Well, At Least It's not My Daughter Flashing for Beads at Mardi Gras

It's my son doing karaoke version of Katy Perry's California Gurls.:



Note that the "Music" tag on this post is a matter of some dispute.

World's Least Reassuring Pie Ever

H/t Vonners at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!! (on Saturday)

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

13. Central Arizona Bank, Scottsdale, AZ

Full FDIC list

This closing was odd, because it occurred on Tuesday, May 14. The last time we had a bank closing not on a Friday, it was Park Avenue bank in 2010, and it was closed because of fraud.

In this case, it appears that there may be some issues with the bank holding company, Capitol Bankcorp, which has been shedding subsidiaries for the past few years and this might be an issue of cross guaranty issues:

After controlling more than 50 banks at its peak, Capitol Bancorp has reduced its subsidiary count to 12 banks through intra-company mergers and divestitures to outside parties. Primarily, the mergers and sales are designed to raise capital or avert a failure. A failure of any one bank subsidiary could trigger the failure of all banking subsidiaries. Through statute referred to as Cross-Guaranty, the FDIC can demand reimbursement for the cost of a failure against any of Capitol Bancorp's still open banking subsidiaries. To facilitate the divestitures, the FDIC has issued at least 16 Cross-Guaranty waivers. Some observers may question the cost effectiveness of issuing the waivers.

And here are the credit union closings:

7. First Kingdom Community Federal Credit Union, Selma, AL

Full NCUA list

The 2^nd quarter is showing a lot more activity than the 1^st quarter did.

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

At Salon, David Dayen observes that it, "Turns out much-hyped settlement still allows banks to steal homes,' even after the much hyped mortgage settlement.

This is not an oversight.  The Obama administration has aggressively allowed banks to cheat customers an investors since day one.

Basically, they see this as a way of making sure that the banks appear solvent.

See my writings on HAMP. Here is one quote:

Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”

By "them", he means the banks.

By foaming the runway, he means that it allows them to delay writing down bad loans, and continue to extract payments and fees by cheating the public.

The suggestion that this is anything but deliberate policy is simply naive.

This is a Shanda Before the Goyim

A tool to run comparisons

Israel has the highest proportion of its population living in poverty of any OECD nation:

Israel has the highest rate of poverty of all developed countries, according to a report released by the 33-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on Wednesday.

The OECD found that Israel's poverty rate stands as almost 21%.

It also put Israel at fifth place among countries with the widest gaps between rich and poor, after Chile, Mexico, Turkey and the United States, while Iceland, Slovenia, Norway and Denmark were the most egalitarian societies.

Israel has been practicing Thatcher style economics, even the Labour Party, for the past few decades, which could explain this.

I'm also wondering how much of this number is driven by the growing number of Heridi Jews in Israel. They are about 10% of the population, and are disproportionately: Over half the Heridim live in poverty, and are on government assistance, as versus about 15% of the general population.

Much of this differential is actually an artifact of poverty by choice. Many in this community prefer to remain on the dole, so that they can study Torah.

Of course, there is no requirement for someone not to work in order to study Torah.

Maimonides was a noted doctor, Rashi was a vintner, and the Baal Shem Tov was an inn keeper.

I do not know of anyone of this generation with the chops of those folks. Get a f%$#ing job.

It's Jobless Thursday!

And the numbers are not great:

The number of people who applied last week for new unemployment benefits surged to the highest level in a month and a half, indicating the U.S. labor market is still not healing fast enough to rapidly bring down the nation’s jobless rate.

Initial jobless claims climbed by 32,000 to a seasonally adjusted 360,000 in the week ended May 11, the Labor Department said Thursday. Economists polled by MarketWatch had expected claims to rise to 330,000 from a revised 328,000 in the prior week.

It should be noted that the 4-week moving average only rose by 1250, and continuing claims fell 4,000.

The Only People Having a Worse Week than the Obama Administration

The Pentagon.

Where they have yet another soldier in charge of a sexual assault prevention office accused of sexual assault, and this time, we have an super-sized the accusations of rape with an accusation of pimping!

An Army sergeant who served as a sexual assault prevention and response coordinator at Fort Hood, Tex., is under investigation for allegations of pandering, abusive sexual contact, assault and maltreatment of subordinates, Pentagon officials said late Tuesday.

………

The noncommissioned officer under investigation had been working as an “equal opportunity adviser and sexual harassment/assault response and prevention program coordinator” with a battalion of troops — about 2,000 soldiers — assigned to the Army’s III Corps at Fort Hood when the allegations surfaced, the Pentagon said in a statement.

The suspect was not identified by name. One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because no charges have been filed, said the portion of the inquiry related to pandering refers to allegations that the soldier was involved in managing a prostitution operation, perhaps involving a subordinate.

Un-dirty-word believable.

I'm beginning to think the whole  "Convening Authority" structure of military justice, where the commanding officer has unlimited authority to decide whether or not to file charges, and can over the ruling of a court martial, needs to be rethought, and not just for cases of sexual assault.

