Back to work

if Megan can have a paid vacation in the middle of a crisis, I can take a few days off to savor the election. But holy fuck have I let the crap pile up. Shorters, marathon style, for the next few posts.

Stuffing our faces:

That Michael Pollan fella isn't mediocre enough, and it frightens me. Do you realize he doesn't like processed simulated food products?

Libertarianism is dead . . . vive le libertarianism!:

If I drown you in words, libertarianism can mean anything I want, including support for torture and reduced civil liberties. Just don't take away the guns I don't actually own.

Blessed are the poor . . . :

I've heard that being challenged in life builds character, but I've never experienced it so I wouldn't know.

Quiet in the peanut gallery:

I just wish that when he has no idea what he is talking about, he would shut the hell up, rather than making an awkward public.

Is that a British idiom I don't recognize or a sentence fragment?
Also, there's this beaut;

This brings me to a pet peeve that has been increasingly irritating me as the crisis wears on: people with little or no understanding of markets confidently opining on the causes of the crisis. Funnily enough, the cause of the crisis is always exactly what they happened to be against before the crisis happened, and the solution is for the people they disagree with to be banned from polite society and exiled from the political process.

The experts fucked up, so listen to them. This is Megan's argument of final resort. We were wrong, so do what we say now to fix the problems we caused.

Memewatch:

I used to call it NYRB syndrome: the mysterious process by which everyone in Manhattan read all the books reviewed in the NYRB, and also, agreed with the reviewer.

You see, only Megan has noticed this, ever.

Now it seems like the disease may be multifactorial, and more prevalent than previously expected. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing--at least until you learn enough to know how much you don't know.

To Godwin myself, this is like Hitler counseling against being an anti-semite.

The evil man theory of failure:

Gramm/Greenspan haters from the left: If regulation is so impotent that a single rule change, or even two, can leave the system vulnerable to this kind of collapse--indeed, make it worse with other rules that are still there--then why the hell do we bother regulating?

If breaking the system makes it unable to function, then why the hell have a system in the first place? If I shoot you and you die, why the hell did you bother living to begin with?

Break time. Much more to come.