Asymmetrical Warfare

I've been reading Free Range International for awhile now, a blog by Tim Lynch - a private security contractor in Afghanistan - and one of the recurring themes of his blog is that the Taliban really, really suck at fighting:

There was an attack on the HQ of one of the security firms in Kabul last week involving two suicide bombers.  They popped up well inside the new Kabul “Ring of Steel” checkpoint system which seems to be designed to harass internationals and opened up on the exterior guards as they walked down the street housing Hart Security.  The Hart guards returned fire for a second or two and locked themselves inside the compound as did the exterior guards outside the gates of every other compound on that street which means about 25 men jumped inside their compounds when the two attackers unmasked.  The attackers reached the gate and, according to eye witnesses, one said he’ll take the gate down and the other moved back about 20 feet. When bad guy one blew down the gate, bad guy two also perished because 20 feet of stand off is inadequate for powerful suicide vests.

FRI points out, this is despite years and years of experience planning such operations. Granted the participants are always noobs - but you wouldn't be out of line expecting the people who orchestrate these attacks to learn from failure. And there is plenty of failure - trouble is, when a bomb goes off in a city - very few people know what the original plan was. It is very easy to assume that a detonation is a success - and reporters love an easy story.

Which is precisely why I like to read FRI and articles like the one in The Atlantic he's posting about - The Case for Calling Them Nitwits. Not just because it heaps abuse on those who are attempting to kill our soldiers and pretty much anyone they dislike - but because it presents a deeper analysis of what truly happened when a bomb goes off.

It is depressing to learn that an almost random assortment of tactics, executed by impressionable and gullible novices can simultaneously threaten two nations - and be thought to be a cohesive, organized enemy.

Which is not to dismiss them - they are not losing because they do not give up. The fact that any success in Afghanistan hinges on getting them to do something other than kill people is even less encouraging.

But still - the perspective is useful.

For the Good of the Public

ProPublica knocks two out of the park:

1) Bank's Self Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis -
Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:

They created fake demand.

2) Take It With a Grain of (Sea) Salt: Gulf Microbe Study Was Funded by BP 

Earlier this week, major news outlets ran with headlines about how a new microbe [4] has been found eating up BP’s oil  and how microbes have degraded the hydrocarbons so efficiently that the vast plumes of oil in the Gulf are now undetectable. No joke.

A bit skeptical of all the oil-is-mostly-gone claims, the day that microbe study was released we chose instead to focus on the Gulf’s thousands of dead fish. Lucky for us.

MIT’s Science Tracker, in a post published yesterday, noted that the microbe study was conducted by U.C. Berkeley scientists through a grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, and that the Energy Biosciences Institute is funded by none other than BP, through a $500 million, 10-year grant. (To the researchers' credit, they also mentioned the funding in their press release — you just had to read about three-quarters of the way through.)

Stewart on Heston on the Bill of Rights

I just love this:


(H/t TPM)

Hallowed, My Butt

(via Felix Salmon)

The brilliantly named History Eraser Button blog shows you some of the sights and sounds surrounding our most hallowed ground zero.

Short version: It's only hallowed if strip clubs and bars are now holy.

But see for yourself

Oh... you meant THIS torture tape???

You gotta be sh!tting me.

Gitmo in Brief

(Via ProPublica)

So far, only 24 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo at some point have been charged with a crime to be heard by a military commission. Four of them have been convicted. Only one detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, has been moved from Guantánamo to face charges in a civilian court; that case is currently unfolding in federal court in New York.

For those of you keeping score at home, that would be 3% of those ever held at Gitmo end up getting charged - and 17% of those charged so far have been convicted.

Google-Verizon: C|net's Telling Me It's Nothing To Worry About

This year, I'd love something to not be as bad as I thought.

'spose this is it?

Here's C|net's Marguerite Reardon:

...most of the [Google-Verizon] proposal sounded a lot like a plan FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski offered nearly a year ago, which many Net neutrality proponents seemed to support.

In short, Google and Verizon say they agree to a set of rules for the Internet that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or degrading lawful content on the Internet. Broadband providers would also not be allowed to take action to impede competition.

This is pretty much what Genachowski has proposed.

The CRA: Weaker Than Weak

Felix Salmon catches a nice one: National People's Action released a report showing how the nation's top banks have managed to end run the Community Reinvestment Act.

