McMorality

It's simple, really:

I don't think there's anything wrong with Michelle Obama vacationing in Spain; they have the money, so why not?

Indeed. Nothing more to know or ask.

Yes, yes, I know--mean Republicans would make hay out of a vacation no matter where it was. Probably so. But no one would be much interested in those charges, while this does seem to have some grip. And while characters in novels may improve their lives immeasurably when they learn to stop worrying about what other people think and just be true to themselves, this is not a life path that is open to political figures.

I wish I had access to the economic knowledge that allows her to determine the relative effectiveness of "those charges" & the "this" that "does seem to have some grip."

Elements of Style©: And I wish she'd stop w/ using "grip" for "traction." You could all stop using "traction" in that context, as far as I'm concerned.

Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire, where I (A pathetic web log-pimp.) am guest-blogging this wk.

Remember This Fucker?

Back in the day when he blogged for Teh Atlantik (and we weren't terminally lazy), we used to make fun of Fatty-Y a bit. I came across this short little bit of idiocy via LGM and it makes me just want to slap that stupid fucker up and down the playing surface of your god damn choice.

America The Beautiful
One of the things that’s great about the United States is that we have the ability to sometimes casually beat other people at their beloved national sports—speed skating, hockey, whatever, we put up a good fight in everything. On to the world cup!

Canadians will have to console themselves with their efficient and equitable health care system.

I really hope that the problem here is that Matt identifies more with sports that use round balls and so has not watched much hockey. I did not see the game (thanks NBC!) but when you win 5-3 while being outshot ~46-22, you're not really eligible for bragging rights. Certainly not when you do it in the round robin.

And what is this "speed skating as a beloved national sport" shit? Who the fuck has speed skating as a beloved national sport? Who the fuck thinks that Americans are the perennial underdog? WTF is wrong with this stupid, doughy fucker?

I'm all for the Olympics and all, but if you want to use as a metaphor for our geopolitical actions, I have a better one that us unexpectedly going faster on ice than the Norwegians. How about; We spend shit tons of money on useless crap like bobsledding and biathlon and then get all happy-crappy cause, hey, the richest, 3rd most populous country in the world wins stuff! Go us! We're so talented.

Meanwhile, we can't spend a damn dime to alleviate the suffering of millions of people who can't even fathom the Olympics and their grandiose waste and misplaced sense of importance. OK, that's not really a metaphor, but Matt Ygelsias is not really intelligent enough to write, either, so we're square.

In the US, even our national sense of importance is better than in other countries!

EWE-ESS-AY!

All the Facts in This Blog Post Are True

Wooo, boy, am I feeling a bit sheepish. Better crack out a post that isn't verifiably stupid so that I can continue to rule my little part of the intertubes. What's this? A post stupid regardless of facts? I'll take it!

Megan is fond of playing the centrist. She voted for Obama! Yet she chides her liberal opponents so much more oft than her conservative opponents cohorts well, whatever they ares.

Take for example, her most recent call to civility. Oh, how those liberals do ignore her well thought out arguments and immediately start with the rending and gnashing and expressioning. Then compare it to her take downs of Rush or Beck, which occasionally might start out strong, but always end up with a walk back "I don't HATE Rush." (Links not inserted to protect the lazy.)

One is left to wonder; who does she love? Well, she finally shows us with her full length quote of RobM1981, who intelligently still uses an AOL screen name from 1998 as his blogging handle:

We have experimental data here: the Smart Car.
Here was a car that was large enough for two people, or one person and a fair amount of groceries. It was driveable, if just, at highway speeds.
And it got relatively horrible mileage because physics is physics.
The Honda Fit seats four and has room - even with 4 people in it - for some decent cargo. Yet it gets much better mileage than the Smart, and is generally considered more fun to drive. Why?
Because it's large enough to have crumple zones. The human cargo is surrounded by some degree of space, and that space can be used to dissipate energy in a collision.
A Smart Car is built like a tank, because it has to be. It is essentially a roll cage on wheels. Even with the best air bag technologies available, merc had to build this thing with a relatively large amount of steel.
That means weight.
You can have a light one seat car that gets crazy-good gas mileage, or you can have a heavy one seat car that gets mediocre (for it's size) gas mileage.
But you can't have both. And given our regulations, you really aren't allowed to sell the first one.
Motorcycles would never, EVER be approved by NHTSA if they were invented today.
At some point all of the fun things will be illegal, and we can all go on to live dreary Orwellian lives, free of fear...