More Evidence of German Self-Mythologizing

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that the recent stories about the Germans being poorer than the rest of Europe, and how it was largely bullsh%$?

Well, it appears that it was even more bogus than I had previously thought. You see the difference in household wealth is almost entirely due to difference in household sizes:

Media hype had been generated by the ranking of the countries’ median household wealth results, especially by the fact that:

• Germany was in last place with €51,400.

• Italy and Spain were significantly above France with wealth equal to €173,500 and €182,700 respectively, compared to the French households’ €115,800.

The mean household wealth averages paint a very different picture to current narratives about the relatively wealth of nations in the Eurozone. The relative dispersion in the estimates is much smaller: the German household mean is €195,200, while for France, Italy and Spain it is €233,400, €275,200 and €291,400 respectively. Moreover, Germany climbs six places in the wealth ranking.

As already noted by De Grauwe and Ji (2013), Germany’s position at the bottom of the median ranking is simply due to its large wealth inequality compared with the others. This is confirmed by observing that the concentration of wealth, measured by a Gini index of 0.76, is much higher in Germany, while for France, Italy and Spain the estimate is smaller (0.68, 0.61 and 0.58 respectively).

Household Size Matters

This analysis does not take account of household composition in the various countries. The distribution of household wealth across countries is affected by differences in the demographic characteristics of households (age, education, household size):

• In northern countries, households are generally small, often composed of a single member.

• In the south it is not unusual to find many people, even from different generations (grandparents, parents and children), living together.

The splitting up of household members produces a sort of partition of wealth among the households they generate, as happens when young members exit the household to form a new family.

A simple way to sterilise for household size is to consider per capita averages:

• The per capita wealth figure for Italy and Spain is €108,700, slightly higher than for France (€104,100) and Germany (€95,500).

BTW, do you know one of the reasons that there are more multigenerational households in the Mediterranean Euro nations?

Because the generous social welfare system in Germany allows for generations not to live together. (Things like high quality government subsidized elder care and strong pensions).

So, Now That We Have a Week of "Scandals"………

The Obama administration has come out in favor of a media shield law that they had previously tried to delay and kill:

Under fire over the Justice Department’s use of a broad subpoena to obtain calling records of Associated Press reporters in connection with a leak investigation, the Obama administration sought on Wednesday to revive legislation that would provide greater protections to reporters in keeping their sources and communications confidential.

President Obama’s Senate liaison, Ed Pagano, on Wednesday morning called the office of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and asked him to reintroduce a version of a bill that he had pushed in 2009 called the Free Flow of Information Act, a White House official said.

The bill would create a federal media shield law, akin to ones most states already have, giving journalists some protections from penalties for refusing to identify confidential sources in federal law enforcement proceedings, and generally enabling journalists to ask a federal judge to quash subpoenas for their phone records.

………

The top Democrat on the committee, Representative John Conyers of Michigan, noted that he had sponsored a version of the Free Flow of Information Act that passed the House twice when it was under Democratic control. He said he would reintroduce his version, too, and he said he hoped that Republicans — who until recently had called for more aggressive investigations of leaks — would support it.

The version the Obama administration is seeking to revive, however, is the one that was chiefly sponsored by Mr. Schumer, which was negotiated between the newspaper industry and the White House. It was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in a bipartisan 15-to-4 vote in December 2009. But while it was awaiting a floor vote in 2010, a furor over leaking arose after WikiLeaks began publishing archives of secret government documents, and the bill never received a vote.

In a statement confirming that he would reintroduce the legislation, Mr. Schumer referred to the controversy over the subpoena of A.P. calling records, saying: “This kind of law would balance national security needs against the public’s right to the free flow of information. At minimum, our bill would have ensured a fairer, more deliberate process in this case.”

So, they are supporting the fake bill that they and Chuck Schumer drew up a while ago in an attempt to kill Conyer's real reform.

Same sh%$, different day.

Yes, We Have to Get Deeply Involved in the Syrian Civil War

One of the putative "good guys" in Syria has been caught on tape eating a dead soldier's heart:

A video which appears to show a Syrian rebel taking a bite from the heart of a dead soldier has been widely condemned.

US-based Human Rights Watch identified the rebel as Abu Sakkar, a well-known insurgent from the city of Homs, and said his actions were a war crime.

The main Syrian opposition coalition said he would be put on trial.

The video, which cannot be independently authenticated, seems to show him cutting out the heart.

"I swear to God we will eat your hearts and your livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog," the man says, referring to President Bashar al-Assad as he stands over the soldier's corpse.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says Abu Sakkar is the leader of a group called the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, an offshoot of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) Al-Farouq Brigades. He insults Alawites, the minority offshoot of Shia Islam to which Mr Assad belongs.

"The desecration and mutilation of a killed person is definitely a war crime," Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, told the BBC. "This one particularly disturbing because of the sectarian nature of the language used by Abu Sakkar.

Seriously, does anyone now think that it's a good idea to choose sides in this clusterf%$#?

Well,. anyone without a history of insanity, or members of the Senate with the last name of McCain, anyway? (But I repeat myself)