Banks beating a particular regulation is not exactly an earth shattering revelation - but you'll remember that the CRA is the law Wall Street apologists were blaming for causing the financial crisis.

The argument went - the CRA "forced" banks to lend money to poor people, so bad loans got made and the crisis followed.

Which is total crap for all sorts of reasons:

1. the CRA was passed almost a quarter century ago and the subprime bubble didn't swell until after 2000 (and oh-by-the-way the CRA is still in effect, yet banks have somehow managed to stop making subprime loans now that they cannot be securitized for profit).
2. The CRA explicitly (and repeatedly) states that community lending should not be at odds with sound business practices
3. There are no mandatory punitive measures for being out of compliance with the CRA.

National People's Action adds another item to this list:

4. The banks were using subsidiaries to lend to the low income market - so the parent bank's CRA evaluation would be unaffected

Here's Felix

...if you get a mortgage from Citimortgage or Citifinancial rather than from Citibank, you’re not going to get noticed in Citi’s CRA exam. And at Wells Fargo, the list of affiliate mortgage lenders [in NPA's report] goes on for the best part of three pages.

Nice.

A Bar In Amsterdam

Back from my trip. Short version - it rocked.

I'll post pics when I have my act together. In the spirit of my Norwegian interlude (and at the suggestion of Penguin) - here's a video from an offbeat Norwegian band called Katzenjammer.

Good fun.

A Better General vs. the Army of Death

Atul Guwande writes another thought provoking article about the state of health care:

The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don't want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don't want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn't, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.

(H/t Atlantic)

Some Great Resources on Global Warming

POD passed along this article from The Big Picture -
Everything You Need to Know About Global Warming in 5 Minutes - Jeremy Grantham

Which rocks, but TBP had a follow up that says it with video.

Climate Change: The Scientific Debate

I especially like video 3 - because it chases a lot of the global cooling bunk back to their source material. (Spoiler: global cooling evidence in the 70's is a total joke)

Random Sip From the Firehose, III

Krugman: Conservatives can quit Bush - just not his policies.

Salmon: Obama will nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (Me: Seriously?)

Ritholtz (well, Katsenelson actually): Japan is worse off than the PIGS?

Plait: Savage? Hyneman? I'm coming for you!!

Pigford

TPM has a fascinating look at the timing of the Shirley Sherrod hit job - tying it to the pending grant of $1.25 billion dollars to compensate black farmers for past USDA discrimination.

While I don't see a line of effect from Sherrod's ouster to opponents of the grant getting what they want, I'd certainly be interested in hearing more about this story.

Looking into the Pigford case (Pigford v. Glickman PDF) I ran across this rather grim story on Salon - Black Wednesday

Check this out:

Virginia farmer John Boyd describes a scene from a painful past: a white U.S. Department of Agriculture loan officer only allows black farmers to apply for loans one day a week. "Black Wednesday," the farmers call it, and they line up outside the USDA office in Richmond, Va. The loan officer, James Garnett, leaves the door to his office open so that all the farmers in the hallway can hear the loan requests of their colleagues be summarily, and vehemently, denied.

...

What happened between you and the USDA loan officer in Richmond?

Mr. Garnett had made 147 farm loans in Mecklenburg County, Va. Only one of those loans was to a black farmer, and he was the minority advisor to the USDA county committee. When they investigated Mr. Garnett, they asked him, "Do you have a problem making black farm loans?" Guess what he said? He said yes. He said yes, I think that they're lazy, and they're just looking for a paycheck every Friday.

Mr. Garnett took my loan application and tore it up and threw it in the trash can while I was sitting there in front of him. And he said he wasn't going to lend me any of his money. When I asked him why he wasn't going to make the loan, he said, "Well, I don't have any money now. If you want to come back again next year, that's up to you, but I think you need to go ahead and just sell your farm. I've got a farmer, Mr. Blaylock, and you can milk cows on his farm. I think that would be the best opportunity for you and your family."

I was mad. I was looking for a $10,000 operating loan to plant my crop. After nine years in a row I'd only gotten one loan from the USDA farm services, and I would apply every year.

I said, "Mr. Garnett, I don't think I can go back and tell my wife that I'm not going to get an operating loan again." And he said he didn't care. And when he said he didn't care, I told him to go to hell in a handbasket, and he began to use profanity, and he spit tobacco on my shirt.

