The lid isn't going to stay on this much longer folks.

First, we have this with General Ham, who apparently had a rapid-deployment force ready to go into action when he learned that the consulate was under assault.  Then:

General Ham then received the order to stand down. His response was to screw it,  he was going to help anyhow. Within 30 seconds to a minute after making the move  to respond, his second in command apprehended General Ham and told him that he  was now relieved of his command.

Got that?  It appears from this report that he was placed under armed arrest for attempting to rescue our people.

But it doesn't stop there; apparently General Ham is not the only member of the armed forces who attempted to respond as one would expect from Americans at-arms:

The Navy said Saturday it is replacing the admiral in command of an aircraft carrier strike group in the Middle East, pending the outcome of an internal investigation into undisclosed allegations of inappropriate judgment.

Inappropriate judgment eh?  Like, perhaps, deciding that he was going to go do his job when our people were under attack through an act of war by belligerents?

There isn't much that's "inappropriate" in my view under such circumstances in terms of rapid response, but the CIC (that would be Obama) apparently sees things differently.

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, we have a military that is under civilan control.  That means you and I are the final arbiters of what is and is not permissible military action, not the other way around.  We, and not they, make that decision.

The questions you must now ask yourself as we come into these next couple of weeks, culminating in the election, are:

• Are you are going to remain silent and by doing so consent to the murder of four in Benghazi?  If this is unacceptable to you then it is your duty as an American to do something about it.  What you choose to do about it is of course up to you, and I urge lawful actions, not lawless ones, but the fact remains that our military structure means that you, and not they, are ultimately in control.
  
  
• It appears that there were assets in the air that could have responded; are you going to remain silent knowing they were there and refuse to demand the public identification of the person or persons who refused to use them? It appears now that our men had designated the mortar team that was firing on them with a laser targeting device.  Such an act never takes place unless there are assets in the air able to hit what's been designated as the target and everyone else in the area can see the emission of energy used to "paint" the target.  We therefore know, assuming the reports of that "painting" are accurate, that some form of aerial fire support was available and was intentionally not used.  Again, you must decide if this is acceptable conduct.
  
  
• The predicate to all of this appears to have been the giving of heavy munitions to militants that may have been related to or connected with (or may have actually been!) Al-Qaida, which then "leaked" beyond where the people who gave those munitions intended them to go and be used.  Is it acceptable that our government gave heavy weapons to a publicly-sworn enemy of our nation?  There are multiple credible reports that the reason the Benghazi safe-house was hit was because the CIA was attempting to recover those weapons through what amounted to buying them back (that is, bribery.)  You must once again decide whether or not giving heavy weapons to known and declared enemies of the United State is acceptable under any circumstances, and if not, what you intend to do about it.
  
  
• This is not the first time we have armed belligerents on purpose; is that acceptable?  Specifically, "Gun Runner" or "Fast and Furious" armed belligerent Mexican Drug Lords when then used some of those guns to shoot a United States citizen.  They also, it must be presumed, used them to shoot a lot of innocent Mexican citizens.  The key question here is when we as Americans will have had enough of this crap -- it didn't start with Obama, but he sure as hell has taken to a new level of art.  Back during the Iran-Contra days we indicted and convicted 11 but then sat back while George HW Bush pardoned all of those who didn't manage to beat the charges on appeal.  Isn't that nice?

We have a lot of serious problems in this country folks.  Our economy is in the toilet, we have a central bank that is entirely out-of-control and a Congress that refuses to enforce the law that governs its operation (and has serially refused to do so for 100 years), we apparently are arming people who are sworn enemies of the United States and we sit back and we blow Saudi Arabian Kings who demand that the UN trash our First Amendment (and incidentally, Mr. Abdullah, go perform an anatomically-impossible act) instead of declaring him an enemy of our nation, never mind the obvious and well-documented monetary ties between his country and Al-Quaida, not to mention the 9/11 hijackers.

Some of our political candidates would like to argue over things like gay marriage, smoking pot and abortion, or promises to hand out more and more money to people in exchange for their vote.  Others still would like to argue over whether one religion is superior to another.  Others will bleat about how a vote that is not cast for one man is in fact a vote for another, although this is trivially proven to be mathematically false.

This is all small-ball and mental masturbation folks if, as is allged, a bunch of MANPADs that our government handed to Al-Qaida connected people start being used to shoot down airliners or our economy blows up as a consequence of unbridled, rampant deficits and QE-to-insanity.

