Obviously, yes, I was upset yesterday. I'm glad that this could bring so much joy to peoples' hearts, and of course to know that for many people, the happiest part of passing health care reform seems to have been knowing that it made people like me unhappy.
Shorter Meganadsfhgbo;aj
"When congress passes hugely unpopular legislation that I like it's because they're smarter than the public. When it passes unpopular legislation that I don't like it's because democrats are poopyheads."
Yup, in Megan stupid cunty land, she can openly fuck the shit outta TARP but HCR is fucking kryptonite. Banks deserve money. People deserve the backside of the invisible hand and, yeah, I'm not apologizing. That stupid whore is a fucking cuntsicle, with a stick right up her ass, a dry barren wasteland between her legs, a pot o' gold where her heart is, and a swirling vortex betwixt the eyes.
FUCK SHIT PISS PENIS ASS WHORE COCK CRAP FOURLETTERWORDSOUTYERASS.
Why do I keep ending up back at her fucking webblogawful.
typo no formatting you're lucky I put in a link fuck off and die world it's made of god damn rotten fungus toecheese assholes with a knife in my nipples, a crooked back, and only fucking reruns of the drew carey version of... well... anything.
So apparently there's some kerfuffle going on somewhere on the internets. Some gold mining company or whatever basically took all their gold from Fort Knox and sold it a huge a profit and now they're paying their employees ridiculous amounts of money for being key advisers to the president's accountant or some shit. I dunno. It's all a bit technical and I can't keep this crap straight in my head. Inconsequential, really. What I want to know is, how does the gold mining company feel about it?
I defended the banks paying bonuses that had already been agreed before the crisis. But this really is ridiculous, and the banks should have known better, if only for PR reasons.Oh nooooo! It's the return of bad PR! Those poor miners! What will this mean to them?
If they get an ugly new regulation regime, they'll have only themselves to blame. Whatever they really think, deep in their hearts, they're certainly doing their best to give the impression that they believe they are entitled to collect huge paychecks no matter what happens, and have the taxpayer pick up the tab for their mistakes.Yes! Whatever they believe deep in their hearts! Who knows! I mean, sure, it looks like they're paying themselves hand over foot while seizing control of regulatory agencies through lobbying efforts, but appearances can be so deceiving. Unless you're brown, in which case appearances are everything.
Now that everyone's set me straight on Wolverine, let's turn our eyes forward to some "Car Talk:."
Patrick Swayze dies; tragedy for Megan 'cause she loved him when he was 16 (and he never did anything after that).
Heath Ledger dies; tragedy for modern day 16 year olds, because that's the demographic for Brokeback Mountain
But what about those salt of the earth 'Mericans? How does Megan feel about them?
What a PR disaster for Toyota: the company is having to recall millions of cars because four people were killed in a crash that apparently involved improperly installed floor mats.Ahh, look how she mourns the loss of Toyota's positive PR. And we accuse her of not relating well enough to the faceless common man in the crowd. How wrong we were. Look how quickly she empathizes with the faceless Toyota.
What I sort of don't get is, why didn't they just shift into neutral, slam on the emergency lights, pull the parking brake, and coast to a stop?What I don't get is; Someone who gets flustered when their wing mirror breaks chiding someone else for losing their wits when faced with death! Also, too, who "slams on" lights?
In the left corner we have:
I have no idea what to think about the accusation that an NBC producer responded to a blast email from Americans for Limited Government by writing "Bite me, jew boy!"This is a pressing question! I hope Mrs. Super-Sleuth is on it:
It's so bizarre that I simply can't believe that an NBC producer did this. But it's also so bizarre that it's not actually all that much more plausible that Americans for Limited Government made the thing up. It's not like they're playing to the common stereotype that the television world is hostile to Jews.
The most likely explanation is that someone punk'd them. But who? And how?Ashton Kutcher, you devious fucker! How did you know how to intercept an NBC producers email at exactly the right time to create such madness?
Also in the "too bizarre to accurately categorize" is the murder of a part-time census worker in Kentucky, who was found hanged in a remote area. He had the word "fed" scrawled on his chest, which suggests anti-government loons.
