digital thoughts

It’s getting worse every day. Washington Mutual failed today. FDIC seized the assets of Washington Mutual and sold the banking assets to JP Morgan for $1.9 billion.

U.S. Congress is still debating whether to approve the bailout. Many banks are eagerly waiting for the free money. American President Bush warned the country about recession in his prime time television address to the nation. Even if warnings of economic catastrophe aren’t enough to win approval of a controversial $700 billion Wall Street bailout, the economy is not at risk of falling into a depression, most experts think so.

Many experts think that the current situation is not as bad as the Great Depression. Millions of people lost their savings in Great Depression when banks closed without any insurance for its customers’ deposits.

Fortunately, FDIC insures all bank deposits in America, up to $100,000 per account. So, the Americans won’t lose the savings even if the banks go belly up. But, the entire economy is going to suffer for many months to come.

If the battered credit markets fail to restart, either because the bailout fails to win Congress approval or it doesn’t work as planned, U.S. could be facing its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression

Americans are angry that their taxpayer’s money is used to bail out the greedy and stupid banks. Some Americans want the government to help their failing businesses if the government is kind enough to help out the banks. Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, said that as soon as Congress returns to work from its upcoming recess, his trade group will be asking for another package of between $40 billion and $90 billion directed towards the housing market.

Ok. How about the common man that lost his life time savings in the housing crisis or the people that lost jobs because of bad bets placed by senior management in banks?

Ironically, all the senior executives that directed and authorized the bad investments are still rich. Merrill Lynch CEO is expected to take home $9 million because of merger with Bank of America. Lehman Brothers’ CEO is not going to live in a hut either. Washington Mutual’s ex-CEO Kerry Killinger that directed sub-prime mortgages is also worth millions of dollars.

Related Links:

Great Depression
U.S. on road to depression?
WaMu becomes biggest bank to fail in US history
Where are the grown ups?
What the Wall Street Titans Earned

A sick fellow cuts the head of a young man and shows off the head proudly. It looks like an incident happened in the remote corner of a village in Bihar. But, it happened in Canada.

The guy shown in the above picture stabbed the fellow passenger and cut his head off. Vince Weiguang Li, 40, of Edmonton, Alberta, killed 22 year old guy in the bus for no apparent reason. Beheading for no apparent reason? God…what would he do if he has a reason?

Related Link: Watch the video

I have seen many U.S. teenagers exposing butts when they walk. Even some old guys don’t want to pull their pants up, they want to show what they got. Disgusting, isn’t it? Parents are not taking action to discipline their kids, so government is trying to do that.

Florida government passed a bill that could mean suspensions for students with droopy pants. More details are here.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer wanted all the criminals to be punished without exception. He was tough on all wall street guys who screwed up many Americans’ savings. People elected him as governor because of his reputation of fighting the bad guys.

Now, Mr. Clean is accused of being Mr. Nasty. Eliot Spitzer was caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet in a Washington hotel room the night before Valentine’s Day with a prostitute. More details are here.

Eliot Spitzer was tough, really tough. He wanted everyone to behave. I am surprised that he himself got in this mess. He may be really a honest person trying to do lot of good things for the people of New York. But, this silly incident screwed up his entire political career. Ironically, he prosecuted many people in criminal prosecutions of prostitution rings and tourism involving prostitutes, when he was attorney general.

Here is the message to all the good hearted politicians. First, control your dick.

Related Link: Lust Plus Pride

A psychologist suggested that the payoff for men that help in household chores could be more sex. Duh…!

More on this in Yahoo.

It happened again. Eight Indian American kids made to the finals of Intel Science competition. The competition is generally described as “Junior Nobel Prize”. Out of eight, five are girls. Great job kids!

Avanthi Raghavan, Shravani Mikkilineni, Hamsa Sridhar, Shivani Sud, Isha Jain, Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh, Ashok Chandran and Ayon Sen are named among the 40 finalists for the Intel Science contest. Each finalist gets at least $5,000 in scholarships and a laptop.

“A high proportion of Indian American finalists speaks well for the community” said Rick Bates, spokesperson for the organizers.

Do you have young genius in your house too? Check out these programs by Davidson Institute.

Related Link: List of all Finalists

You might have encountered these guys all the time, especially in India. The mechanics tell you one thing, do something else. They charge for repairs that were not even needed. After all the money is spent, you might find out that they did a lousy job.

