There's Always Next Yr.

Megatron takes third at Roy Edroso's Top Ten Typing Turkeys Tournament in the Voice.

Better luck next yr., Megan, we know you can be #1!

Uh Oh. Competition. Won't Be Able to Make It in The Free Market

FMM seems to have acquired at least one very, very sincere flatterer.

Fire Mickey Kaus

A Blatant Rip-Off of FJM. And Alicublog. And anything that isn't nailed down.

Two points:

A) Could we get some fucking credit here? All well & good that you credit FJM, whence brad got the idea, but c'mon! What are we, chopped McArdle?

B) I discovered FMK via MK. Whatever the "irresponsible-not-to" speculation about Mr. Kaus's relationship to non-human sectors of the mammal world (& his non-stop union-bashing) he at least opens the flood-gates of free speech, unlike Ms. McArdle, from whom we're lucky to get an unlinked "ur-troll" shout-out.

I'm off to thoroughly research this Fire Mickey Kaus thing, & may (but, let's face it, probably won't) return w/ further aggravation & righteous dudgeon.

How's The Weather Up There?

Say what you will about me (& they do!) I'm eco-friendly. So, I'm recycling this, from the Asymmetrical Info comments to an item about a statistical correlation between "intelligence" & (wait for it ...) height! 

(Do note "Fred," who, shark-style, senses "intelligence + height," & seizes the opportunity to remind all how stupid groups X, Y, & Z are, statistically.)

There's a Fred in every woodpile around here, isn't there?

That aside, Megan, we get it already. You're 6' 2" or whatever. If it's that important to you to share it w/ the world, go to the nearest 7-Eleven & have your mugshot taken next to the height indicator on the door. Or borrow the line-up room at the nearest police precinct. Or get The Atlantic to spring for a professional shoot in a fake police station. Then put the picture at the very tippy-tip-top of your blog. For extra emphasis, you could put a shot of yourself stretching to hold up the picture of how tall you are atop the sidebar.

Sheesh!!

Shorters

it's not 2009 yet, so I didn't break my resolution by not finishing the catch-up last night like I said I would. Mhm.

Weird bailout rumor of the day:

I just heard a plausibly sourced rumor that Chrysler is changing its name. That sounds like a merger, but maybe they just want to put the past behind them . . .

One thing I don't get. If the big three have been so wrong, aren't they, according to Megan's twisted, self-serving logic, therefore best positioned to fix their mistakes?

Request:

Can we hold off excusing Clinton's egregious pardons on the grounds of Bush's pardoning all of his subordinates for horrible crimes until Bush, y'know, actually pardons some subordinates for horrible crimes?

More concern trolling of Obsidian Wings. Poor Hilzoy, though they bring it on themselves by taking Megan seriously.
Also, the probably illegal commutation of Scooter Libby's sentence like, totally didn't happen.

Hypocrisy, or rationality?:

Heh, heh, heh.

Freddie accuses me, again, of a double standard on Detroit and Wall Street. I don't know what not wanting to bail out Detroit is supposed to make me want do to Wall Street. I don't have any ideological interest in saving Wall Street jobs, no matter how devastating that may be for the local economy of my beloved hometown. I don't think the CEOs, or any of the financial workers, are entitled to a damn thing beyond two weeks' severance. I don't want to save the banking industry, except insofar as we can't get along without it.

Please believe her lies, folks. They're all she's got in these difficult times.

In my judgement--and the judgement of most economists--a massive banking industry failure has the potential to take down the real economy into a Great Depression like death spiral, and the failure of even a large single non-financial industry does not.

Is that a lie or just stupidity? Something like three million people are employed by the Big Three auto companies. Putting three million people out of work in one fell swoop is precisely the kind of thing that causes Great Depressions, you stupid asshole. Also, it kinda sucks for those three million people and their families, though that concern is erased by Megan saying "sorry".

We do not need an American auto business, and in fact old line industries have collapsed in America before (see Steel, Bethlehem and US) without wreaking the destruction that their CEOs also promised would inevitably follow.

