Hey, Assholes

Great, so like 60% of people want us to throw bankers in jail or some shit for ruining everything and it's, like, yeah, I hate the fuckers, too, but hey, asshole guess what? FUCK YOU!

You're in the fucking market, eh? You loved your 401k from 01 to 08, didn't ya? What? was investing not another way to solidify your money while keeping it from the down trodden back when the market was climbing? Oh? Betcha ya even still got that 401k dontcha?

Throw your-fucking-selves in jail. this is the same shit as the fucking Iraq war. OMG ABU GRABBI WAS HORRIBLE.

you support war, you get fucking casualties. the generals are to blame, fo' sho', but so is your dumb ass.

From Green To Blue

I haven't been in the mood even to look at McArdle lately, but a visit to Snark-Hunting Susan's informed me that there's a new site design at The Atlantic, & it appears (So excited that we had to post this w/o too much investigation.) that commenting will be easier.

Obviously, if one's not in the mood to read MMcA, reading the comments is even less likely, & Susan advises that it's all pretty much droolers eating the slightly less drooly now. We'll see.

Also noted: Megan can now double post her stuff, under "Business" & "Politics." (And "National" as well.) New favorite category? "Personal." Oh boy.

Something I've NEVER Said Before

FUCK YOU IN THE ASS NJ.

so. fucking. gay.

America, Fuck You

So Iran apparently admits to abuse of detainees before America does.

It took several months, but Tehran admits that political prisoners were beaten to death. Meanwhile, America does not torture.

Mocking Me

That fucking ...... GARRRRRRRR!!!!!!

Creepiest Words Ever Written

The father of Sarah Palin's grandson will go ahead with his much-hyped Playgirl shoot in mid-November "in order to get the pictures out for the holidays"

In the immortal words of Bauhaus, wipe away my eyes, for I have seen too much . . .

It's a synergistic orgy of insipid shit. I am going to fucking kill someone. She did it on fucking purpose. I know it. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. You WILL read about murders in Berkeley today.

Trying to Be Charitable

So, I really don't want to read it this way. Admittedly I skimmed large portions of it. I'm pretty sure that Ross Douthat is actually saying that Anglicans and Catholics need to team up and take on Islam.

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

It's not entirely clear, but he really seems to be saying that the "foe" is Islam in Europe (for the Catholics) and Africa (for the Anglicans).

The man is calling for another fucking crusade.

In the pages of the New York Fucking Times.

Fuck it.

Just..... Fuck it.

I am going bowling.

Ready To Go Again, Already?

Someone get Ross Douthat a tissue, he's talking war, again.

Seriously, if anyone can find any information, insight, or even a fucking opinion in that piece, please email the NYT right away. They're very concerned that they've been gypped.

What the fuck were they thinking?

We Are Sisyphus

UPDATE: Apparently she placed "unknown" and not "23rd." Despite proudly proclaiming 25 winners and five honorable mentions, the list itself is in alphabetical order with no mention of earned rankings. Seriously, can't we get some smart conservatives in the mainstream, somewhere.

Megan is as subtle as ever:

The Wall Street Journal lists the top 25 economics blogs.

Wow, it's like, is she really this passive aggressive or just too stupid to understand how something looks from the outside? Go ahead and say it, dear. We know how proud you are to come in at 23rd place.

Megan McArdle
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/
Originality: 5 light bulbs
Geekiness: 2 calculators
Readability: 4 reading glasses
Megan McArdle doesn't fit the typical profile of an economics blogger: she's a technology project manager-turned-freelance writer, a self-described libertarian who gained prominence when she began blogging about economics and politics under the pseudonym "Jane Galt," a reference to the protagonist of Ayn Rand's popular novel "Atlas Shrugged". She went on to work at the Economist, helping to launch its Free Exchange blog, and since 2007 has maintained her own blog with the Atlantic, gaining widespread media attention in May when she broke the news that New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews's wife had previously filed twice for bankruptcy – a fact he neglected to mention in his tell-all book "Busted," about his family's foreclosure and financial struggles.
Quibble: Ms. McArdle's libertarian views mean her blog -- and her take on policy issues -- can be fairly predictable, undercutting the audience her work actually merits.

I'm not sure where the praise in this review is, other than the implication that her audience should be larger. I also don't understand how one gets 5 light bulbs for being original yet is "fairly predictable." Oh well, I'll leave that for the geniuses at the WSJ. Maybe they can also tell us when the economics part of her blog happens and why we should care if her single accomplishment is to find out that someone who was obviously an ass has a wife who went bankrupt twice.

With friends like those, she don't need us.

Quiet on All Fronts

I'm on vacation this week, so blogging will be light. GM will have to have its death throes largely without me.

So it goes, so shall we all.

I wish I had as much vacation time for as little work as our muse, but we've said that before. Then again, what's to be said that hasn't been said already? How oft have that question itself been asked? Like a Tootsie-Pop, the world may never know.

UPDATE: It's gotten to the point where I post without even reading her all the way through. So I put that up without reading on, figuring it'd be a boring bit that wouldn't interest me. I was wrong:

But I do want to point to two articles that point to a growing problem that the Obama administration has failed to address in any serious way: the exploding deficits, and the resulting need to borrow heavily.

Um, that's only one problem. I posted the following comment over there, which may finally get me banned. I'm so tired of sweeping back the ocean. I am not reading any further for this particular piece.

We will "cure" the budget problem by not passing a 800 billion dollar stimulus in the future budgets. We will raise revenues by not having our economy in the crapper in the future.

If either of those don't happen, we have bigger things to worry about.