One might think that these problems may not happen in countries like America, where all businesses are strictly regulated. It looks that America is not that different. Cheating mechanics are everywhere. Local TV station put the cameras in the cars and investigated a complaint from former insider of Jiffy Lube, fraudulent auto repair shop. Download the file from the link below and play the file using Windows Media player, you will be surprised to find what happened in Jiffy Lube.

http://mfile.akamai.com/…..152183.200k.asx

This file is only 175 bytes, it’s safe to download. If you are not comfortable downloading this file, you can view the same clip in youtube. The video is embedded below. Can’t see the video? Then, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiCAJ8ULnaI

If you have a gun, you may likely to use it even if you don’t really intend to. That was one of the arguments by many anti-gun lobbyists in U.S. Their stand is vindicated in Malaysia.

A Malaysian referee took out his gun and fired warning shots in the air after a local soccer match turned unruly following the suspension of a player, a newspaper said on Tuesday.

The referee, who was also a policeman, ran to his patrol car to get his gun after players mobbed him for showing the red-card to one of them, the New Straits Times said.

Click here to read more about this story. This referee was angry, real angry. It also shows that sometimes you need a gun to control the mad crowd.

You might have heard about the sixth-grade female teacher kidnapping a 13-year old boy in U.S. What if the same thing happened in India?

Let us rename Kelsey Peterson to Kelsey Yadav. Also assume that she works as a sixth-standard teacher in a government high school in Patna.

Kelsey corrupts the mind of a young boy. She seduces him after the school. The boy won’t tell much about this to his parents, if the teacher asked him not to. Every kid in Indian schools is totally terrorized by the teachers. Many school teachers don’t have a basic clue about how to deal with young minds.

Most of the teachers come to school just for the sake of it. Read some books aloud, chat with fellow teachers, threaten few students, then go home. It’s just the routine. Teachers in rural schools don’t even come to schools. They do money-lending business instead.

Ok, there are some good teachers. I agree. But, they are exceptions.

In this kind of environment, people like Kelsey can easily have inappropriate relationship with young boys. The boy won’t tell anything either because of the fear or because he likes the things he does with Kelsey.

Kelsey of USA caught by school authorities mainly because of the love letters in the school issued laptop. Bihar school authorities can’t even provide proper tables and chairs to the school, let alone the laptop. So, school authorities have no way of knowing about Kelsey’s fantasy.

Even if the school authorities find out about it, Kelsey can use her political influence and transfer few school officials. Kelsey can hire some thugs to beat up the school principal. Kelsey can sleep with local MLA to get promoted quickly. Once she becomes principal, no one can dare to challenge her relationship with the young boys. She can literally convert her office room as a bed room.

Kelsey of USA ran away to Mexico because she was afraid that FBI will catch her. Kelsey of Bihar need not worry about that. She can buy local police or she can offer other favours. Either way, Bihar police won’t even file FIR even if the boy’s parents complained about that.

Few years ago, a teacher raped a ninth-standard girl in a rural school in Tamilnadu. He easily got away using his political influence. That’s for raping. Even for the crimes like this, crooks easily get away.

Kelsey didn’t rape. She seduced the boy and had sex with him with his consent. The boy was even ready to run away with her. If the news leaked about Kelsey of Bihar, it could have been masala news for many newspapers, not crime news.

Kelsey of Bihar won’t go to prison. At the worst case, she may be transferred to some other school. She will prey on new victims.

Well, I can’t stop reading about Bobby Jindal. I wrote about him yesterday. Let me write something more about the interview he gave after the victory.

Bobby Jindal’s gubernatorial opponents criticized the millions of dollars he raised from special interests, his scripted campaign appearances and his refusal to participate in many debate forums.

But the attacks didn’t gain traction with voters, who supported Jindal across party lines.

The governor-elect said he is not worried that in a state known for its brash and flashy politicians, he’s seen as methodical and wonkish.

“If I go down as one of the more boring but effective governors, I’ll take that as a great compliment,” he said at a news conference earlier Sunday. “Our people don’t want to be amused by our politics anymore. We don’t want to be entertained.”

Mr. Jindal: It’s not only true for Louisiana. It’s also true for entire India. I wish that we get chief ministers like you in all the states of India.

Read the interview excerpts here.