Yeah, remember how in the late 70s things were so great Carter was reelected in a landslide?
She keeps going, but it's basically a long argument premised on the the idea that lead floats in air. Financial jobs are more important than industrial jobs, because she's been told so by people with financial jobs, who wouldn't lie and have never been wrong.

It's hazard, but is it moral?:

For example, if I am a bus driver, the negative externality of my suddenly jerking the steering wheel to the left and driving the bus off a cliff is much higher than the cost to me--many lives against my one. But my own life is very valuable to me. The threat of its loss is enough to deter such behavior 99.9999% of the time.

This is how she thinks, folks. Megan thinks self-interest is altruistic. It's one of her fundamental stupidities.

Bankers take risk in order to make money, and they control risk in order to avoid losses. But the losses they are most interested in are not to their shareholders. Rather, they are worried about the loss of their jobs. As long as the bank regulators fire any managers who put the bank in receivership, I can see no difference between an unregulated private system without deposit insurance, and a system with.

And I can see no difference between a bookie and a casino.

The kitchen gear that wins Christmas:

Dear everyone who had a rough Xmas thanks to the economy,

Megan got lots of expensive useless pieces of plastic crap, so it's ok. Maybe your kids can watch a video of her playing Guitar Hero soon. That should be fun.

Bad news for retailers, and credit card companies:

Retail sales plummeted in November and December.
...
But it seems to me that this is actually good news for consumers and, in the long run, the economy. Americans are massively over their heads in debt, and have been consuming beyond their means for a long time. The data shows them cutting back their spending to more reasonable levels, and cutting back the most in the most discretionary categories. I feel bad for Hermes and all, but we couldn't keep propping them up forever.

Bad economic news is good for the economy. People are saving the money they don't have, in Megan's world, and not being able to afford Xmas is needed belt tightening for the disposable non-Megans of the world. Can you imagine the whining if she'd had to forgo the slightest thing this season?
Lots of folk couldn't even afford to travel to be with family this Xmas, you selfish bitch, but of course you're worried about the airlines, not the people who would have flown on them.

Tall people are richer because they are smarter:

Megan can't quite give up on the idea of there being a God because who else could have decided she was so much better than everyone else and thus given her the appropriate superior qualities? Someone had to recognize she was deserving of the advantages she's had in life, otherwise it's just the random deal of the cards and she's an arrogant self-entitled piece of shit, and that can't be it. Megan likes herself.

That explains a lot:

Maybe if I pretend I was critical of the financial industry as it was destroying the global economy people will believe me, and I won't have to admit I was completely wrong about a major issue yet again. I'm still pissed at liberals for getting Iraq right, dammit.

Back later with her work from today.

I'm back

I'm resolving to stop slacking off so much in the New Year, and both get back to daily posting and actually begin the currently stillborn Atlas Shrugged Project in proper. I like this little hobby and don't mean to drift from it, but it's been a busy season of ups and downs. Fortunately I have cobloggers, and Susan, to keep Megan from feeling too secure about herself in my absence. So let's do some shorters, see what I've missed. (Apologies ahead of time if I overlap prior coverage.)

Big Three get a deal to save the day --but not the year:

I will now attempt what I think is a fair rendition of Detroit's history over the last fifty years.

Oh, goody.

In the early 1950s, for various reasons Detroit developed a cozy three-way oligopoly. The UAW developed a cozy monopoly on supplying labor service to that oligopoly. In some ways, the UAW helped sustain that oligopoly. If you're a big company whose quality suffers, you have problems. But if you have a union making sure that labor quality cannot vary across the industry, you don't need to worry that your competitors will make a better car.

How the fuck is this woman employed? The UAW hurt the American auto industry by providing it with equal access to quality labor, according to Megan McArdle. What the fucking fuck of a fucked fucko fuckery fuckawoo fuckadoo?
She then accuses the unions of forcing the big three to make cheap, shoddy cars by... ummm.... vulcan mindmeld. Then the government forced the big three to make cars that explode, and so on. Now the only solution is for the union to actually pay the big three for the privilege of making cars for them, unless you want executives to live slightly less well or something barbaric.