Unless of course you're talking about the pre-stimulus deficits, which are somehow Obama's failure. I couldn't think of anyone else to blame that one on. Of course, we must think forward, so I guess we'll blame Obama for not fixing the economy AND the problems we had before the economy tanked?

You are seriously the world's worst econoblogger. Seriously, do you ever think? That's not trolling. It's backed by fact. You are a horrible blogger and you never think. We've documented this for a while now. Perhaps your desire to do a job with a modicum of competency would cause you to pay us heed?

Mission Accomplished

I'll leave the inanity of the post for someone else to cover. Frankly, I'm bored with McMegan lately and kind of busy, so whatevs. I would like to take this moment to modestly state that this blog kicks ass! Though we've not gotten McConomist fired, we've certainly made her feel the pressure. She felt us nipping at her heels and put it in overdrive. Look at her output, lately. It's fucking Foster-Wallacian!

See, we had to fight her over there in order to prevent her from fighting us over here and we've taken care of all the bad guys while winning the hearts and minds of the general citizenry!

Yes, it is clear victory for us today. Why, look at this post. It contains actual, independent research! Can you fucking believe it? Our muse actually searched through PRIMARY documentation! At first I thought she must be plagiarizing someone else's work, but she confirms in the comments that it's her own! Hallelujah! Praise the lord! Freedom marches on!

Now, if we could just get her to stop being stupid.

Why Must they Ruin Everything that I Love

When I was a freshmen in high school, my brother was a freshmen in college at U Pitt. He discovered Michael Chabon and introduced me to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. It has been one of my favorite novels ever since. 6 years later I ended up transferring to Carnegie Mellon and found myself living down the block from the "cloud factory" (A major plot point in the book). It's actually the steam plant for CMU.

Pittsburgh is an awesome city with the shittiest weather I've ever experienced (300 days of clouds, literally, but hardly ever more than drizzles).

I was fucking PYSCHED when I found out they were making the book into the movie. Then I saw the movie. Movies are almost never as good as the book (Fight Club being the sole exception I've encountered) but this went far beyond that. Ignoring the fact that entire characters disappeared and that the peripheral characters (who represented much of the MYSTERY) were suddenly the only characters in the fucking movie, it was fucking horribly executed. Ridiculously overwrought and pretentious--with Art Bechstein walking around permawearing the same expression of half confusion, half trying to squeeze out a turd that made Keanu Reeves famous--I had to force myself to watch the entire fucking thing.

It made me think of the time that Megan completely mischaracterized the town I live in now, Berkeley (Pittsburgh's polar opposite-nice weather but, god, do I want to burn this place and its inhabitants to ashes).

The writers and directors of this movie fail entirely to capture the essence of the city. Its total fucking shame because the movie is set from June to August, the only three months of the year da 'Burgh can be cast in an entirely positive light. Why would you do that? Why would you write about something of which you are completely uniformed? Why must these people ruin things for me?

Why, God, why?

God Save Us

Ross Douthat, Megan's idiot-in-arms at teH atLantiC, is taking over for Bill Kristol.

We are not winning, people.

Update: Susan has taken a look at this, too.

Maybe a Little Too Efficient?

I've never really understood why anyone would put their faith in the free market. To me, it's just like faith in god, only it makes less sense. At least god is a single actor working towards his own means. Decisions are being made in some kind of coherent fashion (even if it might look like nonsense to us mere mortals.)

Free market fuckers, on the other hand, essentially believe that a shitload of uncorrelated decisions made for a myriad of reasons by a bunch of people (many of whom are too stupid to pass college level calculus classes) somehow amalgamate together to form really good ideas! Yeah, 'cause people are so notoriously good at making decisions and their collective actions have never in the history of the galaxy created unintended shitstorms. It's like they think adding enough negative numbers together will somehow result in a positive number.

Example: let's take a look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average's gyrations du jour:


Who the fuck can look at those numbers and decide that the market is "rational?!?!?" It's swung hundreds of points, in both directions, IN A SINGLE FUCKING DAY!! What possible meaningful absorption and analysis of information could be going-the-fuck-on? How is that anything other than just noise? Efficient market my ass. IT'S A FUCKING RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR.

Wait a second... I'm looking at it more closely now.. and... wait is that... OMFG GOD! THAT'S JESUS'S IMAGE IN THOSE SQUIGGLES! PRAISE THE LORD! HALLELUJAH! IT'S A MIRACLE! Surely god is watching over all of us! If only those traders would see the light, then the Dow would climb so high that the lord himself could touch it! Let Jesus into your risk analysis and be saved! AMEN!!!

Fucking idiots.

On a side note, I just read that religious people's brains are deficient in figuring out their own errors (or taking responsibility for them). Viewing free-market leg-humping as the religious fervor that it truly is, those results certainly explain McArdle, don't they? It explains a couple of religious ex-girlfriends of mine, too! Oh shit, my bitter is showing.

Take My Word for It

Too lazy to link, but apparently Forbes magazine named Matty-Y and Ezra Klein two of the 25 most influential liberals in the media.

I'm not sure if that's better or worse than the fact that Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd are also on the list, but holy-shit. What the fuck is going on?

Brad must be really proud of me for not mentioning how Matty-Y, by himself, is two of the 25.

Shorter

Shorter Thai-Nesse Coats: Fag.

Update:

Just Fire Everyone

In the NYT today:

The Dow Jones industrials gained 485.21 points or 4.68 percent, to 10,850.66, halving the 777-point decline on Monday.

485.21/777 = 0.6245 or, just about as equally close to 3/4 (0.75) as it is to 1/2 (0.5). Why the fuck would you call that a "halving?"

Doesn't anyone know anything anymore? Or do they just want us to panic as much as possible?