risk to Murkier Corners Citigroup, Credit Suisse and UBS have recently completed such trades. Rather than selling the assets, potentially at a loss, the banks transfer a slice of the risk associated with the assets, usually loans. The buyers are typically hedge funds, whose investors are often pensions that manage the life savings of schoolteachers and city workers. The buyers agree to cover a percentage of losses on these assets for a fee,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by the man of twists and turns at 6:51 AM on April 22, 2013

Dasein there is so much I find wrong with your statement that it is difficult to know where to start.
before there were ever drone strikes, there was something else that was radicalizing people against America
America has been pissing people off for the last x years by its intervening in their politics and their lives. You can choose from any number of Central American, East Asian and Middle East nations. Try condsidering that the problem is America... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by adamvasco at 2:14 PM on April 22, 2013

It really blows my mind when I realize that Metafilter is one of the most reliably liberal/leftist major aggregation blogs on the Internet. The average Mefite is a raving hippie compared to the average American, and we still blame Afghan civilians for their plight. Imagine how the rest of the country feels and you can understand how Obama has escalated the drone war without any real political consequences.

I would like to point out that one needn't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by pdq at 1:16 PM on April 22, 2013

...the horrific Saudi government stays in power, and that the people living there absolutely cannot evict them

Isn't it just always the stuff that we NEVER talk about that's most interesting. All that "Arab Spring" stuff, and not a peep out of Saudi Arabia. Not a peep. (And not a peep over here about the FACT that there wasn't a peep.) And yet, if you check out the bios of almost all of these extremists, there will be a paragraph that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Trochanter at 1:15 PM on April 22, 2013

there always will be so long as America is engaged with the world.

If you described a relationship like America's relationship with the world in an askme and called it an engagement you would be buried under an avalanche of screams of DTMFA.
posted to MetaFilter by srboisvert at 12:30 PM on April 22, 2013

The problem with this argument is that, before there were ever drone strikes, there was something else that was radicalizing people against America, and there always will be so long as America is engaged with the world.

Your argument is so mind-boggling stupid--it literally can only have some semblance of coherence if you think that people are outraged at drone strikes qua drone strikes and not because drone strikes kill innocent people. Before there... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MisantropicPainforest at 12:14 PM on April 22, 2013

And to further assure you that I am a cold-hearted bitch, as a mother who can't forget the photo of the 8 year old boy they killed, I hope the staff at the hospital are holding back on the painkillers.

I'm a mother, too, and I am grieving for the loss of that cute 8 year-old boy. I remember what my own boys were like at 8.

But...I am also grieving for that 19 year-old. My eldest is only just 21, so I remember him as a 19... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MissySedai at 8:29 PM on April 19, 2013

I highly recommend that people visit one of these countries that the US has intervened in. Standing on ground where people were massacred with US made weapons paid for with American money, and directly hearing from people about their family members that were killed is an eye opening experience. We're lucky that our ventures in Southeast Asia and Latin America didn't produce as many terrorists as the Middle East did, frankly.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 12:22 PM on April 22, 2013

This is a great philosophy if what you want to do is give all the power in the world to people who want to kill civilians. They will have no compunction about killing as many as possible, and we will die in as great numbers as they can manage, because if we defend ourselves, there will inevitably be some civilian casualties. You may wish to take that chance with your life; a government has no right to sacrifice the lives of its citizens on the altar of pacifism and moral... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 12:13 PM on April 22, 2013

I'm literally stunned how many people just flatly state that American soldiers lives are more important than afghani children.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 7:14 AM on April 22, 2013

It is interesting how morality plays out in these scenarios where intention can be blurred or obfuscated when murdering by probability.

I actually gave up driving after running the numbers on the likelihood that I would someday hurt someone in collision (The odds of sending someone to the hospital during a lifetime of driving are pretty high). When I say this a lot of people look at me like I insane for refusing to roll the dice.
posted to MetaFilter by srboisvert at 8:23 AM on April 22, 2013

I'm literally stunned how many people just flatly state that American soldiers lives are more important than afghani children.
posted by empath at 7:14 AM on April 22
[5 favorites +] [!]