But the census is not a traditional bugbear of said loons, who don't generally regard apportionment as an unpardonable blow against liberty.Initial investigations reveal fowl play, but the magnificent magnifying glass in the mind of McArdle sees more! Michele Bachmann is just a red herring, and not part of traditional bugbears! She's on about atraditional bugbears and hence has no bearing on the case!
It sort of defies the imagination that a resurgent militia would decide to start its reign of terror by kidnapping a schoolteacher in his fifties who happens to do census work on the side.You see, this murder defies rational thought, making it suspicious. Most men who take lives are well reasoned, meticulous and cunning. McArdle knows this because she knows the mind of the criminal like the back of her head.
I don't even know what to say about this.The linked article is about an innocent man put to death for the murder by arson of his three young daughters. Megan feigns shock, but her subsequent black souled bleating indicates she didn't really "read" the article. I mean, she may have looked at the words but taking home its meaning was not something she bothered to do.
I'm against the death penalty for a number of moral and philosophical reasons that have little to do with my fear of executing an innocent man; frankly, I don't think that penning one up like an animal for forty years is all that big of an improvement.The part before and after the semi-colon don't actually relate to each other. If someone is innocent they tend not to spend 40 years in jail once found to be so, whereas death sort of prevents them ever regaining their freedom. Even following her alleged "train of thought," does she really not consider that maybe, just MAYBE, people would rather not die even if their only alternative would be to spend the rest of their life in jail? Hell, at least in the slammer I could work on my novel
And I doubt that many of the men on death row are innocent.I guess she missed the part of the article which explains how fire forensics were based on bullshit for decades. we shouldn't begrudge her that, though, seeing as how it was all the way at the end.
Still. When those who are innocent have evidence of their innocence uncovered, you can give them some shred of their life back. There's not much you can offer a dead man except an apology to whatever portion of his spirit you think may have survived the execution.Some shred of their life? Not the whole thing? Huh, I understand less about the legal system than I thought.
The Gift of LifeYes. Yes we do need to start paying people money for their organs.
Virginia Postrel has a terrific piece on organ donation in our pages. Long story short: don't count on cadaver organs, because there aren't enough of them, and organs from living donors last longer. We need quasi-market mechanisms to attract more living donors.
I confess, I don't understand the ban on paying for organs. We let eighteen year olds decide to go to Iraq in order to eventually pay for college, but we won't let a thirty-five year old sell off a part of himself that he probably won't need, and with which he could save a life?I confess, I do not understand how someone could not understand a ban on BUYING KIDNEYS FROM DESPERATE PEOPLE! Oh ho, you may say, what if they're not desperate? Well, I'm gonna have to go ahead and surmise that people either donate kidneys out of charity (no money down!) or desperation (hey ma! We get to eat MEAT tonight! God bless the Slice and Sell!).
Billy Mays, a guy famous for selling crap on teevee, died of heart failure. Apparently Megan things that her readers have never heard of any part of the internet other than her blog because that's the extent of her second post today.
Her first post is titled "Markets in Everything" which, as you all know, is what she said (about 50 times before). What's the market in today? Well, actually, it's likely to be a hoax, but our muse makes no mention of that. No, she merely blurts out "Spend your vacation hunting pirates." My reaction is the same when I hear about commercialized murder. I just comment on it passively. I'm all like "heh, they'll sell anything these days," before I go back to my shoe gazing.
Her commentors are a beautiful people, as always. Some of them defend selling the right to kill someone. After all these pirates have yet to kill anyone use "deadly force" and so it's perfectly cool to go pique a fight with them and then shoot them. That's just enlightened self interest. Yeah, I wouldn't look askance at someone who actively sought out a justifiable homicide as a "vacation," either, Mr. Libertarian. You have such an enlightened view point.
Furthermore, our evaluation of their situation -- I'm informed by the commenidiotariot -- should not involve any analysis of the Somalis' horrible conditions or what atrocities and/or injustices have driven them to piracy. They used "force" and so therefore are "bad." Western civilization, the only true light on this earth, never uses force and engages in only fair, even sided negotiations in order to acquire the supplies for its larder. Anyone who does not return the favor should be hunted down with tanks, destroyers, airplanes, embargoes, sanctions, invasions, locusts, global worming, toxic waste, cruise missles and reality television. End of fucking story.
