SAR #9342

Long term investment has become a series of short term gambles.

Pledge Drive: National pledges to reduce CO2 emissions fall significantly short of the 450 ppm goal. The current level of pledged reductions will lead to an atmospheric concentration of 650 ppm and an average increase in global temperature of over 6ºF. Call now, operators are standing by to take your pledge.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: The FDIC has come up with a great way to keep your neighbor in his house – reduce his mortgage by $45 billion and let you pay it. It'll cut the nasty foreclosure problem, too.

Priorities: Bank of America executives spent $45 billion of shareholder money to buy back government held preferred stock so they could award themselves immense salaries and bonuses.

It's a Snap: Turns out that taking pictures of Parliament, the Thames, or Hadrian's Wall isn't actually against the law after all.

Size Matters: If you lock up a few people and deprive them of basic necessities, the world gets all excited and calls you bad names and sics the cops on you. If you cut off the only adequate oil and gas terminal serving an entire people, the world calls you Israel.

Contagion: Mortgage and monoline insurers have learned from the health insurance industry and are now denying about 25% of claims. In this case the pre-existing condition appears to have been fraud in sub-prime mortgages and “the pack of lies and shoddy paperwork upon which many of these mortgage-related bonds have been built.”

Unadvertized Feature: Sprint's basic cell phone service includes “a wonderful automated back-end” which lets law enforcement use the internet to track your location and intercept your text messages in real time. Experts suspect that GPS location "likely outnumber[s] all other forms of surveillance requests.”

Cost/Benefit Ratio: How much should you tip a paperboy who doesn't deliver the news? For $75 billion a year, don't you think US Intelligence should be able to keep track of one tall skinny Arab?

Clarification: The reason Colonial Pipeline cannot meet all the requests it has for gasoline delivery to the Northeast is that unprofitable refineries in Deleware and New Jersey were closed taking 330,000 barrels of gasoline per day off the market – and Colonial did not have that much spare capacity. Shin bone connected to the leg bone...

Relax... Or Don't: Despite all the noise about conspiracy, spring still comes earlier, glaciers are still melting, trees are growing higher up mountains and Englishmen are back to making wine.

Federal Jobs Program: A small town in Illinois may get 3,000 new jobs, guarding a handful of prisoners from Guantanamo. Be good to get some benefit out of the billions spent on the War on Terror.

Water Pressure: In 2005 Bolivian scientists predicted that the glaciers that supply water to La Paz, would vanish by 2015. They were wrong, it's happened several years sooner. The stolen emails didn't arrive in time to save the Andean glaciers.

Umbrella Policy: Last year Chicago sold off the next 75 years of its parking meter income and put the money in its 'Rainy Day' fund. This year it rained, and 75% of that money is gone.

Porn O'Graph: Unemployment triplets.