Bonehead Insurance for Wall St.

Used to be, bankers were the makers of loans. The steely eyed loan officer would examine the borrower and his business and decide if the loan, if made, would get paid back. Then some of the steel went out of the bank backbones, and they started buying bonds. Then a bond or two defaulted, leaving the bank out of money. So the banks started buying "bond insurance". Pay a small premium, and the bond insurer would promise to make the bond good even if the bond issuer fled the country. The bond insurers only insured state, country, or municipal bonds which are incredible safe. The state, county and municipal governments have taxing power, they can always raise taxes to pay off the bonds and they cannot flee the country to avoid payment. Nice safe business for the insurer, you just collect the premiums and keep them. You never have to pay anything out.
Then the bond insurers started to insure sub prime mortgage bonds issued by brokerage houses. The steely eyed loan officers didn't have clue as to what such a bond was worth, but if they could insure it who cares? The bond insurers wrote trillions of dollars of such insurance, even though they only had millions of dollars to pay off claims. Now that the sub prime bonds are defaulting left and right, the bond insurers will be broke in another week or so.
Did the premiums paid on sub prime bonds do any good? If you are Merrill Lynch, worth trillions, why are you buying insurance from a smallish insurer with much less money than you have?

The many panes of Windows, Pt 5

E-Week reports that Internet Explorer has yet more vulnerabilities, holes that permit hackers to take control of your computer. The latest bug[s] surface in the image uploader functions of Facebook , Myspace and Aurigma. The article recommends a complex resetting of Internet privilege to "high security". Apparently the bug is only in Internet Explorer, so a better way would be to switch to Firefox.

Start of the shelf layout (Model Railroading)

The itch to build an operating HO model train layout got scratched today. Decided upon a thin around the walls layout that allows the guest bedroom to still hold guests. Expected guests are mostly grandchildren, who will think model trains are neat. This is the basement guest room, I have an upstairs guest room for grown up guests.
One wall will have a 2 foot deep shelf for trains, on the other three walls, the layout will be narrower, one foot or a half a foot. I made up some big angle brackets to support the wide two foot side. Gussets are 3/8" plywood. A piece of 1*2 lumber goes on the wall, a piece of 2*3 lumber goes on top. A 3/8" dado in the wall lumber and the top lumber accepts the plywood gusset, and some Titebond II carpenter's glue bonds the gusset firmly into the wood. I made up seven brackets from wood I had kicking around the garage, making the cost of this part of the job zero. I painted each bracket with two coats of left over wall paint, so they match the room's sheet rock nicely.
After an internet recommendation, I bought a Zircon stud finder at WalMart. It's battery powered, $17, and works like a charm. It found every stud, even locates the edges of the stud. The wall brackets went up with 3 inch sheet rock screws, and every screw bit into a stud. Variable speed electric drill sinks the sheetrock screws no sweat. Studs go every 16 inches, making for seven studs from one corner to the other. I put seven brackets on the seven studs and that ought to be plenty strong.

Is Bin Laden still alive?

Transterrestrial Musings blog speculates that Bin Laden has been dead for years. He figures the reason we haven't seen a Bin Laden video for a long time, just audios, is that Bin Laden is actually pushing up daises and is thus unavailable for filming. Audio tapes are easier to fake than video so we just get audio. The piece ends wondering why our "intellegence" agencies won't call OBL dead.
Another real good question is why CIA issues a press release authenticating every OBL tape. Smarter, and of more benefit to the United States, would be to say nothing. As it is, the United States government, via CIA, confirms OBL is alive each time they authenticate one of his tapes. Let OBL's people do the selling of OBL's tapes as real, as opposed to fake.

Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Chris Drew

Great book of cold war submarine war stories. Decribes the underwater collisions, the tapping of Soviet underseas cables, the Glomar Explorer, the trailing of Soviet missile subs. Reads like "Hunt for Red October" but these stories are true. At least as true as sea stories told years afterward can be. Describes a political tug of war between the Navy and CIA for control of submarine secret operations. CIA finally won, and then had so much fun showing the "take" from submarine operations around Washington ("Look how clever we are") that secrecy was compromised. Seymour Hersh broke the story of salvaging a Soviet sub on the front page of the New York Times, largely based on CIA leaks. The book points out how big a PITA Seymour Hersh has been and for how long. Good old Seymour has been doing uncomplimentary stories about the United States since Viet Nam days. He is still at it, writing in the New Yorker Magazine (rather than the NYT), with down beat stories from Iraq.

No TV cameras at the 9/11 trial??

According to the Lehrer News Hour, the trial of KSM and the other 5 9/11 plotters will NOT be on TV. Big mistake. You put the trial on TV to let the whole world know how guilty the bastards are. Do the trial on a Quonset hut at Gitmo and nobody watches, nobody knows, and the effect is lost. In fact, our Islamist enemies will say the trial is rigged, a drumhead courtmartial, and KSM &Co are converted into martyrs.
Even the Iraqi's televised Saddam's trial. Could it be that in the rule of law United States a televised trial will come out like the OJ Simpson trial?

After seven years we are gonna try the 9/11 terrorists

Good idea. A good public televised trial will go far to convince folks worldwide that the United States has real enemies that have caused horrible injury to to nation. It should squelch the "truthers" who claim 9/11 was a put up job. Too bad it took the administration seven years to bring an indictment. Assume the ever efficient US courts or military commisions and appeals will take another seven years to play out. Justice delayed is justice denied. We should have executed the 9/11 bastards five years ago.