Ohhhhhhh, goody goody. Poor black people aren't getting off scot-free today! No sir, we've got some Community Reinvestment Act attacking going on today. Now to be sure, our muse realizes that much of the criticism of the CRA has come from over zealous market humpers and backhanded racists, but you just cause they're paranoid doesn't mean that their isn't a Zionist conspiracy to take over the world banking industry.
John Carney has been doing a lot of blogging about the role of the CRA in the financial meltdown. That role is overstated by conservatives who are unwilling to admit that markets can have bad outcomes, but it is understated by liberals who are unwilling to admit that regulation, too, can produce hideous unintended consequences.Thanks for pointing this out. See, as a liberal, I thought that every idea that I've ever supported was infinitely good. I had no idea what neither the word "unintended" nor the word "consequences" meant! I hope she'll elaborate on this lesson for me. BTW, she does not ever actually say what CRA stands for. I remember when I still struggled to find new jokes to make about that kind of think.
The CRA did not singlehandedly cause the meltdown. But the relaxation of credit standards that allowed the meltdown did start, as far as I can tell, with the CRA.Well, hold on a sec, are we sure about that? I think we can go back further. See, the CRA was passed in 1977ish. Now it might seem reasonable to say that lax lending practices happened then and somehow culminated 27 years later. Seems reasonable to expect that when a bill was passed to prevent banks from giving blanket mortgage denials to entire neighborhoods full of
And perhaps more importantly, the CRA, and the mentality behind the CRA, made regulators extremely unwilling to intervene. Everyone wanted to make credit more widely available to the poor. Well, the poor aren't good lending risks. So if you want to give them access to credit, you need to relax your lending standards. Any attempt to tighten lending standards on the part of the government would have resulted in a massive contraction in the credit available to core Democratic constituencies. Meanwhile, the Republicans were hoping that turning poor people into homeowners would make them more Republican.Hmmm, I didn't realize how pernicious those poor people were. See, if only we hadn't given them half a million dollars to buy houses during an asset bubble that we knew they couldn't afford but sold them anyway under the false certainty that we'd all be saved by ever increasing housing prices. Why the fuck did someone write that we should do exactly that in the CRA text? That was a definitely lack of foresight there. We should have known all those sprawling exurbs of urban blacks and migrant Latin workers were a bad idea.
Regardless of how much causal blame you assign it, the financial crisis has certainly proven that the CRA seems to have been a very, very bad idea. Yet Barney Frank is still trying to keep risky loans flowing in the hope that things will all somehow come right in the end if we just pretend, as hard as hard can be, that there isn't substantial risk attached to doing things like buying a condo in a building that is less than 50% occupied.I totally agree. A whopping 20% of subprime loans were administered by banks under heavy CRA authority. Another 30% had loose ties to the CRA. God damn that "help the darky act." Hasn't Barney Frank learned that we just have to accept that indolence and violence are just part of the nature of Homo Africanus and we'll just have to leave them to their ghettos and rap music. Sometimes, you just have to keep walking.
Public Service Announcement for Graduating Students:Guys, I'm totally insightful because I gave journalism students selfish reasons to refrain from being total assholes. People were surprised by my super smarts1. Also, if I am vague about how I talked to them maybe it will sound like I gave a commencement address2.
Dear Megan McArdle,
It has come to the attention of Fire Megan McArdle that you have recently written a piece about the bankruptcy of General Motors Corporation. Your intent was noble as even the most uneducated surely realizes how the financial situation of one of the country's largest employers affects us all. It was noble of you to attempt to glean from these proceedings those pieces of information that will be relevant to the common consumer and society at large.
However, I would like to take issue with one aspect of your post. You mention that the fate of GM's credit card "rewards points," which, while seemingly sealed from a cursory inspection, is, after a more probing look, actually somewhat ambiguous. While this may or may not be true, I would like to point out one sentiment that you fail to capture which Fire Megan McArdle feels is likely held by the public at large. That sentiment is: WHO THE FUCK CARES YOU IDIOT?!?!? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? MILLIONS OF PEOPLE MIGHT LOSE THEIR JOBS AND YOU THINK PEOPLE GIVE A FUCK ABOUT FUCKING REWARDS POINTS TOWARDS CARS THAT NO ONE WANTS TO FUCKING BUY?!?!?! BUY A FUCKING CLUE YOU WORTHLESS SACK OF SHIT! TRY, JUST FUCKING PLEASE TRY, TO BE RELEVANT! GOD YOU HURT! YOU HURT SO BAD! I HOPE YOU FEEL THE HURT YOU CREATE AS ACUTELY AS I DO BECAUSE YOU FUCKING DESERVE IT! GO FUCKING BANKRUPT YOURSELF YOU WORTHLESS SACK OF SHIT! DIE DIE DIE! OMG PLEASE DIE!
