The stupid

it burns us.

How did it all happen?:

Fuck if Megan knows, but she's going to try to bury her readers under all the economics jargon she ever half absorbed to keep them from noticing she really doesn't have the vaguest idea what's happening in her supposed field of expertise.

Meanwhile, across the pond ...:

Europe's ongoing disaster is starting to match ours. This not only seriously challenge the idea that the main problem is American bank regulation--everyone is having the same problem, despite different regulatory regimes--but also puts us in much deeper jeopardy.

Yeah, it's not like financial markets across the globe are linked such that tremors in one location can produce aftershocks on the other side of the planet. Europe, like, isn't the US, so it's not our banks' fault for self-immolating. I blame Jimmy Carter.

Palin's "racist" comments:

If I leave out the fact that an AP piece was titled Analysis: Palin's words carry racial tinge I can get more points for my "Blame the MSM" merit badge by playing on my core readership's bias against news sources which don't openly propagandize for movement conservativism, especially if I selectively quote the piece so as to leave out the actual argument contained in it. My readers won't click through, they're lazy and intellectually dishonest like I am. Here's what I intentionally cut out;

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?
In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.
Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

The war on naked shorts:

Heehee.
Naked shorts.

Kindle 2!:

My advice to people in this time of crisis is to keep buying useless shit. I already have an iPhone and a first gen Kindle, but I'm rich, fuck you. Savings are for suckers, plus who knows if your bank will still be open next week. I can't give you any help, I'm too busy shopping to be paying real attention.

Another way to understand the crash:

Is by looking at another kind of crash: exploding Space Shuttles.

NASA officials ignored warnings about technical problems, just like banking officials and I ignored warnings about our abject stupidity.
The logical conclusion: it's no one's fault.

Distressingly, this appears to be exactly what happened with the Columbia. Foam had come off the shuttle before, but never with disastrous results; NASA accordingly seems to have decided that it must therefore be safe to have the insulation break free. This heuristic was probably the best we could do as East African Plains Apes. In the modern world, however, we have better substitutes, like reason, if we'll only use them.
Of course, engineering a space shuttle, like the financial markets, is so complicated that we may never gain full understanding. The most dangerous thing is that we are so confident in our assessments of the uncertainties.

Apes built machines that can fly to the Moon, but we can't understand how they work, because we only have our capacity to reason and ability to build such machines in the first place to rely on. In the end, the Space Shuttle is magic, just like our incredible vanishing banking industry.

One thing is clear; it's poor people's fault.