Yes, this is the man to whom we should all aspire. A man who thinks an anecdote is "experimental data." A man who writes several paragraphs in a row with only one or two sentences in each and yet still manages to be verbose. A man who thinks that safety laws ruin all the fun; like driving in a car without a seatbelt or having your small child locked in a refrigerator that doesn't open from the inside or having said child eat lead paint or any of the other myriad safety regulations that industry swore would bankrupt them.

A man who thinks the lessons of Orwell are about crumple zones....

So today is RobM1981 (aka sparklesexyboy69) Day. Let us all be RobM1981 for a day. Let us ride motorcycles without helmets and drive cars without antilock brakes. We shall hike in forests blissfully free of birds thanks to DDT and swim next to the orange glow of the Cuyahoga river. We shall cry "God bless the perfect, self-regulating industry!" and everyone shall say a little prayer for it as they fly through their safety-glassless windshield, and land with a thudding "Amen" on the pavement, smiling ear to ear.

Megan: Still Not Getting It

Best Wishes for the New Yr. (If not new decade.) to most. However,

But the implied combination of tiny savings, minimal income, and inability to find a paying tenant in a real-estate market with a sub-2% vacancy rate, does not suggest that the solution to his problems is a mortgage modification.  I'm not sure what the servicer could have done, other than foreclosed outright.  Or what Felix thinks this has to do with people who decide to default on their mortgages so that they'll have more money to spend on cruises and new furniture.

Here's the point, Mlle. McA.: What this has to do w/ your previous tale (the horrid immoral bastards who left their houses & mortgages to spend their money on furniture & cruises, & probably ruied their credit in the process) which did, indeed, describe a horrible affront to the entire mortgage banking community, is that "going on a cruise" is not the principal, primary or even main reason that people are stiffing their mortgage servicer. The tale seemingly told by Mr. Salmon's "sad case," involving job loss, is the real story of the millions of Americans in serious financial trouble, not the exceptional defaulting douchebags that some twits get all excited about.

Also awful:

Modifications are supposed to be a deal that makes both sides better off by avoiding the huge costs of foreclosure, not a vehicle for transferring wealth from bondholders or bank shareholders to people we like better.  The latter is what the progressive income tax is for.

Oh ha ha. Guess what, toots: I like defense contractors & American military morons who kill babies from 30,000 ft. (or the other side of the world) even less then I like bondholders & bank shareholders, not that the entire group of them aren't firmly interconnected & equally evil. Not very likable, either, what w/ their being murderers & such. Apparently in Megan World the horrid progressive income tax all goes directly to welfare cheats, people who go on cruises w/ their new furniture, & the millions of lazy bums who have a better life on General Relief & Food Stamps than if they had a job.

Trivial

It's almost Spook Night, & what better time to re-enter the overgrown elfin horror of Megan McArdle's mind? The woman who can't spell her favorite word, even when spotted the "e," would like us to pay some attention to some stuff she's typed about something else.

When we were considering the stimulus, I got asked frequently whether it would work.  That very much depends on what you mean by "work".  If the question is:  "can I increase the size of a measured variable by boosting one of the components of that variable," then the answer is undoubtedly "yes"--but this is trivial.

Well, that depends on what the definition of "works" is, doesn't it? And maybe we aren't ready to deal w/ this. A clue for Mlle.: The question (she asked it herself) was "Will the stimulus work?" Not, "Ha ha, would you type something obvious & not funny even as sarcasm while avoiding the truth about the stimulus?"

We borrowed a bunch of money from abroad, and that was going to show up as an increase in GDP.  But as I wrote in our November issue, GDP is at best a proxy for our well-being, not a direct measure of it.  It's often a good proxy.  But it's never perfect, and it's very easy to manipulate with certain sorts of government actions, most notably borrowing a ton of money from the global capital markets.

