I had to write an expert report last week, and I’m in New York on business all this week.  In the meantime, watch the music video above (that’s the artist’’s grandmother), courtesy of Gerard Van der Leun over at American Digest. And be sure to watch it all the way to the end.  ..bruce w..

. . . check back later.  ..bruce w..

At 5:00 PM Eastern today, the treasury will finally release their “Stress Test” results. Not to belabor this, but you should largely ignore them.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Results of the government’s stress tests of the nation’s largest 19 banks started to trickle out Wednesday, highlighting the burgeoning gaps between the industry’s strong and weak players.

Among the institutions that have been instructed by the Federal Reserve to raise more capital are Wells Fargo & Co., Morgan Stanley, GMAC, State Street Corp., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc. and Regions Financial Corp., according to people familiar with the matter. The banks with the biggest capital deficiencies are Bank of America, with a $34 billion hole; Wells Fargo, which needs to raise $15 billion; and GMAC, which faces a $11.5 billion shortfall, the people said.

Firstly, the criteria are completely made up. The future conditions they test the banks against are not slated to happen until next year (2010), however some of the bad conditions they were testing against have are already in effect as of today.

Next, the entire premise is foolish. This entire stress test process was created to distract the public from the un-sound fundamentals of the banking system. At the same time it provides an elaborate and deliberate enough display that most people will accept it as reality and stop worrying about the banks.

Lastly, it’s really interesting to see who they have labeled as the bank needing to raise the most cash; none other than Wells Fargo. Some of you may recall that Wells Fargo fought hard against TARP and did not want to participate. Given the current climate in Washington, one should not be surprised that there is a heavy portion of “payback” for anyone who does not want to be part of the herd.

Mayday! Mayday!

ADMIN: Yeah, I know today’s post title doesn’t rhyme with the others — but here’s a quick test of your own nit-pickiness: did the difference between Monday’s title and the rest of the week bother you?

MORNING LINKS (and these are likely the only link you’ll get today).

LINK: Speaking of workers, I’m going to be tied up all day today. So for this glorious morning, let us remember, courtesy of Amity Shlaes, the true efforts and consequnces of the New Deal:

As for President Hoover, his tenure was marked not by laissez faire or respect for private property–indeed, Hoover had labeled property a “fetish” before he became president. The Great Engineer was in fact the Great Intervener, meddling in multiple areas, raising taxes and backing tariffs, to the economy’s detriment. Mistrusting the stock market as unreal, Hoover berated short-sellers and exhorted businesses to keep wages high when they could ill afford it.

International, monetary and banking factors all played a role in creating the Depression, but the counterproductive Hoover mattered as well. As economist George Selgin has noted, the most absurd of the Hoover increases was a 2% levy on checks, which caused people to further drain money out of their bank accounts so they could pay their bills, untaxed.

Roosevelt, for his part was indeed courageous, and his call to action did inspire. FDR’s free-trade moves and some of his regulatory moves–the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal deposit insurance–helped to stabilize the economy. But the argument that FDR saved the U.S. from fascism is an exaggeration. And, like Hoover and his interventionists, FDR and his New Dealers did much to hurt the economy.

Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration, created in 1933, pulled wages up when perishing companies could not afford it; come 1935, the Wagner Act gave unions more bargaining power, forcing further wage increases on companies. Roosevelt’s multiple tax increases caused businesses to postpone investment. Especially counterproductive was FDR’s “undistributed profits tax,” which punished firms for being cautious and forced them to disgorge cash at the worst possible moment.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Then go out and by Shlaes’ book, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. It’s now in paperback, and we have massive deficits as far as the eye can see, so it really behooves you (so to speak) to do so.

ITEM: Speaking of inappropriate steps, can you imagine the reaction if back during the 2000 recession, Laura Bush made a public appearance in a $540 pair of sneakers? I’ll be it would have appeared in far more places than the New York Daily News. (Hat tip to the Drudge Report.)

Some links sometime on the weekend, I think.  ..bruce w..

P.S. Behooves — Hoover — get it?

Where in the World is Air Force One?

OVERNIGHT LINKS — well, just one, really.

I’m heading out to the Left Coast for some time to come, so blogging will be a bit more sporadic and light. For today . . .

ITEM: Debra Saunders takes a look at Pelosi’s Tortured Explanation:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been pushing for a “truth commission” to investigate the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques like waterboarding — until Republicans started shining the spotlight on Pelosi herself. Now she is not so adamant.

Spokesman Brendan Daly told me that Pelosi wants a truth commission, “but she still realizes the political reality” — as in the opposition of President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The rest of the reality may well be this: Pelosi knew that White House lawyers had sanctioned waterboarding in 2002 — and did not protest.

Read the whole thing, and I’ll see you on the weekend.  ..bruce w..

I will never buy a Fujitsu laptop again....

My laptop is threatening to die, or at least be reduced to seriously degraded performance. I’ve been having problems with it for months, and I think it may be on the way out.  One way or the other, I’ll see you in a day or two, once I’ve either got this one fixed up or gone out and bought a new laptop.

To make matters worse, my cell phone/PDA, a Palm Treo 680, started dying this weekend. That forced me to buy a new phone — an iPhone — ahead of schedule (I really wanted to wait for the 32 GB model and the 3.0.1 software). You have to understand that I’ve been using a Palm PDA of one kind or another for close to 13 years. The process of trying to move all the contact info, notes, calendar items and so on to my iPhone is not going to be pleasant, quick or easy. ..bruce w..