We had damn well better wake the hell up as a body politic because if we don't you're going to wake up one of these mornings due to a GE Turbofan engine coming crashing through your roof, on fire and in pieces, and that will just be the beginning of a nightmare that will not end for years.  This assumes that we don't find ourselves in the middle of WWIII with mushrooms sprouting as the fruits across our "magnificent" plain.  That was the ultimate "solution" to the Depression and I'd rather not do it again, especially in a world where the loser can and probably will play "push button vaporization of your nearest city" rather than go down with a whimper.

Don't tell me that Romney is going to fix it, because I've heard exactly nothing from him on any of these matters thus far that leads me to believe he would do anything other than turn his head and, if the shit got really thick, pardon Obama and everyone in his chain of command that ultimately was brought up on charges over this crap exactly as George HW Bush did.

Fuck that.

I know I've said it before, but it's time to rehash the HFT debate.

First, Wired posted this:

Faster and faster turn the wheels of finance, increasing the risk that they will spin out of control, that a perturbation somewhere in the system will scale up to a global crisis in a matter of seconds. “For the first time in financial history, machines can execute trades far faster than humans can intervene,” said Andrew Haldane, a regulatory official with the Bank of England, at another recent conference. “That gap is set to widen.”

Only because we have perverted what markets are.

In addition Felix Salmon over at Reuter's Blog posted this:

A nice chart of HFT activity from 2007-2011.  It will peel your wig back.  He closed with this:

The stock market today is a war zone, where algobots fight each other over pennies, millions of times a second. Sometimes, the casualties are merely companies like Knight, and few people have much sympathy for them. But inevitably, at some point in the future, significant losses will end up being borne by investors with no direct connection to the HFT world, which is so complex that its potential systemic repercussions are literally unknowable. The potential cost is huge; the short-term benefits are minuscule. Let’s give HFT the funeral it deserves.

Again, we have forgotten what the market is supposed to be.

It is a price-discovery mechanism.

Further, The Securities Act of 1934 tells us that all means by which one may manipulate prices are illegal.  Period.  The law is clear on this point:

(2)To effect, alone or with 1 or more other persons, a series of transactions in any security registered on a national securities exchange, any security not so registered, or in connection with any security-based swap or security-based swap agreement with respect to such security creating actual or apparent active trading in such security, or raising or depressing the price of such security, for the purpose of inducing the purchase or sale of such security by others.

Got it?  The entry of orders for the purpose of other than actually transacting in the security at the given price -- that is, to induce others to trade, to raise or lower the price, to do anything other than to actually transact -- is illegal.

Period.

It is also illegal to:

(1)For the purpose of creating a false or misleading appearance of active trading in any security other than a government security, or a false or misleading appearance with respect to the market for any such security,

So the entry of an order without intent to actually execute is a violation.

All of this arm-waving is a pure refusal to enforce the law.  Nothing more, nothing less.

And enforcing the law is easy.

It requires no tax.  It requires that you make the following changes:

• All market participants must have margin available to clear all orders they have open at any instant in time on an unaggregated basis.  Since you may only enter an order you intend to execute under black-letter law you must be required to have the margin capacity through either cash or secured and proved-available credit, to clear the trade.  Period.
  
  
• All orders must be exposed to actual execution risk by all market participants.  Since you may only enter an order that you intend to execute the market must be able to act on each and every order you place into the market.  This requires that each order, once placed, by valid for a reasonable minimum period of time so that it is exposed to a a reasonably-large percentage (for all purposes all) of the market.  This means that the minimum human reaction time plus the round-trip time for all reasonable technologies in use must be the minimum order validity time; an order must either be valid for that time or it must execute.  A reasonable definition of this time is 2 seconds.

We can fix this problem tomorrow, as I have repeatedly pointed out.  You just make all orders valid for at least 2 seconds or until executed and at the same time you require all brokers, dealers and traders to be able to clear via either actual capital or secured and known-good margin loan capacity all orders open at any instant in time without offset or aggregation.

That's it.  You do those two things and the entire HFT "baiting game" collapses.  Any order placed must be exposed to the risk of execution and any order placed must be able to be cleared by the firm or individual that places it.

End of problem.

So why isn't anyone talking about this?

Because stealing from the public -- and others -- is all the "market" has become.  It is no longer a price-discovery mechanism and is now simply a bunch of robots trying to screw one another out of fractions of a cent at a time.