I am on the edge of my seat awaiting the McArdle Index, so we can begin measuring our well-being w/o the irksome proxy of the GDP.*

Megan asks four questions, one of which is

2)  Are employment and compensation growing?

Funny, considering wages have been essentially stagnant since the Reagan era, & that, after all is good for Megan's America. Unless "compensation" is code for more bonuses for Wall St.

Elements of Style©:
How to type as if you graduated from a not really bad junior high school:

We borrowed a bunch of money from abroad
borrowing a ton of money from the global capital markets

Next wk., we'll find out that we've borrowed a bunch of tons of money.

Also fascinated by this sentence:

The things I think we really want to know about the economy are

The horror of the overgrown yet still elfin mind. Boo!

* One of the axes of the "McArdle Index."

A Funny

From Salon:

 As for the libertarian intellectual movement, isn't that a contradiction in terms? How intellectual can a movement be, if it reflexively answers "the market!" to every question of domestic and foreign policy, before the question is even asked?

Snap!

Freudian?

I just want to know what he thinks about Kanya. Or Kenye.

Screw The Main Stream Media Bloggers Too

Oh, for crap's sake, already!

Snark Hunting Susan notes it a wk. ago, brad notes that she noted it; a wk. later it's all over the Media Village blog-o-sphere, w/o any credit. (Which would seem to be the least they could do, as none of us are exactly in it for the money.) Or did it just take them a wk. to wade through the WaPoo chat & notice? Of course, they don't even credit each other: "A colleague points me to this." Not a recommendation either way.

brad adds:

Matty Y. has even reduced Susan to "Washington Post readers", probably because she's one of them DFH's who got the war right.

Thanks to commenter cd over there for linking to us, tho. For those MY readers just getting here, it was Susan who asked that question. Go read her, you'll be smarter for it.

An Addition to the Preceding Shorters: "Excellent opportunity for Rehab potential."

Must add 2¢ worth on

Real Estate Moment of the Week

as I took a look at the advert for the $1,000,000 mansion Mlle. McA. was snickering at.Yes, it's 103 yrs. old & sold for $149,000 in 1996, but is now hoped to be worth a cool million. What the hell? How can you base an economy on something like that? Have tips, wages & income increased sevenfold or whatever in the last 13 yrs.? I think not.

Cheap Shot At Non-Contrarianism

Shorter:

Why Marriage?

I am not being contrarian by needing a note from the gov't. telling me w/ whom I may sleep. Also, Mr. McSudelman (of the spotty employment history) has figured that if I haven't been fired by now I never will be, so I'm kind of a cash cow. Mooo.

Cottage Cheese

Not that I've been adding anything here recently, & there's no such thing as bad publicity (especially w/ a link) but

There’s an entire cottage industry dedicated to picking apart her posts and they do a pretty good job.

let's name some names here, people! Not merely FMM, but fellow cottage snark industrialist Susan of Texas.

At least this guy was kind enough to link.

Ted, here is a blog that chronicles McMegan’s insipidness.

Do read both the linked threads. Then no one here will have to waste time or keystrokes on the inspirational Megan posts.

Oh, we see it's been done. Have to do some catching up around here.

Yes, There is a Dumbass in the House

I love how stupid Megan and her friends are. There's this kerfluffle going on about some Army hospital fucking up cancer treatment MAJORLY. It's pretty bad. Naturally, Megan uses this as proof that government health insurance is a bad idea:

Bruce McQuain says that the problems at Walter Reed prove that the VA isn't so hot. Ezra Klein snaps back :

Walter Reed is an army hospital, not a veteran's hospital. The two systems have nothing to do with one another. That's why the problems at Walter Reed led to the resignation of the Secretary of the Army and not the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Ezra wins on points. But here's the thing: Army hospitals have all the advantages that single-payer advocates love about the VA. They're unified. There's no profit incentive--indeed, the doctors are on quite low salaries. They have great incentives for preventive care. They certainly don't have any profit motive to provide bad care. So why did Walter Reed suck? And what guarantees that the VA is the system we'll follow, rather than the multiple other dysfunctional government systems everyone hates?