Help us save our homes!:

Eventually so many homes will be foreclosed on that homelessness will be the norm and it won't be a problem anymore, so let's just wait for the market to sort it out.

Just say no to drug laws of all sorts:

Here we see Megan make the devil's advocate argument that maybe drug laws are justified as a secondary means to jail the really bad people who just happen to be overwhelmingly black or hispanic, and universally poor. If we're not going to let black men have jobs we might as well find some way to make them economically useful, right?

Kennedy yesterday! Kennedy today! Kennedy forever!:

I like getting self-righteous about nepotism and undeserved career advancement in political groups I oppose because I enjoy being a hypocrite.
Btw, I voted for George Bush, twice.

Riding to the rescue!:

Nor did anyone mention the seemingly even more obvious step of shutting off the water main for an hour, or at the very least, dropping sandbags over the break--though the Post claims crews found the water too turbulent to get to the valve.

Her official title includes the word "Editor".

Methinks the emergency responders may have had a lot of shiny new equipment, funded by the federal government's post-911 spending spree, that they wanted to try out. But maybe there was something I was missing.

Heh, indeed.

Are we targeting the symptom or the disease?:

Megan is a disease vector for the twin cancers of greed and stupidity that have undermined the world financial system. She will never take even a moment's responsibility for this, however, which means her work will only grow more infuriating in the months to come. This post is a good example.

You've heard me say here that many of FDR's schemes were lunatic and probably helped prolong the depression. (If you're a liberal, you have probably spent more than a little time in the comments screaming that I'm a heartless and innumerate fool who wouldn't know good economic policy if it bit me in the aggregate demand.)

Or maybe we're saying that you're a liar who consciously ignores reality in favor of comfortable lies and delusions. Either/or.

Thus, I naturally wonder if fighting to keep the housing market from falling might, like the NIRA, actually make things worse.

Trying to help people will just make things worse, guys. The fact that Megan has been wrong in every possible way up till now only means she's better positioned to fix things than, say, some Krugman guy who accurately predicted what's happening based on common sense and intelligence. Duh.

Madoff feeder fund: buyer beware:

If I cover a handful of the worst excesses of the criminal class responsible for the economic crises we face maybe I can distract from my cheerleading for the same folk the rest of the time.

Invidious comparisons, part II:

Megan has been concern trolling Obsidian Wings frequently of late, possibly because someone there made the mistake of trying to be polite to her, a depressing error to see them make.

Anyhow, Hilzoy said

* The financial executives helped cause the present meltdown. Auto workers did not.

* The financial executives run their firms, and are responsible for their troubles.

among other reasonable things, which Megan calls "bizarre", because she's an insane asshole enabler. So Megan invents a world where the 50,000 jobs being shed in the financial industry are all executive positions, and where the millions in ill gotten gains those few actual lords of the realm who lose jobs have to fall back on don't fully cushion their pride, meaning they're in just as bad a position as millions of potentially unemployed blue collar workers.
She tries to justify this, but I'm not going to read it. You shouldn't either.

I'll have a second round of shorters later tonight, but for now I need to calm down a bit. Ye gods, she's an asshole. At least someone like Dan Riehl knows he's a piece of shit, and goes with it. Megan wants to, and probably does, believe she's a decent person, at least at heart.

If you haven't yet

read this.
It's the terrible reality Megan flees from laid bare.

Blame It On The Bossa Nova

Megan  is (not the only one) always willing to blame symptoms rather then get to causes of problems; in this case, unmitigated human greed. (Should drug tests be made mandatory for financial sector wage-slavers?)

Two years ago, like many somewhat financially literate readers, I was perusing newspapers stories about crazy negative amortization  mortgages and exclaiming, "What are they, on crack?"  Now we have our answer.

