[puzzle] strange goings on with higham

Explain this if you can and I 'm really not making any of it up:

I had plans last evening to do a follow up to the finance post and had written it in the form of a fisking of myself, disparagingly quoting myself from documents I have on file, which directly points the finger at who is behind Blair et al.

It goes on to speak of the coming credit squeeze and calling in of loans. The graphic was to be a photo of a US president with someone and it would have left no doubt in anyone's mind. It wasn't half bad.

The moment I tried to lift the graphic from Word to Paint to upload, the computer jammed and I eventually had to switch off at the wall - all of the regular buttons were immobilized. Then it wouldn't reboot, then it would but without keyboard.

I switched off again, took out all the leads at the back, puff-cleaned the area and put them back. Still nothing when I tried to reboot.

Suddenly, I had a brainwave. "All right," I said to no one in particular, "I won't run the post. Promise."

It rebooted and all went back to normal. I threw the post, as my part of the agreement.

[edwards] would you still vote for this man

What is this rubbish? What is pretty boy John Edwards trying to do? The two bloggers have promised him “they’ll be more temperate in their language than they were before they joined his campaign.” He clearly knew what they were like before he took them on. He clearly took them on to cater for a certain market in the blogosphere.

Commenter Bob Owens said:


It's all quite delicious, actually. Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan prostitute themselves by disavowing the overwhelming majority of their own bodies of work to keep their jobs, while Edwards flip-flops from yesterday and caves under the pressure of a group of progressive internet extremists to keep them on staff.

[attention] all brits should read this post

Britain probably isn’t aware of this but it has heavy snow. Truly. No, don’t laugh at this – the Australians have reported it, so it must be so:

Britain was hit by travel chaos yesterday as much of the country was covered by a thick blanket of snow at the height of the morning rush-hour. Luton airport had to be closed for up to four hours due to the bad weather and one lane of the M25 motorway was blocked by heavy snow in Hertfordshire.

There you are, you see.

[finance] for the economically ignorant like me

Interesting little article on the Fed’s continued low interest rates:

In an effort to preserve US consumer spending, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates; the administration of President George W Bush lowered taxes, and Asian policymakers kept their currencies artificially weak to subsidize exports to American consumers.

These policies have led to one of the longest booms in consumer spending ever - US consumer growth has not been negative since the early 1990s. However, it is credit expansion, rather than increased purchasing power, that has fueled the growth.

Hedge funds and the issuers of credit derivatives seem to be most into this phenomenon. European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, warned that the explosion of credit derivatives is a risk to the stability of financial markets. Specifically, he complained that the market underprices its inherent risks.

You don’t have to be an economist to understand this – credit is fuelling the boom, maintaining it, to be more correct. And when the plug is pulled further down the track? I have a document before me, from 2001, predicting that the finance is going to call in credit debt when they feel the societal controls are at last in place and they are ready to create a crisis. Is this one reason why George and Tony are so hell-bent on removing citizen’s freedoms, e.g. the FoI Act?

[west country] blessed are the cheesemakers

England's West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers have put a webcam on maturing cheddar cheeses to let afficionados watch in real time the process of mould growth for a year.

"It puts watching paint dry in the shade," a company spokeswoman admits. The site, Cheddarvision, boasts 85,000 visits already.

Go to it rightly.

[assault on woman] dancer pulled from stage

In Australia, an 18 year old dancer, in a very seedy part of town, at 4 in the morning, was pulled from a stage where she’d been dancing and assaulted by a man in his early 20s:

Police say the man approached the 18-year-old woman, Tamieka, about 4am on Sunday at the Area 61 nightclub in Fitzroy Street while she was dancing on a podium. Detective Senior Constable Scott Gladman says the man tried to talk to Tamieka, then pulled her from the podium and attacked her.

No one is saying for one moment that this attack was anything less than appalling and the young man should feel the full force of the law and yet …

Why would he have done it this way? Why not, say, sexually assault her? Why the type of attack a man usually reserves for another man? Did he know her? Was he a suitor or ex boyfriend? Had she broken up his next relationship? The glib headline ‘Coward attacks woman’ and the printing of only her side: ‘I did absolutely nothing wrong,’ doesn’t ring true to me.

Seems to me, a man physically assaulting a woman, with no sexual overtones, is rare and is usually associated with prior history or else something she said which snapped the self-control.