Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
For “subprime”, read “non-prime”. Yield-hungry investors are ready to endorse a revival of bonds backed by riskier US residential mortgages, as lenders warm to housebuyers who do not meet strict borrowing guidelines introduced after the financial crisis. More ON THIS TOPIC VW car loan securities at risk of losses EU plan to revive ABS faces…
Venezuela, a country that is struggling to import food and keep its currency from falling to worthless lows, has just “minted” the world’s largest chocolate coin. The candy money, made to look like a one bolivar coin, weighs a massive 870 kilos [1,900 pounds] and measures six feet in diameter. It was presented to the…
Turns out the Vatican has one final burn for Kim Davis, the anti-gay clerk who flew a little too close to the sun when she released the news that the pope had acknowledged her existence. Not only was her meeting not a “real audience” with the cool guy, the day before, the Vatican confirms, the…
It may never be known whether Chris Harper Mercer went on the Internet forum 4chan the night before he killed nine people at Umpqua Community College to warn of what he planned to do, or whether the post that had media outlets and investigators scrambling was completely unconnected to the shooting. Either way, this…
“Stuff happens” was the dumbest and most unfortunate thing Jeb! Bush said Friday in reaction to the mass shooting at an Oregon community college one day earlier, but his fumbling attempt to clean up that mess was nearly as rife with dumbitude and non-fortune. http://gawker.com/jeb-bush-deliv… After challenging a reporter to tell him “what I said…
If death rays are outlawed, then only lawless Martians will have death rays My Right to Keep & Bear a Death Ray Look, I’m glad you support my right to bear small arms. That’s awfully swell of you. But the Bill of Rights puts no such weaselly little adjectives in front of “arms,” OK? It’s…
News organizations must treat reader comments with the same level of consideration that they treat their own stories, New York Times community editor Bassey Etim said today speaking on a panel at this year’s Computation + Journalism Symposium at Columbia University. “We have to treat comments as content,” Etim said. “We can’t cede the social…
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has said at least nine of its staff have been killed in an overnight bombing of a hospital in the embattled Afghan city of Kunduz. The attack early on Saturday also wounded 37 people, including 19 MSF staff, the medical charity told Al Jazeera. Officials of MSF later told Reuters…
I met you in the rain on the last day of 1972, the same day I resolved to kill myself.One week prior, at the behest of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, I’d flown four B-52 sorties over Hanoi. I dropped forty-eight bombs. How many homes I destroyed, how many lives I ended, I’ll never know….
Over the course of the day we’ve had a handful of readers write in to ask or demand that we not report the name of the shooter, Chris Harper Mercer, in the Oregon school massacre. As the massacres continue, an increasing number of people think that we should expunge the names of the offenders both…