HSBC’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

Former Prosecutor Neil Barofsky explains that HSBC is too big to fail, just like several other Wall Street banks. The evidence is that prosecutors had the goods on HSBC--it was clear that HSBC knowingly laundered $800 Million in Columbian drug money, but used its political influence to cut a deal to write the whole thing off as a relatively small cost of doing business. As Barofsky explains on Cenk Uygur's show, we need to break up and "neuter" the big banks, but he's not optimistic that this can happen before yet another crash.

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Why older folks get ripped off more often

In this article in the WP, it is reported that older folks are much more trusting than younger people, and they often miss cues that broadcast untrustworthiness. This correlates with the fact that older folks are victims of fraud much more than younger people.

To see if older people really are less able to spot a swindler, Taylor and colleagues showed photos of faces considered trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy to a group of 119 older adults (ages 55 to 84) and 24 younger adults (ages 20 to 42). Signs of untrustworthiness included averted eyes; an insincere smile that doesn’t reach the eyes; a smug, smirky mouth; and a backward tilt to the head. The participants were asked to rate each face on a scale from minus-3 (very untrustworthy) to 3 (very trustworthy). In the study, appearing online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the “untrustworthy” faces were perceived as significantly more trustworthy by the older subjects than by the younger ones.

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Churches and Candidates

Through no effort of my own, I receive email bulletins from the Christian Coalition, an unabashedly theocratic (and more covertly white-centric) political action committee, yet somehow still tax free (503-(c)4). The latest email tells people to bring voters their guides to church. Their splash page practically forces you to download it. I am of the opinion that churches that want representation like this should be amenable to taxation. Naturally they argue that just because every member shills for their platform, the churches should not be held accountable. Can this be remedied? Discussion?

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Retired NSA analyst: The GOP is stealing elections

The GOP is stealing votes, and the "red shift" is thus real, according to a retired NSA analyst:

A retired NSA analyst has spent several sleepless nights applying a simple formula to past election results across Arizona. His results showed across-the-board systemic election fraud on a coordinated and massive scale. But the analysis indicated that this only happens in larger precincts because anomalies in small precincts can be more easily detected.

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Two billion dollars per week for 11 years, but our leaders won’t level with us about Afghanistan

The War in Afghanistan. We've spent enormous blood and treasure on this adventure, yet it almost never shows up in most daily papers. The candidates for president almost never discuss it. In eleven years, no one has articulated why it is that we have invested so heavily in being there for eleven years. The official platitudes are based on horrific lies. No politician wants to discuss that our "ally" Pakistan is encouraging the Afghanistan insurgency. What should we say to the families of the soldiers who died there? Your loved ones died for what? "Freedom!" scream the politicians. No politician has discussed all of the things we could have done with that money had we truly invested in something permanent and valuable rather than something wasteful, tribal and destructive. No candidate has stated the obvious: We have been propping up a corrupt regime in Afghanistan. And the media cooperates with all of the above ignorance, making Afghanistan a bloodless, vague, distant thing that we don't know anything about, and we, as a nation, don't care that we know nothing about it. No one in power wants to admit that fighting wars is good insurance for re-election, or that it simply makes us feel like we're doing something meaningful and patriotic to fight a war, even an insane war.

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