Why did Walter Reed suck? Well, in the context of arguing about nationalized health INSURANCE I'd say "Who gives a fuck about national health care PROVIDERS?" That is, people want government coverage, not fucking government doctors.

I may win on points, but here's the thing: I said the f-word so I'm wrong. How do two people that can miss points entirely obvious and crucial to/against their arguments be employed by Teh Atlantiz and The Washington Post.

The Burr Beneath Her Mini-Cooper Upholstery

Absolutely w/ NutellaonToast on this. Bored, & unable to deal w/ econo-blogging. Saw this mess on memeorandum, & was depressed by the mere idea of dealing w/ it. (brad?)

However, working from the comments to NoT's item immediately below, & some other assumptions, I can only conclude that Ms. McArdle prefers researching the intimate details of someone's life, Michelle Malkin-style, to statistical research on econo-facts. (Especially when you can make the facts make the victim look like a perp.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, or assuming something not in evidence.

Also referring to the comments below (Being a contributing ed. has its privileges: Imagine the indignity of being forced to reply in the comments!) I thank Dillon for clearly stating my, at least, attitude:

Similarly, FMM's mission is to cause Megan to be fired with extreme prejudice, or failing that, to marginally irritate her to the point where she does some research.

Hey, what's important is that it piss off the liberalslibertarians, right?

Trying Too Hard

Megan again tries to be cute. It barely works for her appearance, & it never works when she types.

Whatever you think of, say, children who decided to be born poor,

One can only assume (or hope) that she is, in her sad way, actually mocking those who think po' folks are completely responsible for the situation they find themselves in, but when she qualifies it w/ "whatever you think," as if those who think the poor deserve to be screwed on a daily basis have a point somewhere besides the tops of their pinheads, she manages to undercut whatever point she may have been trying to make.

Self-loathing? Just plain dense? World's worst typist? I neither know nor care any longer. My only hope is that The Atlantic will be out of business soon. Then she & her insignificant other can spend all their time sleeping on the streets, except w/o a new iPhone waiting for them every morning.

Let justice be done!

Also: As a California native & resident, I'd just as soon we secede from your United Snakes. Unlike shitholes like Texas (no offense to those few rational beings still living there) we can do just fine w/o the rest of you. Maybe Oregon, Washington & British Columbia will join us, & we can give the finger to East Coast elitists, Midwest morons & Southern shitheels.

The Great Republican Hope

Douthat has his debut over at the New York Times, whose motto seems to be "We're going to push newspapers into irrelevancy as fast as we can!" I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a far better paper than a lot of others, but well, it's hard not to question its sanity when it publishes this:

Watching Dick Cheney defend the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, it’s been hard to escape the impression that both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.

Actually, Asshat, I find that quite EASY to not believe that, but, then, I'm not completely fucking insane.

We tried running the maverick reformer, the argument goes, and look what it got us. What Americans want is real conservatism, not some crypto-liberal imitation. (Italics in original... for some reason.)

Um, hmm, interesting point. I think it may have something to do with how shitty McCain's campaign was. It might have been because of his absurd choice of running mate. Now you could argue that Palin was a maverick reformer, or you could say something relevant to reality. Something like "Palin was an idiot first class of the extreme insane right-wing style. People hated her because of everything of GWB that they saw in her." I dunno, that might have explained why even Peggy fucking Noonan said it was over after she was picked.

[Cheney] was for tax cuts at home and pre-emptive warfare overseas; anything else he seemed to disdain as sentimentalism.

This is precisely the sort of conservatism that’s ascendant in today’s much-reduced Republican Party, from the talk radio dials to the party’s grassroots. And a Cheney-for-President campaign would have been an instructive test of its political viability.