All other aspects of said blog post about the effects of the GM bankruptcy on the general public are valid points. In the interest of completeness, we wish to thank you for all of those insights as well as for those useful pieces of information which can be remembered from previous posts on your blog. We shall conclude this paragraph with a list of such points to balance the critical tone of the preceding paragraph:.
Sincerely,
The Fire Megan McArdle Team
McMegan talks about America's first face transplant. I know, I love it, too.
There's been a sort of fascinated repulsion surrounding these transplants, but severe facial disfigurement is probably the worst accident that can happen and still leave you alive.Who wants to give the odds on whether or not she is being hyperbolic here? And who the fuck are the people that say that people whose faces have been horrible disfigured shouldn't be able to have skin transplanted to repair them? Does Megan think those people really exist and/or represent some kind of mainstream "revulsion?"
There's been a number of them lately; the ones that just scream at you from their titles alone. Here we have "Fair Pay" which is, amazingly, properly capitalized. Way to go, hardworker! I know that shift key has been giving her trouble since she became dimly aware of the English language. It's good to see she's making progress.
Speaking of hard work:
One of the dividing lines between me and a lot of the commentators on the Wall Street crisis is that I am not outraged by their pay. If any of my classmates are left on the Street, I'm well aware that they mortgaged their last ten years in order to bet on a directorship that's now at best a badly tainted prize, and at worst just evaporated beneath their fingers. I work 60 to 80 hour weeks doing something I love. They've been working 30-50 hours a week more than that, doing work that no reasonable human being could claim to enjoy the mechanics of. I do not resent the difference between their well-located New York co-ops and my tiny row house in an "emerging" neighborhood in DC. I'm only thankful I'm the one in the row house.The avalanche of stupidity comes quickly these days. Seems like every post I take a look at has an opening paragraph so choc full o' crap I can smell it through the screen. Rundown time:
The difference between me and them is that I don't think they deserve their pay, either. Now it may be that I, in my position as taxpayer, have to continue to pay these guys their huge salaries, because the unintended consequences of trying to regulate their pay will make it harder to get the banking system back on its feet.Oh, so people are getting undeservedly rich while billions starve, but that's not outrageous. Again, point taken, McArdle. Glad that she's willing to take one for the team by paying them with her taxes. We wouldn't want to destroy the fabulous banking system. I mean, it's been keeping us out of depressions for decades at a time at only the cost of a few S&L type scandals in between. That's only a major scandal/screw up every 10-20 years! It's a fucking peachy keen organization that one is, the banking system. Gotta pay to keep it healthy! Fuck getting people to the doctors. I want my tax money going to the banking system!
So for all the bankers annoy me, their pay--and its difference from mine--doesn't outrage me. The difference between their pay and that of a physical therapy assistant or an auto line worker doesn't outrage me.Ohhhhh. It's just annoying. Yeah, I see. The exploitation of the productive members of society by the members who merely push paper around is a mere annoyance. Silly me. Once I realize that the people whose time was spent in the pursuit of money at the expense of life, relationships, and any sense of having made a meaningful contribution have made sacrifices for their money, suddenly I don't see them in such a low light. If they love money so much they're willing to sacrifice their fucking soul for it, well, hey, I guess they deserve it, right? Oh wait, then she says "No one deserves their pay so I can hardly be angry at blah blah taking what they can get." so they don't deserve it. And if we're angry it's not because there's a shitfest of a system that needs to be fixed. We're just jealous. Or something, I dunno. The mobious strip that is this woman's thoughts is far too twisted in on itself for me to follow.