When the investigator asked him, "Did you spit chewing tobacco on John Boyd's shirt?" He said, "Well, yeah." He claimed he accidentally missed his spit can.

When was this?

This was in 1994.

What was the result of the investigation?

In my case, they found Mr. Garnett guilty of discrimination. But they didn't terminate him. They allowed him to move to the sister county, which is Greensville County, Va., and they let him retire after two months in Greensville. He didn't see anything wrong with that.

It's easy to think that this kind of virulent racism is a thing of the past - but here's the USDA barring farmers from financing because of their race less than 20 years ago.

Drone Wars

The BBC had an interesting blob of data about the US drone strikes in Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Here's a sample:

Nuclear Detonations 1945-1998

(Via Bad Astronomy)

Here's a video representation of the first five decades of nuclear detonations - by location and country responsible.

It starts slow - but picks up rather dramatically.



As Phil Plait rightly asks, What the hell were we thinking?

Ratings Agencies Will Be Held Accountable?

(Via the WSJ and CJR)

Surely that's a misprint.

Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings are all refusing to allow their ratings to be used in documentation for new bond sales, each said in statements in recent days. Each says it fears being exposed to new legal liability created by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

The new law will make ratings firms liable for the quality of their ratings decisions, effective immediately. The companies say that, until they get a better understanding of their legal exposure, they are refusing to let bond issuers use their ratings.

Or, more likely - that's something that will be swiftly reversed in some non-accountable way.

Still, fun to watch them squirm.

And Chittum's right - nice to know this little element got pretty much zero press up until now. Why do we have a media again? Yeesh.

The Phantom Menace of Social Security

There's an oddly comforting discussion posted at Columbia Journalism Review.

Yale Professor Ted Marmor lets the air out of a few of the more common depictions of Social Security.

Trudy Lieberman: What do you say to young people who believe that Social Security won’t be there for them?

Ted Marmor: They are being misled. If the proportion of Americans living beyond sixty-five is rising, as is the case, and if their voting strength will increase, as will be the case, why should their promised pensions be endangered? Put another way, if Social Security is a sacred cow, why will it be sacrificed when its worshippers are more numerous?

Interesting stuff.

The verdict on 'A Whale'

Uber oil skimmer "A Whale" is a flop.

Subprime Goes to College

---

Are we going to do this all over again?
-Steven Eisman, Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, June 24th, 2010

---

Steven Eisman has a J'accuse moment with the for-profit education industry. He's talking about the excesses and misdeeds of the federally backed student loan industry (Title IV loans).

The for-profit education industry accounts for 9% of the students, 25% of all Title IV disbursements but 44% of all defaults. And the President of the largest for-profit institution is paid nearly 25x the compensation level of the President of Harvard. There is something wrong with this statistical progression....

Here is one of the more upsetting statistics. In fiscal 2009, Apollo, the largest company in the industry, grew total revenues by $833 million. Of that amount, $1.1 billion came from Title IV federally-funded student loans and grants. More than 100% of the revenue growth came from the federal government. But of this incremental $1.1 billion in federal loan and grant dollars, the company spent only an incremental $99 million on faculty compensation and instructional costs – that’s 9 cents on every dollar received from the government going towards actual education. The rest went to marketing and paying the executives. One major reason why the industry has taken an ever increasing share of government dollars is that it has turned the typical education model on its head. And here is where the subprime analogy becomes very clear.

There is a traditional relationship between matching means and cost in education. Typically, families of lesser financial means seek lower cost institutions in order to maximize the available Title IV loans and grants – thereby getting the most out of every dollar and minimizing debt burdens. Families with greater financial resources often seek higher cost institutions because they can afford it more easily. The for-profit model seeks to recruit those with the greatest financial need and put them in high cost institutions. This formula maximizes the amount of Title IV loans and grants that these students receive.

With billboards lining the poorest neighborhoods in America and recruiters trolling casinos and homeless shelters (and I mean that literally), the for-profits have become increasingly adept at pitching the dream of a better life and higher earnings to the most vulnerable of society.

He also beats plenty hard on the for-profit education served up after families dive deep into debt.

If the [for-profit education] industry provided the right services, drop out rates and default rates should be low.

