Ayman al-Zawahiri's racist demeaning of President-elect Obama as one of America's "house negroes," implying that he does the bidding of whites, may backfire. There is also speculation among terrorism analysts that this latest statement may reflect of Mr. Zawahiri's weakening support base.

"This won't play well. Zawahiri has over-reached," writes William McCants in an e-mail. The Washington-based founder of www.jihadica.com, which monitors Al Qaeda activity on the Internet, says that after Obama's victory racist remarks about him on jihadi websites were not universally welcomed.

Well, that didn't take long. Talk about the sound of a paradigm shifting without a clutch...

Al Qaeda No. 2 insults Obama with racial slur in new video | csmonitor.com

An Iranian blogger has been arrested in Iran and charged with spying for Israel. He could face the death penalty if found guilty.

Hossein Derakhshan, known around the world as the father of the Iranian blogosphere, was recently arrested upon returning to Iran from Canada.

Jahan News, an Iranian website affiliated with Iran’s intelligence community, reported on Monday that he admitted to spying for Israel.

Hoder has been discussed on MemeStreams before.

I initially found him to be an interesting character but I was turned off by his support for Iran's nuclear weapons program and stopped paying attention. This is a strange turn of events.

He apparently stated:

“I would love to have the opportunity to be able to go back to Iran again after I have been to Israel, and make this contact between Iranian and Israelis, which is my project, bypassing the governments and making this contact between the two peoples.”

Hoder arrested in Iran, faces death penalty

"Are you or any of your close friends, relatives or business associates a member of an organization or association, formal or informal, that believes, advocates or advances the belief that the internet should be completely unregulated?"

Federal trial attempts to weed out Cypherpunk jurors

This is an insightful interview that takes a hard line on the financial crisis and also manages to actually use the word bankster.

When people ask us who we’d like to see in positions of financial responsibility such as Treasury Secretary in the Obama Administration, we have three simple tests:

First, the ideal candidates should not have been involved in formulating the financial rescues and bailouts of the past 18 months.

Second, ideal candidates may never have worked for Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS).

And third, the ideal candidates should not be economists or at least among that tendency of economist who believe that markets are efficient and complete, that people are rational and that supporting concepts like OTC derivatives and fair value accounting are good and practical public policies.

New Hope for Financial Economics: Interview with Bill Janeway | The Big Picture

Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Schiff says. "People are going to feel like complete morons if they don't participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn't afford."

You can say that again.

You Might Want To Think About Stopping Your Mortgage Payments and Reducing Your Income

A really depressing Powerpoint presentation. Click the "full screen" button and then imagine that between each slide is this interstitial.

Matrix » [Timeless Chartology] The Frugal Future

The S&P 500 is headed for its biggest annual decline since the Great Depression, when it fell 47 percent in 1931.

``The final low will be much lower than this,'' and may not occur before the fourth quarter of next year, de Graaf said.

At a minimum, stocks are likely to revisit their lowest levels of 2002 and 2003, when a 51 percent slide from the March 2000 peak sent the S&P 500 as low as 768.63, said Mary Ann Bartels, chief market analyst at Merrill Lynch & Co. in New York.

The S&P 500 is likely to fall to around 680, 20 percent lower than yesterday's close, probably by the end of the year, said John Roque, senior technical analyst for New York-based brokerage Natixis Bleichroeder Inc.

This isn't the bottom

In general, we can expect wildfires to hit subprime- and foreclosure-struck areas more heavily than others in California. These area were built in what is euphemistically called the “wildland interface”, which is a multisyllabic way of saying near fire-prone forests and chaparral.

Paul Kedrosky: Wildfires and Foreclosures, Part II

Universities and pension managers are dumping their holdings in venture-capital funds, depressing values by as much as 50 percent as the financial crisis extends to private companies.

Bloomberg.com: VC funds crashing

‘Sometimes you must go too far to see what would suffice.’

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