Category: Politics, Religion & Money

A Fed-eral Case

Wall Street has become an economy unto itself. The Fed has helped to inflate the stock market, by holding interest rates so low for so long.

The only thing learned from the 2008 financial crisis is that the Federal Reserve and Treasury will always do everything possible to help Wall Street. For some at the Fed, their actions have apparently been helping themselves.

(Editor’s note [from CNBC]: This story has been updated to reflect new information. Fed Chair Powell owned the municipal bonds in question in a joint account over which he had control. Due to incorrect information provided by the Federal Reserve, CNBC reported initially that Powell owned the munis in a family trust over which he had no control.)

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/17/fed-officials-owned-securities-it-was-buying-during-pandemic-raising-more-questions-about-conflicts.html

Mike “Race” Pence

The shocking, yet not surprising, stories from the final months of Trump’s term in office continue to surface.

Being able to paste in a YouTube URL and have a Colbert video appear is quite a change from 15 years ago. Back then I had analog cable TV being captured by an ATI TV Wonder card.

I edited using a very old version of Pinnacle, then had to convert to FLV, because Flash was the only available streaming video format. The process was labor intensive and extremely time consuming, and it ended in a 320×240 video that was uploaded to the site via FTP. Painful!

What hasn’t improved since then? Dealing with WordPress problems.

Boston After 9/11

The Frontline documentary “America After 9/11” paints a justifiably grim picture of the failures over the past 20 years of American policies and actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The series is produced in Boston, which played an outsized role in the 9/11 attacks, due to lax airport security. The documentary doesn’t mention that, nor does it mention the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 by the Tsarnaev brothers.