Let’s first look at drop out rates. Companies don’t fully disclose graduation rates, but using both DOE data, company-provided information and admittedly some of our own assumptions regarding the level of transfer students, we calculate drop out rates at most for-profit schools are 50%+ per year.

How good could the product be if drop out rates are so stratospheric? These statistics are quite alarming, especially given the enormous amount of debt most for-profit students must borrow to attend school.

But what about default rates? Eisner is convinced the industry manipulates the default rates, but he paints a truly horrifying picture with what information is available.

The federal government is covering defaults for the Title IV loans, so the lender has every incentive to write crap loans. After all, they're not stuck with the bill. This is awful for lots of reasons, but wait! There's more...

The companies who offer Title IV student loans also offer their own private loans as well. The loan loss provision for these loans is 50%-60%. That's money the bank is setting aside to cover defaults. When you're setting aside more than half the the amount you're loaning out to cover defaults - you're expecting a massive default rate. Under 10% is what you're looking for if you're planning on getting money out of your loans.

But why are Title IV lenders reporting that their private loans are tanking so hard?

According to Eisner, this is why:

There are two key statistics. No school can get more than 90% of its revenue from the government and 2 year cohort default rates cannot exceed 25% for 3 consecutive years. Failure to comply with either of these rules and you lose Title IV eligibility. Lose Title IV eligibility and you’re company’s a zero.

With respect to the default statistics, it is my belief that they are manipulated. Since the rule currently revolves around the 2 year default rate, the companies have every incentive to keep that statistic below 25%.

Isn’t it amazing that [leading Title IV lender] Apollo’s percentage of revenue from Title IV is 89% and not over 90%. How lucky can they be? We believe (and many recent lawsuits support) that schools actively manipulate the receipt, disbursement and especially the return of Title IV dollars to their students to remain under the 90/10 threshold. And again, unprofitable private student loans is also a way to keep below the 90/10 threshold.

Incredibly, it gets worse from there. Read Eisman's testimony (PDF)

(H/t Felix Salmon)

Late edit: Eisman's presentation is also available on Marketfolly.

A sample:

The Bitter End

Iniesta: Suck it, Villa

In any tournament that begins with a large pool of teams - the early rounds are the most exciting.

The World Cup encourages this - with rules that reward teams for winning big. Teams commit to attack, because a big win is more valuable than a marginal one.

In the knockout rounds, any will will do - even a penalty crapshoot. So percentage play shifts to cautious play - and scorelines usually trend towards marathon struggles that end in 1-nil.

Sooner or later, the stakes catch up with the game - and you get a total crapfest like this cup's final match.

I've said before that soccer played well is amazing, captivating even. But soccer played badly is about the worst thing you can watch.

This was the final, so people hung in there to see every last godawful moment. If you could have gotten 700 million football fans to screen this game without context, as if it were a friendly - I doubt a tenth of them would have kept watching past the half.

It was horrid.

Dutch hacking vs. Spanish diving vs. the English ref.

I started the match rooting for Spain - and by the end was wishing that the Dutch would send Spain home in a bucket. Naturally, the Dutch disappointed. Clear shots on goal, and Robben couldn't get it done over and over. I'd criticize Van Persie - but I honestly can't be sure he was on the field. FIFA says he was - but I'll need to review the tape.

I still believe the ref was over the top, but it's fair to say the Dutch were trying to hack their opponents into submission. John Nicholson points out this was a deliberate choice:

Had they played an open, attacking game, they'd have got creamed senseless by Spain. Yes, that would have been fun for the neutral but the Dutch don't owe ...commentators or anyone else anything. They're there to win and win by any means possible. It wasn't some sort of gross, immoral attitude they took to the game, merely a pragmatic one born out of knowing exactly what would suppress Spain most successfully. I admire that.

He's right, but I don't admire it. I had to watch that crap.

Two highlights of the night for me:

1. The Dutch coach receives his second place medal - and then takes it off and pockets it before he even gets off the podium. Nice.
   
2. The American booth minder, Bob Ley, trying to convince his audience that they have witnessed a "celebration of soccer" - right before they cut to Ruud Gullit who denounces the match in terms usually reserved for acts of genocide.

Oh, there was a goal, too - but whatever.

Spain gets the trophy, Holland gets the shaft (again) and the soccer gods smile down at the evil they have wrought.

Ugh.

One thing to look forward to - we start qualifying matches in two years.