Rumblings from the Conservative side of things concern me lately.  There is suddenly loose talk about having to do something about the 14th Amendment, like one has just discovered an ant invasion in one's kitchen after a heavy rain.

First, the whole idea has a snowball's chance in hell of ever happening.

Second, the 14th Amendment has a long and fascinating (if you are a legal scholar) history, from its post-Civil War 19thC roots through today.  It underpins so much of our modern jurisprudence that it is unimaginable to mess with at this point.

Like something caught between being the Great Oracle and the Wizard of Oz (ignore the man behind the curtain), on Tuesday, the Fed met and has now spoken about the lousy economic numbers of late last week and the general morass in which we find ourselves.  The Fed announced Tuesday morning, that it will use the proceeds from the Fed's own gigantic (and getting bigger all the time) mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities.

So what, you ask?

The dismal economic performance of late (can you spell DoubleDipRecession) has, in the Fed's inscrutable judgment, required it to now continue, as it has done since 2007, pumping vast amounts of US Dollars into our gasping economy, to prop up the housing and financial markets.

Citing both the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Federal Constitution, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, on Wednesday, held that Prop 8's ban on same-sex marriages was unconstitutional. 

Next stop, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, then on to the US Supreme Court.  When Prop 8 was passed in the Fall of 2008, I wrote a piece for F&HD predicting this result on these very grounds and my article here provoked, shall we say, just a bit of controversy - some very critical comments were posted concerning my constitutional law analysis.  Now that the formidable legal talent from both sides of Bush v Gore have combined, the results, at least at the Federal Trial Court level are in. 

You can read Judge Walker's Decision and Order here and likely in many other places in cyberspace by the time you get around to reading this.

Last Friday, the news wires carried this from Newt, while speaking at an AEI event: a call for a US war now on both North Korea and Iran, now - re-labeling the War on Terror as a War on Radical Islam.

Now, let me get this right.  Newt just broadcast into the whirlpool of our 24/7 21stC Media, a call for our economically troubled nation of some 300 million, to declare a War against Islam (the Arab Street will not hear the word "Radical") - the religious belief of 1+ Billion people, out of nearly 7 Billion currently crowding this planet?  Did I read that right? 

Would you take on three or four guys in a street fight tonight when you leave the restaurant at which you have enjoyed dining?  Will we really force our truly exhausted military (and their beleaguered families) who have served 3, 4, 5 or more tours in Iraq and/or Afghanistan (literally, the ends of the earth) to now make ready for, not one, but, two more wars, one against a Hermit Kingdom, run by a little Madman who thinks he is John Wayne; the other against a huge, intensely mountainous country, run by a little Wise Guy in a cheap golfing, zip-up jacket, who is shilling for a bunch of Mullahs with attitudes, but not much else in the way of guts or brains?

Once, long ago, we had the Great Depression, which our history books tell us started with the crash of Wall Street in Fall 1929.  Many of us either still remember what the 1930's were like in this country, or grew up hearing about them from parents and grandparents, at times ad nauseum. 

Few in our 24/7, fully-connected, 21stC Media, have either been brave, or honest, enough to call what we've been living through since late 2007, (first fully impacting in late Summer 2008 and now coming up on it's second full year since them) with that name starting with the dreaded D-word: "Depression;" yet, as I have said here repeatedly since Fall 2008, that's what this is in reality.

Pundits (not pundints, as we hear the word mispronounced too often lately) have stuck a toe in the water by calling our own economic agonies this time around, the Great Recession, but not further.  Yet.

Next time you are shopping at the Mall, Costco, or Bed Bath & Beyond and your shopping cart or pallet is overflowing, think of this: nearly half of the world's population (roughly), some three billion people, are living on less than $2.50 per day - the price of a cheap magazine or a couple of Cokes or perhaps a Happy Meal at Mickey D's.   The opposite of SuperSize - PatheticallyTiny.

When you are next staring into the late night contents of your refrigerator, having paused your movie on DVR, not really hungry, but looking for something to stuff in your face . . .  one billion people inhabiting this same world (one thousand million, for the numerically challenged) went to bed hungry last night - not dieting; not low cal; not ‘no fat' - starving hungry - the kind that really hurts . . .  all night.