I'm going to reprise a Ticker from 2011-10-18, which you can read here if you want the original, but in a political context.

There was once a nation that was comprised of fish.  The fish lived in a pond that was 64x64 in size, or 4096 square units of surface area.  As with all fish they survived on dissolved oxygen in the water, which came to the water by exchange with the atmosphere above.  Plants grew in the water, receiving their energy from the sun while recycling the waste emitted by the fish as nutrients, and the fish ate the plants. All was well in the nation of fish.

But the economy of fish was limited by its growth.  Some of the bottom where the fish lived was rather rocky, and not much suited to cultivation of aquatic plants.  Some of the bottom was fertile, and beneath still more were various rare and natural treasures, such as energy sources that the fish could use for manufacturing.

One day a bright fish that worked for a bank called "Goldfishbank" got the idea that since plants were food, and more growth is better, the nation would be served by faster "growth."  He introduced to the pond a species of lilly that reproduced very rapidly.  In fact, it produced a new lilly once each day.  He began by placing just one lilly of one unit of size, or 1/4096th of the surface of the pond, in the water.

The next day there were two, and the fish nation cheered.  Then four, and the fish nation demanded that this fine fish be President.  Then eight, and all was even better in the world.

There were, however, some fish that became alarmed, for they had not been sleeping in school.  They knew, as well, that their very survival depended on the exchange of oxygen with the air above, and that absent this exchange all of the fish would surely die.

The great prosperity that appeared to flow, however, led the scholars to be shouted down. 

Unfortunately the great prosperity resulted in the price of fish dwellings, foods and fuels rising precipitously.  The credit created by all of this growth, which had heretofore appeared to be impossible, made everyone feel wealthy.  After just eight days what was 1 lilly had become 128; both great and permanent prosperity appeared to have blessed the fish.

Two days later the pond was 12.5% covered with lillies. 

But in the middle of this prosperity there was much corruption and theft.  The interest rates charged to lend money were corrupted by some of the fish banksters, who reasoned that they were merely making very small changes in what they reported, and due to the leverage they employed, reaped billions of profits.  This they did by stealing pennies from each fish per day.  Nobody would jail them, for some of those "profits" were simply diverted to political contributions in order to make sure that the fish nation government left the thieves alone.

There were other fish that were involved in lending for dwellings, and they too scammed the public.  Some of the lenders collapsed, yet they paid only small fines while most of the fish suffered monstrous losses, with many losing their homes.

Still other parts of the fish economy were involved in health care, and they got laws passed to make differential pricing, cost-shifting and other monopoly behavior protected, for this was their way to riches.  Soon the fish nation spent twice as much on health care as a percentage of its economy as all the other fish nations, but all these monopoly protections, enacted into law, were not seen as the corruption they were.

Unemployment became a problem and the fish nation saw its standard of living decline.  This was puzzling, for the proponents of the new lily had said that such prolific growth would lead to permanent prosperity.  There were many who claimed that the lily was simply not prolific enough, and that means must be found to spur even more lilies to grow.

The three major political parties sparred over the unemployment and economic malaise.  The two largest ones offered that taxes should be increased on the most-fortunate fish and that taxes should be decreased for all fish, respectively.  But neither put forward a plan to cut down the size of the government, which was sapping an increasing amount of the economy.

The third party decided to state that it should cut the size of the government by 43%.  But it refused to address the main growth drivers of the government, that being the medical industry's special protections.  Nor did that party appear to give a damn about all the scams and frauds, which had stolen monstrous amounts of wealth from all the fish.

Soon the political debate within that third party turned to whether fish should be able to smoke pot, which was currently prohibited under penalty of law, and whether a fish named Steve should be able to marry one named Larry.  Some fish believed this was a civil right and of the utmost importance, while others believed it was Satanic. 

Yet these were the only points of political debate on which this third party focused, instead of on the financial institutions that had skimmed off all the "prosperity" that had been promised to the fish nation by the Goldfishbank and others in the financial industry, along with the medical industry that had lobbied for their special protections and which were bankrupting the fish nation's government.

A few of the third party analysts saw that in point of fact the lily issue was soon to kill all the fish and the entire fish nation economy.  They were poo-pooed and called alarmists, for the sun was still visible in the sky above, and their rising stridency was called "divisive" or that "if you simply changes your approach you could actually influence people."  They were even told that their commentary was "self-righteous."