It really blows my mind when I realize that Metafilter is one of the most reliably liberal/leftist major aggregation blogs on the Internet. The average Mefite is a raving hippie compared to the average American, and we still... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Avenger at 9:13 AM on April 22, 2013

*Otherwise legal: carried out by uniformed troops under command, or duly flagged combatant vessels or aircraft similarly under command.

Probably worth pointing out that CIA drone strikes are neither of those things.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 9:33 AM on April 22, 2013

You know, our military could project force much more precisely and with far less collateral damage if instead of using drones designed like aircraft, we equipped quadrotor drones with some type of projectile weapon and used them as hunter-killer units. (See this artist's conception of how such a unit might look.) Things like this are almost certainly in the future of drone warfare and could probably even be built today: the main limitation to surpass is simply flight range.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by wolfdreams01 at 11:48 AM on April 22, 2013

While the world media obsessively follows the Boston tragedy and goes into the tiniest details about the victims, no one is interested in knowing the names and identity of those children killed in Afghanistan, or hundreds of others killed in Pakistan. Were they any less human?"

To be perfectly fair, the media does a poor enough job of covering our own war dead.

7 so far this month in Afghanistan. 3 were killed in a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by schmod at 6:34 AM on April 22, 2013

We know we have two options: door to door combat where Americans and civilians will become casualties, or precision bombing of known targets.

Those precision bombs seem to be killing an awful lot of children.

Do you realise that those Americans are soldiers? There is a risk in that job, and that risk is death. They should be sent house to house to precision-kill their enemy rather than their kids and risk death doing so. Is... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Brian Lux at 6:33 AM on April 22, 2013

But the thing about all of this is that the US lost in Afghanistan a year ago: we will never achieve the objective of neutralizing the "Taliban" much less building a stable nation state with a national army. Everyone recognizes this.

Instead what we have is a complete normalizing of Nixonism. Nothing would have changed in Vietnam if the US Army had left in 1970. Instead Nixon spent 3 years bombing anything that moved, moving across borders, with increasing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ennui.bz at 6:29 AM on April 22, 2013

If we followed through on being good guys, we would not have as many people angry enough to want to attack us. Most countries survive just fine without having to project the insanely strong military we do.
posted to MetaFilter by Drinky Die at 5:14 AM on April 22, 2013

That is, were they being used as human shields?

This is somewhat besides the point - ultimately the US has indicated, through a repeated pattern of drone strikes, that it is prepared to have a certain level of collateral damage in order to achieve its tactical and strategic goals.

If human shields are a known, and they are a known, then the issue isn't "oops, we didn't mean to kills these civilians" but "we went... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by MuffinMan at 3:51 AM on April 22, 2013

It's also lovely to see that policy drift into the entertainment sphere.

See: Homeland or Zero Dark Thirty. Reactionary propaganda masquerading as soap operas and hero quest stories, respectively.

Not to undermine the post, just to add another line under.
posted to MetaFilter by converge at 3:13 AM on April 22, 2013

any male killed by a drone strike is automatically declared to be a terrorist.

Any male killed by any means whatsoever back in the Viet Nam war was automatically declared to be Viet Cong. And civilian casualties there were staggering. Business as usual. These are all the same old lies, rehashed over and over for successive generations, by a war machine that is out of control.
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite at 2:54 AM on April 22, 2013

Gamera is really neat!
He's powered by human meat!
We all love you Gamera!
posted to MetaFilter by eriko at 8:49 PM on April 21, 2013

Is there any bigger than bite-size part of our educational system than isn't a long-form article worth full of clusterfuck? These are absymal, kill-it-with-fire kind of numbers:

In 2010, Bailey and colleagues Dong Wook Jeong and Sung-Woo Cho led a study that looked at tens of thousands of community college students who scored low on placement tests and other measures but ignored the advice or instruction to take remedial classes and instead enrolled directly in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by crayz at 7:25 PM on April 21, 2013

A. It's funny how when the narrator is saying "one of the most colorful and romantic cities in the world.." and the image on the screen is a landscape of uniform white boxes, looking neither colorful nor romantic.