When you finish that late night movie and take out your DVD, VHS, or power down your computer's streaming video, consider this.  One in four people living on the same planet as you and me, have no access to basic electricity - zip, zero, nada.   When the sun goes down, they live by candlelight, if they can afford candles; lamplight, if they can afford whatever burns inside to illuminate . . .  as humans have lived for the several million years that we have been evolving into the multi-tasking, digitally plugged in, expensively clothed and accessorized marvels you walk past all day, every day, in your life.

"These are the times that try men's souls." - Thomas Paine's The Crisis

Going ‘from bad to worse' is a much overused expression.  For those who have not entirely given up on the 24-7 Media coverage of all the nasty things going on lately, some have begun developing traumatic associations and now avoid news like the plague,  how many disasters does it take . . . . let me count them.

The Gulf is filling with what looks like melted chocolate and even mighty BP is clueless how to stop it, having started on live video feed, no less, it's latest, Top Kill (think: life as comic book) solution to the month-old spewing of oil into the pristine Carribean waters and beyond, involving something with old sneakers, tennis balls, cement, what have you.  Lousiana's bayou and wetlands country is smothered in what we only wish was butterscotch syrup, some twelve miles in now.

The recent news cycle has featured a story about a civil lawsuit filed by the SEC against the insanely profitable Wall Street Master (Of All Masters) of the Universe, Goldman Sachs ("Goldman").  The SEC charges in the Complaint initiating this soon to be titanic litigation, made public last Friday, that Goldman created some 25 ‘Deals' (like the one from which this piece derives its title: "Abacus 2007-AC1"). 

These Deals enabled Goldman and some of its most beloved clientele to literally bet against the housing market, at a time when those bets could pay off BigTime.

Now, Goldman vehemently denies all of this (in a press release within minutes of the filing, Goldman called the allegations: "completely unfounded in law and fact").   I want to make it very clear at the outset that what I am about to discuss further here are but allegations in a new lawsuit, neither proven facts nor adjudicated matters found true by any court anywhere.   It does not take much to file a lawsuit - in fact, even a Rhesus Monkey, armed with a typewriter, about $300 (here in the Los Angeles Superior Court) and a stack of papers, who can find his or her way to the Courthouse, can file a lawsuit!

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
for want of a shoe the horse was lost;
and for want of a horse the rider was lost;
being overtaken and slain by the enemy,
all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.

-Benjamin Franklin
The Way to Wealth (1758)

A volcano in Iceland with an absolutely unpronounceable name erupts and air travel in, about, and through Northern Europe is thrown into total, unmitigated chaos. The ash and smoke from the erupting Eyjafjallajokull volcano could, if sucked into modern commercial jet engines, shut them all down, leaving winged, painted steel and aluminum tubes and hundreds huddled inside in cramped seats at the cruel mercy of gravity.  In London, more than a thousand miles away, thousands of flights were grounded with perhaps hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded for days that must have seemed endless for one trying to just get home.  Strangely, it was all about the direction the wind blew. 

I want to let you in on a little secret. Once upon a time, the Wizards of Wall St. took risks with their own money and, when those risks paid off, they earned handsome rewards. Somewhere in the not too distant past, that changed to the newer model, which nearly sank the world’s financial ship in the Fall of 2008 and likely will again, unless Congress addresses the heart of the problem.

Somewhere around the time that the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed (November 12, 1999, to be precise, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliely Act) the Wizards of Wall St. had a revelation. This light bulb suddenly illuminated, as in the old comics and cartoons, greatly assisted by a major shift of graduate-student-level physicists, weary of stuyding arcane String (Superstring, Membrane, ad nauseum) theories, and math geeks, tired of not making any real money using their mental gymnastics, were looking to escape the hallowed halls of academia.

It was also made possible by the power of modern computing, featuring exponentially increasing memory storage and computing power, enabling billions of calculations in microseconds, all emanating from a computer chip the size of a postage stamp. These academic émigrés were snapped up by the Wizards of Wall St., who called them “Quants,” and set to work, sweating over hot computers, cooking up exotic financial instruments, the understanding of which lay far beyond the ken of mere mortals, to whom an algorithm is a very hard-to-spell word for some kind of math that you did not pay much attention to decades ago when somebody tried to teach it to you. “[A]n algorithm is an effective method for solving a problem using a finite sequence of instructions,” say our pals over at Wikipedia, the People’s Encyclopedia.