But that commentary, labeled "divisive" and in fact dismissed with "that ends our conversation and damages both our working relationship and friendship" was based the simple fact that while just 12.5% of the pond was covered, the entire fish nation was only three days from extinction, and the last two days had been wasted arguing over gay marriage and dope smoking instead of addressing the impending and mathematically-certain disaster.

I wish there was something approaching an honest reporter left in this country among the mainsleaze media.  But there's not.

Updated 4:05pm ET The trustees of the Social Security system said Monday the fund that helps sustain retiree and survivors’ benefits will become exhausted in 2033, three years sooner than they projected last year.

At that point, payroll taxes and taxation of Social Security benefits will provide only enough income to pay about 75 percent of the benefits that Congress has promised to retirees and survivors.

In practical terms, this means that a 40-year-old worker who is eligible to collect retirement benefits in 2039, would see his or her expected retirement benefit cut by about 25 percent, unless Congress took action to change the program’s funding or its benefit structure.

So far so good.  But it's the assumptions that are the problem:

The trustees said that to keep the Social Security trust funds solvent over the next 75 years, Congress could take a number of steps:

• increase the payroll tax rate from its current level of 12.4 percent to 15.01 percent;

Huh? 

The Payroll Tax is not 12.4%; that's a lie.

Millions of workers will see their take-home pay rise during 2011 because the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 provides a two percentage point payroll tax cut for employees, reducing their Social Security tax withholding rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent of wages paid. This reduced Social Security withholding will have no effect on the employee’s future Social Security benefits.

So the tax is actually 10.4%.  And note carefully that the Trustees said that a roughly 2.5% increase would balance Social Security.  But we've done exactly the opposite by almost exactly the same amount.

So who's going to be honest and call for (1) an immediate full stop to that payroll tax cut and (2) an increase in the payroll tax to 15%?

Nobody.

In point of fact there's another option for Social Security that would make even more sense -- index to longevity.  That would, along with a less than 1% increase (to 13%; the "cut" that's allegedly temporary must go away right here and now in any event) put the system back into balance.

In short Social Security is pretty easy to fix.  It's unpopular to talk about what has to happen to fix it, but it's fixable and at a reasonably-small cost to the average employee in terms of tax impact.

Separately, the trustees, who are also the trustees of the Medicare program, reported that the Medicare fund that pays hospital costs for older and disabled Americans will be exhausted by 2024, the same forecast as they made last year.

After the assets of the Medicare fund are gone, if Congress were to take no action, projected Medicare revenue would be adequate to cover 87 percent of the estimated spending in 2024 and about two-thirds of projected costs in 2050.

Nonsense.  These figures are nowhere near accurate as they do not include the 9.2% rate of increase that is currently being suffered.

The BEA says that compensation of employees is $8.4 trillion (last quarter of 2011, which is the latest available at present.)  That's $244 billion a year in Medicare tax (2.9%, both employer and employee parts.)

But the Federal Government spent $820 billion last year on health costs, approximately $550 billion of it in Medicare and Medicaid.  While the program claims to have taken in $530 billion there's obvious game-playing going on here as the total employee compensation as of the last quarter of 2011 is annualized to $8.4 trillion and Medicare tax is 2.9% of this, or $244 billion.

On a basic cash-flow analysis and given the $244 billion of actual bonds in the system for Medicare there is about one year of benefits available on a cash-flow basis, including tax receipts and "bonds in the drawer" for Medicare.

To be succinct Medicare is functionally bankrupt right here and now!

Medicare and Medicaid cannot be fixed at all as the problem is not found in those programs -- it is found in the underlying medical system in our nation.

Simply put we have to shut down the cost-shifting, including that represented by:

• EMTALA, which resulted in the destruction of charity care in general; the Catholic Church "cheered" this as it's roughly six hundred hospitals were largely relieved of being fully-charity-funded (that is, from your donations in the plate on Sunday) and managed to shift a huge part of that funding to you, the taxpayer, via explicit health "insurance" and private payer support!  This of course the Church does want to talk about; a "gun up the nose" isn't charitable at all, yet this is much of what so-called "charity hospitals" do today.  The Church needs to be called out on this loud and long; they're liars and frauds and have done their level damndest to pretend to provide charity care while offloading it on the general public.  This sort of intentional deception is a Satanic abuse of the alleged moral high ground the Church claims for itself.
  
