Bond Insurance brings down AIG

AIG has been insuring sub prime mortgage bonds. Lots of them. Investors looking at AIG liablilities see nothing but disaster, as trillions of dollars of insured bonds get ready to default. It won't help AIG today, but a lesson learned from this. Don't insure bonds, any kind of bonds, ever again.
The availibility of insurance allowed greedy but clueless investors to buy risky bonds and feel good about it because they were insured. Trouble is, when times get bad, ALL the insured bonds default at the same time. No insurance company is wealthy enough to make good when everything fails at once. So, the investors are left with worthless bonds, and worthless insurance. A bond so risky that it needs insurance is too risky to sell. If the insurance hadn't been available, those bonds wouldn't have been sold, which would be a good thing.

Georgia gives the Space Shuttle new life

After years of talk about retiring the Space Shuttle, now the NASA people are talking about squeezing a few more missions out of the old bird. The original NASA plan was to shut down the Shuttle and then use the money saved to build a new ground to orbit system (Ares). In the years between the last shuttle flight and the first Ares flight, we would use the Russian Soyuz capsule to get to the International Space Station.
Well, after Georgia, relying on the Russians for access to space doesn't seem so pleasant.

Stereo Missile Warning

In this day and age of shoulder launched SAMs, combat aircraft now carry missile warning electronics. One version of same, when it sees an incoming missile, gets on the aircraft intercom and cries out "Missile! Missile! Missile!". The Swedes have improved on that.
Human ears are very good at telling the direction of a sound. The Swedish system plays with the timing and phase of the sound going to the pilot's left and right earphones. This gives the sound a direction left/right and up/down. Naturally the system makes the sound come from the direction of the incoming missile. The pilot instantly knows which way to turn to evade.
Clever idea.

A Grafton Country Wedding

Big event. My niece got married on Saturday. This happened out of doors at the family farm. Saturday was a single day of sunshine sandwiched inbetween two solid weeks of rain and the remnants of Hurricane Ike. Scads of guests, set up a huge white tent for the reception. Filled an aluminum canoe with ice, and beer. Squeeze bottles of Deep Woods Off set between the water pitchers and the salt and pepper shakers. Hordes of wedding guests turned up days in advance to pitch in and spiff up the place. A couple of years worth of home projects got finished off and looking good. Vows were said at two in the afternoon. The beer lasted until 2 AM the next morning.

Windows XP gets the slows

Daughter returned from overseas last weekend, bringing back her Compaq/HP 6516 laptop with the slows. Apparently the machine caught something awful from a flash drive in the Kirghiz Republic. It boots slow and runs slow. Takes 3 minutes to boot. Runs so slow as to cause static while playing music.
So, we ran AVG anti virus, Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad Aware, Microsoft malicious software removal tool, Malware bytes, and UnHackMe. No improvement. Uninstalled a good deal of HP bloatware on general principles, found a patch that allowed us to see hidden files. Studied Task Manager's process list, looking for strange processes. No joy. Something is lurking in the laptop and we can't see it. If you can't see it you can't kill it.

Poltical Thing

TV was full of 9/11 remembrances all day yesterday. This lasted up and into the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. They had some pundit on, talking about 9/11 and he said something like "It's too bad that 9/11 became so political."
Hmm. Unprovoked attack in peacetime with higher casualties than Pearl Harbor. And this guy thinks it shouldn't affect the politics of the United States? Pearl Harbor got us into WWII and ended with nuking the enemy. By those standards, the American response to 9/11 was quite restrained and civilized.

Kim Jong Il may be ill. Or dead or dying

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il failed to appear on the reviewing stand for the North Korean version of a Fourth of July parade. He hasn't been seen in public for several weeks, creating speculation that he is dead or dying.
If so, the world gets to see if the North Koreans have a succession plan. Last time, Kim Il Jong managed to pass the dictatorship to his son, Kim Jong Il without a ruckus. If there is an heir apparent this time, I never heard of him. If the seccession doesn't pass smoothly to someone, the country may fall apart. Leading to a sticky situation.
The South Koreans will face intense pressure to intervene to maintain order and rescue numerous relatives from the chaos that will break out. The Chinese will be under pressure to intervene to maintain North Korean as a buffer state. They certainly don't want the pro American South Koreans to expand North and become their new neighbor. The possibilities for serious trouble are obvious.