... in the Afghanistan quagmire, graveyard of empires.

CNN:

More than one-third of all weapons the United States has procured for Afghanistan's government are missing, according to a government report released Thursday.

The U.S. military failed to "maintain complete inventory records for an estimated 87,000 weapons -- or about 36 percent -- of the 242,000 weapons that the United States procured and shipped to Afghanistan from December 2004 through June 2008," a U.S. Government Accountability Office report states.

[...]The military also failed to properly account for an additional 135,000 weapons it obtained for the Afghan forces from 21 other countries.

Have we declared victory on health insurance reform yet? I confess I don't keep up with the access bloggers as much as I should, so maybe I didn't get the memo. Anyhow, the Versailles consensus that declaring victory is distinctly preferable to achieving it works for finance, too. James Kwok:

Gillian Tett has an article criticizing the idea that CoCos — contingent convertible bonds — will solve the “too big to fail” problem. ...

Contingent convertible bonds, a.k.a. contingent capital, are the latest fad to hit the optimistic technocracy in Washington and London. A contingent convertible bond is a bond that a bank sells during ordinary times, but that converts into equity when things turn bad, with “bad” defined by some trigger conditions, such as capital falling below a predetermined level. In theory, this means that banks can have the best of both worlds. They can go out and borrow more money today, increasing leverage and profits (which is what they want). But when the crisis hits, the debt will convert into equity; that will dilute existing shareholders, but more importantly it means the debt does not have to be paid back, providing an instant boost to the bank’s capital cushion. In other words, banks can have the additional safety margin as if they had raised more equity today, but without having to raise the equity.

Sounds ideal! Where do I sign up?

Is "defiles" too strong a word? Let's see! The set-up:

2,266 Veterans Die Because They Are Uninsured

The pitch:

nahant brings to our attention an extremely important and tragic statistic this Veteran’s Day. Via the Huffington Post:

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

[cross-posted at NPR Check]

Is Sorya Sarhaddi Nelson really and truly in Afghanistan? I've heard her interviewed the last day or so regarding the fortunes of of the US debacle in Afghanistan - in light of the non-runoff runoff and the "victory" of Hamid Karzai - and I can't say I've learned anything from it.

Nelson was on ATC Monday talking to Michelle Norris and this exchange occurred:

Norris: "With Hamid Karzai now declared the official winner of the presidential election, to what degree does that now solve the political uncertainty in Afghanistan?"

[cross posted at NPR Check]

On Friday I was staying late at work and before leaving heard this promising start to a story on All Things Considered:

"This week, we've been reading a vivid narrative in the New York Times by the journalist David Rohde. He was held captive for seven months by the Taliban. He was moved frequently from house to house all over remote parts of Pakistan. And one detail in this story made us particularly curious."

Holy cow! I thought, NPR is going to allude to the three rather stunning observations contained in Rohde's articles which Glenn Greenwald so aptly wrote about a few days ago:

Matt Taibbi:

This is what Barack Obama did to “earn” the Nobel Prize. He put the benevolent face back on things. He is a good-looking black law professor with an obvious bent for dialogue and discussion and inclusion. That he hasn’t actually reversed any of Bush’s more notorious policies — hasn’t closed Guantanamo Bay, hasn’t ended secret detentions, hasn’t amped down Iraq or Afghanistan — is another matter. What he has done is remove the stink of unilateralism from those policies.

They’re not crazy-ass, blatantly illegal, lunatic rampages anymore, but carefully-considered, collectively-run peacekeeping actions, prosecuted with meaningful input from our allies.

CC declines comment, but I didn't.

it's a class marker. non-elite women serve the "whore" function, it's how the elites define non-elites when not defining us "baby oven" or "handmaiden." elites can pay to have the real thing made, and it sets them apart, special. the semi-celebrity associated with the costume itself, and the social capital that creates, is reserved for elites. now, i don't define Con fans who do this as elite, as most of the time they do it themselves and it's almost an art these days, and surely a craft. but speaking simply as a status marker among the elite, it is on purpose that non-elite women rarely have access to the real costume, and frequently offered whore-esque "choices."

I'd like to start by saying i'm a longtime reader of graphic literature and speculative fiction of a wide range of genres.

The Patriarchy is hard at work here, employing a pretty wide range of tools here, tools which are literal pressures upon the shape of a woman, the way she shapes herself and is shaped.

Via Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi explains Obama's Nobel Peace Prize by providing some very insightful commentary about who is - and isn't - eligible for Nobel Peace Prizes and why:

Thanks to the wonderful posts by CD and the thoughtful contributors in the comments, we've been talking about food a lot the past couple of days. And to tie those posts in with CD's post about the need to take action, I thought I'd pass along these 10 things you can do to help start a citizen revolution aimed at taking back our food. The list comes from Sustainable Food, which I've added to the Blogroll and highly recommend.

Update: Well, at least they don't hate me because I'm queer. Whew. I feel so much better:

In an email to the Huffington Post on Monday, Harwood clarified that the quote was not meant to convey any displeasure on the part of the administration for the gay community's public advocacy.

"My comments quoting an Obama adviser about liberal bloggers/pajamas weren't about the LGBT community or the marchers," he wrote. "They referred more broadly to those grumbling on the left about an array of issues in addition to gay rights, including the war in Afghanistan and health care and Guantanamo -- and whether all that added up to trouble with Obama's liberal base..."

I have a writing assignment due today. I'm going to make the deadline, but I just looked at the time and I'm sort of amazed at how quickly the morning got away from me. Because I've been reading original sources, analysis and commentary from many different places all morning, and even though I'm a fast reader, it has still taken some time. It's too important to me, a pajama wearing blogger, to check and double source my facts and otherwise make sure what I'm about to write is reality-based and correct, to prepare my pieces any other way.

If I were employed by the mainstream press, I wouldn't have to do any of those things. I could just toss off an anonymously sourced playground insult and add some snotty, insider comment, and call it day.

I wonder if the next Blogger Ethics Conference will have a panel on the latest in fleece and microfiber jammies. I hope so.

[cross posted at NPR Check]

Consider these two screen shots from NPR's website:

From a story on Thursday's Morning Edition:

and from Thursday's All Things Considered

Any grade schooler with a rudimentary understanding of the innocent until proven guilty concept could figure out what is wrong with the titles of these web articles: both refer to TERRORISTS, when what is at issue are detainees of the US government suspected of involvement in terrorism (or guerrilla warfare) who have NEVER faced any semblance of legitimate due process that would justify calling them "terrorists." In fact, someone with just a bit more knowledge of recent US detention policies would suspect that most detainees in the US "war on terror" are probably innocent.

Unfortunately, instead of a grade schooler, NPR's two pieces on US rogue detention are led by "a magna cum laude graduate of Yale," Ari Shapiro.

[cross posted at NPR Check]

Last Saturday Scott Sermon made this claim about the US war in Afghanistan:

From Ian.