  
• Outrageous development cost shifting from the rest of the world to the United States; price controls in other nations effectively prohibit the cost of development of new drugs and devices from being borne by health systems in other countries.  Canada and the UK are two of the worst offenders but hardly the only ones; other nations frequently threaten to break patents wholesale unless they get favored pricing.  The medical industry then got passed laws prohibiting reimportation, codifying a "wall" in federal law with felony penalties for breaches that allows this rip-off of the American consumer to continue. As a consequence Americans often pay 10x or even more what a Canadian pays for the same drug or device; we effectively cover all development costs for the entire planet.  This must end -- now.
  
  
• Specific legal exemptions from anti-trust law and shielding from consumer-hostile practices such as permitting and even encouraging disparate billing for procedures, drugs and devices depending on how one pays; a discriminatory act that when taken for the purpose of reducing competition is flatly illegal in other fields, blatant limiting of competition for various technological practices (e.g. licensing restrictions prohibiting the free opening of new MRI centers to drive down costs) and other acts that in any other field would land the parties involved in the graybar motel for felony criminal violations of anti-trust and restraint-of-trade law.

All of this combines to cause the cost of medical care in the United States to be a literal double that which is charged and obtained in other nations.  We simply cannot afford to continue on this path as the growth rate (9.2% compounded for the last 30 years) will result in the bankruptcy of the federal government and destruction of our economy within the next two decades.

The game-playing within the system cannot be maintained; eventually cash flow always wins.  You can move things around and pretend for a while but doctors, hospitals and others in the supply chain don't take empty promises, they want checks.  Eventually you are forced to admit that the money doesn't exist and you're shuffling the deck and playing with the cash flow from one place or another so as to avoid telling the truth about what's really going on in the budget and these funds.

This problem has to be solved, and solved now.  Neither political party will talk honestly about this, but we must as Americans demand both the truth and real resolution, as the path we are on will resolve in a disorderly collapse of our medical system and shortly thereafter our economy and government.

We cannot afford to continue to play the game that both the Republican and Democrat parties are running in this regard, nor are the so-called "third party" claims (e.g. Gary Johnson) honest assessments either.

The medical system in this country is terminally broken and if it is not corrected now we will all discover that there is simply no money and thus what people claim they have been promised will be shown to be a sham and collapse -- and this outcome will be apparent much sooner than people think.

From the bond hearing:

George Zimmerman was allegedly recognized by the Mayor for his intervention in the events surrounding the homeless (black) man that was beaten by a Sanford police officer's relative.

There has been a near-complete media blackout in this regard -- and questions about whether the letter published somewhat-recently was authentic.

Well, it appears (from testimony of his mother this morning) that the Sanford Mayor personally recognized George Zimmerman for his efforts to obtain justice for that homeless man.

And where is the media who tried to turn this into a racial issue? 

Just as importantly, where is the Mayor of Sanford who gave that commendation and thus knew damn well what the history of this man was when it came to his views on race?

Further there was testimony introduced this morning that George Zimmerman has been actively mentoring black kids in Orlando despite being urged not to by his mother as a consequence of the area of the city in question where he traveled to being a known high-crime area and thus dangerous to his person.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the media intentionally attempted to present a false picture of both the incident itself and George Zimmerman personally with regard to any racial issues surrounding this event.

Oh, and the claims that Zimmerman wasn't injured?  Here's a picture taken three minutes after EMS arrived:

Update: Not only is that damage consistent with the claim that Zimmerman was having his head bashed against the concrete sidewalk but two other things came out of the interview linked above that are of great importance to the development of facts surrounding that night -- the embedded data in the image file has a time stamp off the cell tower (it was an iPhone 4s) and geotag information from the phone's GPS matches the location. There's a high probability that photograph and the tags embedded in it will be deemed admissible evidence.  Second, the person who took the picture says Zimmerman was visibly staggering, which is consistent with a low-grade concussion from the impacts to his head.

Finally the witness said that there were visible powder burns on Martin's clothing (one of the questions I had originally as their presence would be expected given Zimmerman's narrative of what happened.)

If this all holds up it's pretty clear that the legal standard of objectively reasonable fear of great bodily injury or death was met for Zimmerman, and if so the shooting was justified -- period. 

Note that there is no resort to "stand your ground" necessary to reach that conclusion.

Prediction: This case is going to go nowhere and, in my opinion, Zimmerman has an excellent lawsuit against the media outlets for libel and/or slander and perhaps even against the special prosecutor for knowingly false and malicious prosecution.