If only McCain hadn't been so "pro-torture" and "pro-foreign war." What would've been much more successful was Cheney. The public clearly wanted someone who was PRO-torture and PRO-foreign war. Yup, people love those things. People are all like "tax cuts and war are awesome! That's what's done America so well these past few years!" By people I mean the retarded 29-percenters who have more paint chips in their veins than blood.

I'd go on, but what's the point. Rossie does a bit of backtracking, trying to state that the debate about torture should have happened during a presidential campaign so that we could reach a consensus. Yeah, that would've been awesome. A two point torture and foreign wars campaign. The public benefit from that kind of discourse would be immeasurable. It is, after all, hard to measure ridiculously small quantities.

So glad Rossies around. It makes the flailing death of the Republican Party that much more amusing.

What's the over-under on him having misattributed a quote or something equal ridiculous in his very first column? I feel that should become a tradition.

Update: Because I realize this post is as vague as Douthat's: it's true that Douthat's point is that a Cheney loss would jolt a conservative reawakening, but he posits that so vaguely and halfheartedly, it's as if he's afraid to just come out and say that Cheney is a monster. He wants conservatives to get away from the pro-torture and pro-foreign wars stance and writes an entire article about that. In that article, he fails entirely to actually decry torture and foreign wars. Instead he thinks we need to "discuss them."

Maybe if he forgot his fairy tales of a Cheney presidential run and instead dreamed fairy tales of getting Cheney and his evil minions of all the fucking TV and newspapers blasting people with their lies and aggression, it might make him appear less like a wannabe-contrarian idiot.

FMM Wins the Lottery-Megan McArdle Discusses Torture

Update:Just to be clear for anyone who might second guess; yes Megan was not originally anti-torture.

Megan's talking about torture. Read the post or just use your imagination. It's all the same.

I've long said that we shouldn't waste time arguing that torture doesn't work. For one thing, the evidence for those arguments seems empirically shaky, especially since many people employing them insist on arguing that torture basically never works, rather than that it doesn't work very often and therefore has a bad cost-benefit ratio. For another, arguing that something doesn't work isn't necessarily an argument for not doing it--it could just as easily be an argument for improving our technique. And if advances in brain scanning research let us develop a reliable lie detector, as seems possible in the relatively near future, then torture will work very, very well.

If that happens, we're in a nasty spot. Most people who make this argument do not, in fact, care whether torture works. They would still be every bit as much against it if waterboarding worked perfectly. Yet when they argue about whether torture works, they're conceding that torture's effectiveness is relevant to the question of whether or not we should engage in it.

(...)

Thus I think it is much safer to keep arguments about torture on solid moral ground: we shouldn't torture because it's wrong.

Megan's stupidity checklist:

Claim that opponent's arguments are invalidated by evidence she makes no attempt to cite: Check.

Claim that even if opponent's arguments are right, they are still wrong because of something that hasn't ever happened but could conceivably happen in a fantasy world that she periodically visits: Check.

Claim that opponent's response to counter arguments of her side undermines opponent's own arguments because their position is not based around her presumptions: Check.

Statement about her positions which matches none of her arguments and is clearly designed only to make her seem like less of a monster (Fat chance, bean pole): Check.

Oh, and, uh, dear, the people who supported torture don't get to become the "we" who are opposed to it later on. It's like how you don't get to be an Obama supporter when you never say anything positive about him, ever.

She closes with a long blockquote to which she offers no commentary (Check!). You can read it yourself, if you're looking for one of the lamest anti-torture arguments ever. Needless to say, the guy who wrote it is as shallow as you'd expect from someone that gets linked to by Megan.

He claims that the non-torturers won WWII (I guess the Soviets lost?) so torture doesn't work. He doesn't really back that up with any evidence of course, which is hilarious given how easily the argument can be made -- provided one makes even a cursory attempt to learn about spying during WWII. The espionage successes of WWII are almost certainly the best examples of how good intelligence can be without coercion. By the end of the war, German espionage in the UK was completely co-opted. Many historians believe there wasn't a single German spy that wasn't compromised to the point of uselessness, or an outright double agent. A man in Spain actually completely fabricated a network of English spies and convinced the Germans that it was authentic. He then used his imagined network to feed them false information throughout the war. There wasn't a single piece of information the Germans were getting through back channels that wasn't either wrong, or provided intentionally by the English.