There has been an historic event over at The Atlantic. Our "Eloise at The Atlantic" (as Roy Edroso puts it. I've never read Eloise but apparently it's very clever.)- well, it's truly astonishing - I... I... I'm getting choked up here.... she... she... she properly capitalized a title.. There's even grammar and shit in that thing. "Preach it, Brother Sanchez"... the phrase has just become the prettiest on record. Why, our muse,after years of badgering, may have finally listened to a critic. Could such a thing have happened? If so, I think we can likely head over to, uh..., somewhere in Europe and tell them not to bother powering the LHC back up. The Standard Model has been proved. The world is in harmony. We an all sleep at night, safe and sound, comfortable in the knowledge that terrorism has been defeated and that the economy is back on the up and up. Hold your breath, people. It might just be the greatest time to be alive.
While we can rest comfortably in the knowledge that the writers of the day are taking the 5 seconds necessary to make sure their articles are properly introduced, there's still work to be done. Though our pupil's post may have finally been begun in a competent manner, that which follows still reeks of hackdom, shallowness, and bias. I give you the "I know you are but what am I argument":
Julian incredulously asks how failing to give away billions is a sign of ideology. That's a fair point, if not for the fact that Republican's were busy gleefully rejoicing that the auto-bailout gave them a chance to "take their first shot against organized labor." If there's anything that screams well reasoned consideration, it's failing to back a bill intended to aid the economy during the worst blah since blah because you have a chance to stick it to those pesky blue collar workers and their whole "treat us fairly" bullshit. But, I digress.
Julian points out that authoritarianism isn't some exclusively Republican vice:Failing to funnel billions to a failing business is a form of authoritarian punishment. As an alternative, we're offered the proposition that we "want affordable, safe, fuel-efficient, environmentally sound cars built by committed workers who are rewarded for undertaking this task on our behalf." I think it's a lot more revealing to contemplate the sort of mindset that insists on seeing every economic outcome as a political "reward" or "punishment."
This whole familial frame seems to amount to an inverted Gospel of Wealth: Where the 19th century claimed that financial success was a reflection of moral worth, the function of public policy in the 21st century will be to create that symmetry. The only question is whether workers in a particular industry are naughty children who need to be sent to the corner for a time-out, or well-behaved children who should get a gold sticker for effort. This is, as I hope goes without saying, a pretty authoritarian frame on either side. It also seems like a manifestly awful way to make economic policy choices. Barring some marvelous Lebnizian coincidence, the answers to questions about the moral desert of workers in particular sectors are unlikely to consistently match the answers to quesitons about what's in the long-term interest of the economy as a whole.
It occurred to me, while I was listening to the congressional hearings, that the government could stop most of this by just seizing houses in default and continuing to make the mortgage payments. It turns out someone else is thinking the same way:Yes, what a great mind. Give the banks lots of money and fuck over your average Joe who just wanted a fucking house to live in. Oh, wait she thought of that problem.
There are inherent issues here: at what rate do we rent to the current occupants? How do we make the banks pay for their folly? Also, the government is not a notoriously effective landlord. On the other hand, it punishes the homeowners without putting them on the street, and eventually the houses will be worth something.Well, I said she thought of it. It's not like I said she actually gave a fuck about it.
I'm sure this post deserves more than drive-by, but I can't resist:
For one thing, a lot of old people would starve because they believed their government--a valuable object lesson in the problem with relying on government programs, to be sure, but it is perhaps a mite rough to let millions of old people die pour encourager les autres.What is the lesson that these old people should learn, you ask? Well, it appears to be that libertarians would really like to be even BIGGER assholes than they already are:
Yes, we all concede that Social Security and Medicare are bad programs that should, at the very least, be structured very differently than they are. But that doesn't mean we can just try shock therapy.She seems almost disappointed that she can't just make the government bail on its promise to keep the elderly from starving on the streets. In fact she feels the need to mention a second reason to not throw these programs away:
For another, there is no political possibility of enacting a law that causes millions of old people to starve.Because, for most of her fans, the whole people living in poverty thing really isn't persuasive enough.
Glenn Greenwald appears in Megan's comments section in this thread (I verified that it is him).
Megan wrote: "Glenn Greenwald, predictibly [sic],[sic] views these as fascist attempts [at pre-emptively handcuffing and arresting protesters] to stifle dissent."