Yes, we do, in an unattributed blockquote. Imagine that from Megan. I'll grant it's amusing in the way that I like my amusement, but for our "somewhat financially literate" (& tall) econo-blogger essentially to dismiss this as a by-now-ancient joke at last come to life when serious questions about WaMu's culture/legal responsibility could be raised is par for the course.

(All WaMu questions so far avoided by the bank going under & selling out to JP MorganChase.)

It's a Crazy Kind of Season/There Really Is No Reason...(to the tune of "Let It Snow")

It's difficult to believe that Ms. McArdle is as dense as she often makes herself appear, but today's Commercial Christmas item (Do not click. All six lines are here.) ventures far, far into the land of self-parody. Indeed, if I could determine whether she's trying to be (& thinks she is) funny, or is trying to be self-deprecating via self-parody & thinks that's working, or if she's really so tax-ticked that her title's the only part of the Jeezis legend she wants to know from, I could give up this gig & retire on the royalties.

And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Cæsar Augustus declaring all the world should be taxed . . .
25 Dec 2008 01:21 pm

Despite a crazy kind of season, I'm having one of my best Christmases either ["Sic," or is she answering voices we can't hear?]. I hope all of y'all can say the same.

Whereas I'm about to have one of my "best Christmases" ever. Whatever. Whatever her fuzzy religious stance, is the title her favorite line from the Bible? An indication of gawd's thought on just what should be rendered unto Cæsar, & what should be tithed to the church? Perhaps not; the "X" seems to be out of Megan's "Strictly Commercial" holiday, as she posted a picture of many large presents under a large, traditionally decorated, Norse-stolen "tree of life." But not all the goodies can be for her, & while she surely doesn't rate the season by racking up gift value, it might be irresponsible not to speculate why this is one of her "best either" Christmases.


Elements of Style©:
When doing the rural, cracker, hick, yokel, Klansman & so on shtick, one must get it right. A simple "y'all" (that's it, second person plural, all that's needed) "all y'all" for the huge audience surfing by, but no "of" there. (Unless that's said in Western N. Y State, w/ whose speech I am not familiar.)

And, mlle., your last line was redundant:

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good day . . .

Why not try something like this: "Hope your New Year's misery is less than this year's."

As I hope for our multiude of readers. Best to all twelve of ya!!

I Told You So 3: The Told You So-oning!

Apparently someone is fed up with nepotism.

Let us mince no words: the idea that Caroline Kennedy might be nominated to the Senate is embarassing. I come from a state that has given its fair share of bad ideas to the world. Punitive drug laws. Pennies ground into a medal with the Empire State Building on it. Rudy Giuliani for President. But this goes beyond that into a zone previously occupied only by the inventors of Pepsi Clear. We fought a whole war and everything to get away from political dynasties. Why are so many brain dead boomers avid to reinstall the talentless byblows of their bygone youth?

Caroline Kennedy is the child of some politician and we know nothing about her, so it's a terrible idea to let her be a senator for a short period of time.

Contrast that to GWB, who was the child of a politician that had a track record of running every company he was ever a meaningful part of into the ground. Him, we gotta vote for him twice.

I love how she claims that she's NOT a Republican.

Also, what the fuck is she talking about with "Pennies ground into a medal with the Empire State Building on it?" Is she talking about those souvenir things that squish a penny? Does she think those are only in New York? Does she realize that grinding and pressing are two separate things? Does she ever stop smoking crack? Ever?

TOLD YOU SO! PART DEUX

We just knew blogging would be light, as stated two items below.

so blogging will probably be light today.

Why do these bloggers always say "probably?" They know bloody damn well they're going to be cheating their employer for the next two wks., until the post-New Yr.'s Eve hangover is gone. 

Wouldn't you love to see a parasite like McArdle trying to hold down an actual job, as most wage-slave Americans must? Have to be at the same place, at the same time, five days a wk., & don't get paid if you don't show up. Would that change her attitude towards the parasites who live on the work of others? Probably not, as her identification w/ the oppressor class is probably unshakable at this stage in her existence.

We're embarking on an extended haul to New York City and then Western New York

"We?" Fleas back? Extended haul? What, is she a truck driver now?