I remained appalled at how poorly this program is administered. After I fixed all the problems and requested a review, Google insisted that my site still had ‘badware’, claiming to have done a scan of my website that very day. This continued for a week (with daily checks on my part — nope, still no badware — daily requests for review, and daily ‘Badware found’ designations from Google) until suddenly the ‘badware’ designation vanished yesterday (May 1st). I credit that largely to having posted a message in the Google Webmaster Groups forum the day before (Apr 30th), though no reply was made directly to that posting or to me via e-mail.

Given the disproportionate impact that Google can have on a website’s traffic — thus for sites with ads, the site’s income — and the difficulties that most people appear to encounter in getting Google to lift that badware designation even after fixing the problem (browse through these search results), I’m surprised that Google’s legal department hasn’t urged more caution and diligence on how this ‘Badware’ initiative is administered.  ..bruce w..

Last Monday (4/21), I brought up the SiteMeter statistics page for this blog and noted in passing that the traffic seemed a bit light that morning. I chalked it up to the usual variations in site flow and didn’t think much of it.

But then I happened to click on one of the incoming Google searches (as I often do) just to see what other sites that search brings up and where my blog ranks in the results. I was startled — and dismayed — to see something that looked like this:

I was rather dumbfounded, to say the least. I clicked on the ‘This site may harm your computer’ link and found myself at Google Webmaster, having their “StopBadware” initiative explained to me. Since this blog (along with all my others) is hosted on a dedicated remote server, I fired off an e-mail to the support staff, as well as to my co-blogger Bruce Henderson. In the meantime, I brought up CuteFTP and started searching through the blog’s files.

I quickly encountered some files that weren’t part of the WordPress installation — they had been recently created, and most of them started with the prefix “fx_” (as in “fx_wp-cron.php”). Henderson found them as well; he also found reports that this problem was related to a known WordPress exploit. I had not yet upgraded the blog to WP 2.5, since I’m always a bit leery of new major releases, so I got caught in the exploit as well.

I then proceeded to spend a full day cleaning up the mess. I backed up the blog’s contents as an XML file (to avoid copying out any PHP files), relocated the image files, then deleted the entire WordPress installation, including the database, leaving little more than an bare-bones index.html (‘PLEASE STAND BY…”) file. I then did a clean installation of WordPress 2.5 and upgraded it with the security-related portions of WordPress 2.5.1. I then restored the blog’s content by importing the XML file (broken up into three smaller chunks, since WordPress will only import XML files < 2MB). I restored the image files and requested a new review of the website by Google.

Google told me that the site still had “badware” — but the section that was supposed to inform me where the badware was, was completely blank. Aargh. I requested a new review and noted in the comments that Google was telling me there was a problem with my website without giving me any information about what it was. This process continued for several days.

Today, I checked Google again and saw that this blog was still listed as ‘harmful’ — but now it pointed me specifically to the (current) third page of the blog. A cursory review of that page didn’t uncover anything. I then did some more online research and found a post talking about iFrame injections. I did a ‘view source’ on the 3rd page of this blog, searched for ‘iFrame’ — and bingo! There it was, embedded in my post on HP Lovecraft. I deleted it from that post, but to be sure, I exported the entire blog out to XML again, opened that file in UltraEdit, and did a search on ‘iFrame’. I found two legit uses of iFrame (some of Henderson’s Google maps during last fall’s San Diego fires), but found another iFrame exploit in an old post on ‘Time Traveller Day’. I deleted that one, then did a resubmit to Google.

Through all this, my site traffic had declined sharply, down to less than a third of what it had been averaging each day:

There was a brief spike on the 25th-26th, but that mostly Digg traffic on the ‘rainbow’ photo that Henderson posted.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Google ‘Stop Badware’ initiative. On the one hand, it sure brought the problem to my attention in a hurry — but only because I happened to backtrack on a Google search that landed at my site. (Google claims to notify via a variety of e-mail addresses, but I enabled several of those for this blog, with forwarding, back on the 21st and have yet to receive a single e-mail since then, despite several ‘Request review’ requests.) What’s more, Google has never provided any information about what the alleged ‘badware’ is that it found on my blog, and it is has been for the most part vague and unhelpful in letting me know where the alleged badware is.

In the meantime, for a full week now anyone using Google who hits my site sees that “This site may harm your computer” phrase. I can only cross my fingers and hope that Google in Its Inscrutable Wisdom decides that my site is OK now. Henderson and I have spent nearly two years building the blog’s traffic to its current level, only to see that drop by 60% in a single day and mostly stay there for the past week. We’re not alone in this mess; a Google search on “Google site may harm computer” yields 649,000 hits.

Have you checked what Google is saying about your blog? ..bruce w..

As a result, we backed up the posts, etc., in XML form and then completely deleted the WordPress installation. After that, we did a clean install of WordPress 2.5, added the 2.51 security upgrades, and restored the posts, etc.

There have been a few problems with the restorations (particularly with linked images, the sidebars and the blogroll); bear with us. ..bruce w..

UPDATE: Oh, and I changed the WordPress theme.

UPDATED UPDATE: By popular demand, I changed the WordPress theme back.