Greenwald, or a very good imposter of the spirit and style of Greenwald writes:
The reason it's customary to link to what someone writes when criticizing what they've written is to prevent brazen lying like this.
I said -- so clearly that even you should have been able to digest it -- that the people who committed violence or otherwise broke the law should be arrested. What I wrote had nothing to do with anything you said I wrote.
Nonetheless, keep cheering on preemptive arrests of lawyers, journalists, videographers and legal observers -- along with home invasions and mass arrests of people who had no connection whatsoever with any criminality -- and then keep boasting about what "libertarian" you are. It's good for even more deep entertainment than you normally produce when you move your mouth.
First, we get hit with disturbing sexual inneundo in her post title "No, really, I'll pull out." I haven't been this permaflaccid since Bob Dole was pimping for Viagra. Seriously, I think my dick just shrank all the way up inside my body cavity.
Megan spends the post explaining that she thinks the possibility of a timetable for withdrawal being set while Bush is still in office is better for McCain than it is for Obama:
I'm puzzled by war opponents who think that voters will suddenly love Obama for having been "right all along". Assuming arguendo that this is true, the psychological logic is off. Most Americans supported the war. Do you become more endeared of your spouse when it turns out that you really should have taken that left fork thirty miles ago? Most people prefer folie à deux.Unfortunately, she may be right about this. Of course, that doesn't make her any less incompetent.
Another quote of a quote of a quote in a string of stupid not seen since the last tug of war in special ed class. Let's break it down!
First, David Brooks writes an op-ed about education which isn't as stupid as he usually is, but still makes the ridiculous claim that America's rise to super power status was due to an "unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom", ignoring the fact that the rest of the world was mostly worried about killing their neighbors from 1910 to 1945 while the US sat comfortably isolated atop a vast array of natural resources. Ya think we might've improved our educational infrastructure faster than Europe because we weren't constantly having the rest of our infrastructure bombed to cinders, Davie? Nawwwwwww, couldn't be.
Laura at 11-D responds with another smart but stupid post in which she rightly suggests that there are large improvements to be made by fostering expansion of early age eduction. Seems like a good idea, but Laura's post is full of a a bunch of know-it-all bullshit and stereotype. She apparently knows the goings on of all of her neighbors, describing with authority the daily routine of the families living nearby:
In some homes, the kids are sent to summer camps or swim lessons early in the morning. The parents establish routines, keep bedtime hours, supervise outside play, and take the kids on trips to mall or the beach or the swim club. In other families, the academically struggling kids are allowed to skip summer school classes, are in no activities, sleep until noon, and never leave their homes. There are no books in the house. They curse up a storm. They have hours and hours of free time where they absentmindedly throw rocks at a fence. Broken toys litter the backyard and new ones are provided freely. The kids power up on sugar cereal all day. The parents are overwhelmed and stressed. In one case, a parent was told by the school that her nine year old will never go to college, so she's entirely given up.Jesus fucking Christ women! You're either the world's largest busy-body or are one of those people that feels that can extrapolate everyone's entire life from the way they say "hello!" Then she follows up with:
And, yes, it is very clear who's going to college and who's going to end up as a pole dancer.Just to show that she's not just a nosy know it all, she's judgmental, too!
This is where the schools have to step in. They have to level out these differences. All day nursery schools. Free books for toddlers.Towns need to offer parenting classes and organize babysitting cooperatives. Churches have to organize parent groups.Megan can see through it all. After all isn't it obvious that, as Megan says:
The problem is, parents who let their kids cut summer school probably aren't going to force them to go to all day school programs. Or read to them. Or show up for parenting classes. The parents are choosing to let the kids do what they want either because they don't value school, or because they are too stressed or exhausted or possibly too lazy to engage in the confrontation and micromanagement required to force their children onto a different path.That's right, Megan. The reason they have a problem now is because they suck! It has nothing to do with a lack of resources available! They're just
High income parents do these things because a) they view them as their own path to success b) their social circle values these activities, and punishes parents who do not do them and c) people with more satisfying jobs have more emotional energy for the unpleasant work of parenting--they have room left in the mental "chore" basket. I don't know what sort of social program can change any of these factors.Everything's fine! It's only the
Posts
All Comments
