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

Oh, communists. Starting a diatribe off with a reference to Noam Chomsky at this point is a bit of a warning sign even if I agree with the reference used. Just as there is a tendency by radical leftists to believe that Obama's election means something that it does not in regard to the influence of their ideas in the world, there is also a tendency by the same to believe that the global economic crisis means something that it does not in terms of the repudiation of the ideas they hate. Deeply infuriating is this question:

Which ‘flaw’ of the system as such opens up the possibility for such crises and collapses?

...when juxtaposed against the earlier hand wringing about the bailout. The purpose of the bailout is to tender the rough edges of the economic cycle. Communist systems do not have such cycles because the financial system is defacto nationalized. In effect, communism is all bailout, all the time. Comparing the amount of this bailout versus money we could be spending on feeding people in Africa is hardly a criticism when you are simultaneously arguing in favor of an economic system which has, as its central feature, a drag which vastly exceeds the sum of this bailout and is a constant reality and not just a temporary response to a temporary situation!

Nevertheless, I bothered to waste time this morning responding because I thought that this observation was valuable:

The first thing to bear in mind here is that the origin of the crisis is a ‘benevolent’ one: after the dotcom bubble burst in 2001, the decision reached across party lines was to facilitate real estate investments in order to keep the economy going and prevent recession – today’s meltdown is the price for the US having avoided a recession seven years ago.

It seems to me that something, and I don't know what, happened around 1995 that vastly increased the rate of investment in the stock market. I'd really like to know exactly what that was. At the time I thought it was excitement about developments in IT coupled with the impending millenium's effect on people's psychology. But I suspect there may be a more structural reason... some fundamental change made by the Republican Congress at the time?

In any event, the run up to 1999 was comparable in scale to the run up to 1929, and the crash would have been devastating. I think the housing bubble was intentionally blown to soften the crash.

We've essentially been having an economic depression for 8 years, but it hasn't felt like it, because we've been running a bubble. I can't really say that I can complain about that. Its not a bad idea.

I also think it was allowed to get too big, likely politicians were afraid to act to stop it because they knew they would be held responsible for the resulting crash. The longer the ruse could be kept up, the better the Republican's fortunes at the ballot box would be.

The gig is now, certainly, up. I don't think the iTulip guys have it right. I don't think we're going to blow another bubble. I certainly don't think this country is going to go rogue and blow a military spending bubble, as suggested by the linked author. The fortunate thing about America's political system is that the socialists and the nationalists are kept at opposite ends of the spectrum; this tends to limit the influence of nationalists during hard economic times.

I think we're going to take it in the chin for about 8 years, and that it will be about 8 years before the economy is really growing again. There is not much that can be done about that. However, it would be useful to know exactly what happened in 1995. It would be useful to know if there was anything that could have been done about it.

RE: Use Your Illusions

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

DHS's Transportation Security Administration is currently testing an encrypted 2-D bar code that includes all the information from a boarding pass and is digitally signed to ensure the data hasn’t been altered.

In the pilot, passengers show the bar code to TSA identity checkers, who use a scanner to read the image off the passenger’s smartphone, and then check the person’s identification against the decrypted information.

The system also works using public-key cryptography, which lets the TSA use scanners that don’t need to connect to airline databases, and they don’t store records of who is traveling.

Really, really cool. Smart use of crypto to solve a real security problem. I never thought I'd say these three words but: Good job TSA!

Chertoff: We're Closing that Boarding-Pass Loophole | Threat Level from Wired.com

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