B. I wish they still had this style of narrator around.
posted to MetaFilter by bleep at 12:14 AM on April 21, 2013

Great stuff. Sadly, this video is how I discovered that my brand-new Roku no longer carries any Youtube channel, since they just killed the "VideoBuzz" channel. That's the whole reason I bought it in the first place. Great work, Roku.

I'm pissed off.

Those of you who are considering the purchase of a TV streaming device would be well advised to get something else besides a Roku.
posted to MetaFilter by Fnarf at 10:23 PM on April 20, 2013

I imagine (though I am not well-informed) that they may want to use it as a carrot to offer him. As in, "Look, we haven't read you your rights yet, so anything you say right now is going to be thrown out when this gets to court. So: are there any more bombs out there?"
posted to MetaFilter by rifflesby at 11:48 PM on April 19, 2013

> Here's the thing, even if they don't mirandize him, he still has all the rights.

So why aren't they doing it, if it makes no difference?
posted to MetaFilter by lupus_yonderboy at 11:42 PM on April 19, 2013

I just want to emphasize that the worst atrocities are perpetrated by those who think that they are absolutely certain what evil is and that they are good.
posted to MetaFilter by empath at 11:34 PM on April 19, 2013

malibustacey9999: "And to further assure you that I am a cold-hearted bitch, as a mother who can't forget the photo of the 8 year old boy they killed, I hope the staff at the hospital are holding back on the painkillers."

That's not "cold-hearted", that's straight up sadistic. Goddammit, how many times do we have to keep saying this: we aren't supposed to torture people in democracies!... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by barnacles at 11:12 PM on April 19, 2013

Regardless, though, there is such a thing as evil, there is such a thing as doing evil in the world, and it has to be dealt with.

I think evil is a scapegoat. It's easy to dismiss someone as evil rather than try to understand the choices and circumstances that led them to do harmful things.
posted to MetaFilter by Malice at 11:04 PM on April 19, 2013

Apologies if this has already been posted:

From Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights? ... And so the FBI will surely ask 19-year-old Tsarnaev anything it sees fit. Not just what law enforcement needs to know to prevent a terrorist threat and keep the public safe but anything else it deemed related to “valuable and timely intelligence.” Couldn’t that be just about anything about Tsarnaev’s life, or his family, given that his... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by scody at 10:49 PM on April 19, 2013

This is NOT one of those "Proud to be an American" moments, for sure. I'm sad for this country and for everyone who has died or been hurt over this.

I agree, there's a lot shit that went down here (especially the lockdown bs/and unofficial Martial Law that seemed almost an expected state by the authorities) but there's a time and a place and for now I think it's time for reason and perspective and normalcy to re-establish itself and for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Skygazer at 10:47 PM on April 19, 2013

Yeah, they should have looked in that last place first, like when I can't find my keys. Dummies.

I don't see how anyone can think Boston did a good job in this case, and I don't see why Bostonians should be partying and celebrating in the street after this. A couple of severely disturbed brothers shut down an entire city and dare I say the entire country for two days, three people are dead, and hundreds are traumatized/injured. We've become... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ReeMonster at 10:21 PM on April 19, 2013

Encrypted police scanners: DO NOT WANT.

Cops should have all the technology they need to be efficient at their jobs, up to and including having much better weaponry than civilians can legally possess, but in exchange for being entrusted with that power, the public must have a window into what they're doing as a means of holding them accountable. Police have already pushed back against citizens' legal right to record arrests and other police activities, so count me as a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by tonycpsu at 9:55 PM on April 19, 2013

Camofrog: “Surely Jesus would withhold the painkillers.”

"Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, lord, we withheld painkillers from this terrorist scum and even kicked him in the crotch a few times for you just for good measure and for added extralegal justice – come on now, wasn't that totally awesome? You know he deserved it, even before his trial and sentencing!' And I will say to them: 'I never knew you. Get away from me,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by koeselitz at 9:32 PM on April 19, 2013

With the inclusion of the nacho scene, I believe that gives us license to overthink a plate of beans.
posted to MetaFilter by zippy at 9:22 AM on April 21, 2013

Thankfully it's been dumped!
posted to MetaFilter by wingless_angel at 9:11 AM on April 21, 2013

I loved the book so much, and in 6th grade I decided it would be fun to run away to the May Company department store (now LACMA West) near my house. I went towards closing time and hid in the bathroom -- just as I was taught! -- and figured I would sleep in mattress/bedding department. I waited for what seemed like an eternity and ventured out...to a enormous, empty, and completely dark store.

I was so scared I ran down to the ground level to find an... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Room 641-A at 10:07 PM on April 20, 2013

Oh, sad! I loved her books (though there's many I realise I haven't read, I'll have to do something about that). Many years ago my mum somehow came into contact with her and got two of my favourites signed. I especially like what she wrote in the front of A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver: "For [Athanassiel] - with many thanks for loving the work of E. L. Konigsberg for many years 11/27/93". She had very elegant handwriting.

She also put... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Athanassiel at 9:26 PM on April 20, 2013

I understand where she is coming from but her attitude is too much "if you have nothing to hide, then open your door, civilian" to it. CPS is called CAS in my province and it is a mess, I personally know several families that have been harassed by CAS basically for the crime of being poor or having a (currently in active treatment) mentally ill family member or not being WASP enough. The publicly available court transcripts in my jurisdiction are repleat with examples of "this... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by saucysault at 8:22 PM on April 20, 2013

So what do blue homeschoolers in red states with nosy neighbours think of this? Since every damn thing is now a political fight I'd like to know where I'd stand if the colours were reversed.
posted to MetaFilter by Space Coyote at 8:05 PM on April 20, 2013

[joke about the fly's drink being spiked with a spanish human.]
posted to MetaFilter by not_on_display at 6:00 PM on April 20, 2013

°oOOo°
posted to MetaFilter by Cold Lurkey at 4:13 PM on April 20, 2013

That cute hamster probably has a bunch of baby parasitic spiders inside, just waiting to bust out.
posted to MetaFilter by Kabanos at 4:53 PM on April 20, 2013

From the second link:

He and his colleagues have had to overcome skepticism and endure ridicule over the project, which some viewed as utopian or “just one big pipe dream.”

Which is funny because it's actually a big pipe.

You know, a big tunnel with water in it is like a big pipe.

Okay, it was funny at the time.
posted to MetaFilter by Hamusutaa at 3:25 PM on April 20, 2013

I have a certain fondness for jumping spiders. As a child I was on a long trip, exiled to the backseat and was bored to tears. Then this teeny jumping spider emerged from somewhere down in the door and scurried onto the window. I looked at it and it looked at me. I would tilt my head this way and it would tilt its head (?) the same way. I would move forward and it would scuttle backwards. I would move away and it would crab after me. We kept this up for hours. A meeting of the minds...... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by jim in austin at 4:03 PM on April 20, 2013

Also, if one crane fly A tries to smack crane fly B's ass, does B move to fast for that to happen?!
posted to MetaFilter by Brandon Blatcher at 3:33 PM on April 20, 2013

The GAINAX Creed: "Just One More Reboot"
posted to MetaFilter by cthuljew at 2:21 PM on April 20, 2013

It is not about the structure, it is about the risk.

So it'll all be fine as long as no-one in the financial industry is reckless, selfish or greedy?

Phew.
posted to MetaFilter by howfar at 2:47 PM on April 20, 2013

Except who are they expecting to sell these instruments to?

You know that handful of weird generic funds that are your only choice for your 401K? They'll hide them in those. The "finance industry" as we are now expected to call it, is an extractive industry, basically mining helpless shmucks.
posted to MetaFilter by George_Spiggott at 1:20 PM on April 20, 2013