SEC subpoenas Goldman, JPM, Citi, BofA, Wells on foreclosures

Too much more of this and we might have a functioning federal regulatory system. Goodness, that would be just so wrong. I’m sure Barack (“I heart banksters”) Obama and the incoming Republican committee heads in the Senate need to move quickly to end this foolishness.

Wait a minute. Now some of those damn states are [...]

TSA groping lampooned on Japanese TV

Picower estate to pay $7.2 billion in Madoff settlement

That amount is the entire amount the trustee asked for in the lawsuit and is also that entire amount that Picower withdrew.

In another settlement, the family of Carl Shapiro settled for $650 million.

So, if these were ill-gotten gains, is anyone going to prison? Or is that just so for the little people?

The [...]

Polizeros podcast. Afghanistan Strategy Review. Activism

Click to listen to the podcast on BlogTalkRadio

Josh Mull talks about the Afghanistan strategy review, the third of Obama’s Administration, where the withdrawal date got moved forward from 2014 to June 2011. This could indicate the elites now understand the war is no longer winnable, even as we carpet bomb that country and [...]

Don’t trust the cloud for all your data

Adam Curry on the demise of delicious (and Yahoo Buzz, as well) and why we need to take steps now to insure that our online data is not vulnerable to a service going down.

If the stories that are being posted are true, then once again we see the perils of trusting the cloud.

[...]

Vertical farming

The Economist remains unconvinced that vertical farming is viable, given the cost of artificial indoor light. Indoor growing works superbly as long as there is just one floor because light can come in through the roof. But artificial light is essential when there is more than one floor.

However, one storey greenhouses could work [...]

US cities in peril

Detroit police patrols in 20% of city: expect bankruptcy in 2011

Camden, America’s second most violent city, lays off half of police department.

If police stop patrolling an area then organized crime will move in and take control, just like in favelas in Brazil. Don’t think it can’t happen here.

Police now charging for responding [...]

Mexico can’t control its border

The other border…

Vatican Bank launders money and aids crime?

On December 12th court documents came to light detailing new money-laundering allegations against the Institute for Religious Works (IRW), otherwise known as the Vatican Bank. Italian prosecutors are claiming that the bank has repeatedly and deliberately ignored EU rules against money laundering, and even aided the Italian Mafia.

This isn’t new. There was a major [...]

Speed up WordPress with W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is an amazing, free WordPress plugin that when configured optimally results in WordPress blogs loading much faster, like this one.

If you want to view the home page in WordPress, it normally runs a PHP script, opens the database, populates the page with the data, then presents it to the viewer. [...]