This is one of the principle reasons that D-day was successful. Misinformation kept German reserves away from the actual landings because they believed they were only feints for the "real" landings coming at other locations. Naturally, these same double agents made gathering intelligence on the Germans relatively easy. It's pretty much a classic example of how easy it is to attract people to your side when your opponents are complete monsters. But of course, why would we ever want to win the hearts and minds when we've got so many bombs?

First Quarter Wrap-Up

Rehoused, in a working-class neighborhood. Where AT&T does not yet provide DSL service, but will charge your ass twice as much for dial-up as for their "new customer" DSL offer. Therefore, don't expect squat from this direction for another wk. or so. (Minimum.) Cable DSL, here we come!

And what has Ms. McArdle come up w/ of late? Nothing that founding ed. brad has not thoroughly covered (w/ the exception of Unemployment Continues Its Upward March) and no one could blame brad for such an omission, as it's about the least pointed thing on which Megatron's ever wasted electrons. (Does she think she's CNBC now, updating her legions of day trader viewers?)

Essence: Jobs lost, market not like.

No crap, cretin?

Annals Of "You Know"

For this, a trip to NYC. Carbon footprint, anyone?

ZAKARIA: So, the populist rage against these million-dollar bonuses and the companies that give them -- has it all gone too far?

I brought together three sharp thinkers, all of whom once worked on Wall Street, to talk about this.

Megan McArdle writes an economics blog for the "Atlantic Monthly," and she has worked in technology, consulting and finance.

[...]

ZAKARIA: Megan, I think of you as a libertarian from your blog. Should the government be deciding what bonuses people are getting?

MEGAN MCARDLE, ASSOCIATE EDITOR AND ECONOMICS BLOGGER, ATLANTIC MONTHLY: The outrage may be completely counterproductive. But on the other hand, it's totally valid. They are getting taxpayer money, and it is totally valid to feel like I shouldn't be paying some guy who got me into trouble, forced me to bail his company out, give him another $3 million.

On Henry's site, yesterday there was someone who posted a letter from an investment banker who pointed out that these guys hate their jobs. It's not a fun time to be in that position. And so, you may really need to pay the money to retain them.

Maybe the moral outrage is worth -- expressing our moral outrage is worth the price that we're going to pay if AIG gets into trouble. And that's a political decision. It's not really an economic decision.

[...]

ZAKARIA: Megan, you live in Washington. Are we going to see a new kind of regulatory regime? You know, is this -- Washington must be, at some level, enjoying getting its fingers in this extraordinary honey pot.

MCARDLE: Oh, absolutely. When the election was finally decided, my Twitter feed was filled with friends who were liberals, and Obama fans, going "It's 1932. It's 1932!"

You know, they're ready to sit down and really get in there and start, you know, playing with all the levers and the pulleys. They want to do radical reform. There's a huge sentiment.

I mean, there's also a sentiment out on the street, on Main Street, that we've been taken for a ride, that people on Wall Street have been making outrageous sums of money for what turns out to have been not merely worthless, but actively harmful.

Now, obviously, that's completely exaggerated, in my opinion, and Wall Street does a lot of good things. But -- although I probably won't make any friends for saying that here.

But, you know, it doesn't really matter at this point what the underlying economic reality is. At this point what matters is the politically reality.

There you have it. An appearance on Charlie Rose is now only a matter of time.

My Sentiments Exactly

Helicopter Ben fires up the engine

Will this work? Damned if I know, and I bet Bernanke doesn't either. It should work, in theory. But while in theory, theory is the same as practice, in practice, they differ. These days, more sharply every day.

Damned if I know. Just how I feel about the whole thing. But I'm not spending all my time pretending I know, or admitting I don't know over & over. I'm starting to think all economic discourse, like Jim Cramer, should be made illegal.

A Thousand Wordsworths

From the fabulous commie atheist, who linked to it while commenting @ Sadly, No!Pajamas Media, the perfect example of a successful business model.