Whatever

Cats are always cool in a crisis because they just don't care about your problems.

Pointless, Callous, Intelligent; Pick Two

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.

Don't Put Salt in Someone Else's Eyes

Shorter Megan:

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.

¹Or, perhaps, horrified that you'd use that argument, as if they would need to be told not to bash heads in so as to avoid blood spatter on their clothing

²Dear God, please don't tell me she actually gave a commencement address

The Easy Ones are Easy

Ho hum:

Question of the Day: Bank Robbers!:

Reader Ben writes:

How has it been lost on people that Citi's new CFO (Ned Kelly) has the same name as an infamous Australian bankrobber?


I don't know, but what once was lost, now is found.

Yeah! How has an obscure piece of trivia from a continent on the other side of the planet been lost on us? We are such fools.

Like fools gold...

...and all that glitters is not gold.

Woah, .... so deep.... mind blown... again....

Oh yeah, and Robbers!11!1!1twelve!!!!!

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.

The Hits Just Keep on Coming!

...and now she admits to being too stupid to put together a box she got from Ikea.

Yes, she not only wasted money on a fucking box from Ikea, but she apparently can't even assemble it.

Puts a whole new spin on the -blanking- your way out of a paper bag joke.

This woman can't even blog her way into an Ikea made box.

<rimshot>

Bonus "She's not as clever as she thinks she is":

My life's ambition is to never again put together an Ikea product. I have not yet reached that halcyon plane of existence, and perhaps never will.

A search of her blog for the word "halcyon" yields over a dozen hits. GOD, WHAT A FUNNY WORD!!!!!!

Such a Journalist

Amusing fact of the day:

Our muse just "investigated" the credit crisis by applying for credit cards! Yes, that's real behind the scenes work there gumshoe!

You might say "Well, some journalists would only apply for a single credit card, so MM really is going the extra mile" to which I rejoinder "Actually, this moron only MEANT to apply to one but accidentally applied to three because she's retarded."

"She can't be that retarded, can she?" you ask. Well, yes, and also, she forgot that you shouldn't be checking out lots of new lines of credit while you're looking to buy your first ever house.

Our intrepid journalist: stupid enough to do things of no merit to anyone and harm herself in the process. Natural selection at its finest.

Ahhhhhhhhh

There I was, minding my own business, browsing through some blogs over my morning cup of coffee, when POW! some random web designer shoots me in the fucking face with this horrible shit:
WTF IS WRONG WITH THIS PUBLICATION?!?!?! I haven't seen so many glaring pastels since the last time my 6 year old niece showed me one of her latest paintings. Megan's last post may have stupid that burns, but this shitty new layout will put a hole right through your retina.

Seriously, where are the unicorns, stars, and rainbows to go with this wonderful new theme? It's like the designer of the Miami Dolphins' jersey was reincarnated as a teenie-bopper and Teh Atlantik decided he was the man to remake their website.

This pretty much proves that they're just not going to bother with even thinnest veneer of professionalism. They draw you in with their pre-adolescent color scheme, and keep you with their pre-adolescent thinking.

Oh, it hurts.

Shoulda Been a Sports Commentator

Ezra Klein is making sense:

And while a week ago, I would've given Ohio to McCain, the economic crisis has cemented Obama's leads in a lot of traditionalist Midwestern states that McCain could otherwise have contested (...) The map is shrinking for McCain. But polls are coming out in places like North Carolina and Indiana that suggest Obama is surprisingly viable. So his map is expanding. And he has more money. That, fundamentally, is the position you want to be in right now.

Yes, my son, a shrinking map for McCain surprisingly corresponds to an expanding map for Obama. However, it isn't that McCain is losing in Midwestern states while Obama is winning in Southern states. In reality, McCain is losing Southern states while Obama is winning in the Midwest. The conclusion that winning states is good for Obama is completely sound, though you may want to provide more evidence for the true skeptics.

I'm so glad there are people being paid to tell me these things. And I love how good at writing they are.

Get it While it's Cold!

In an article that prolly deserves more attention (or less, really) Megan whips out this whopper:

You know who made most of the money on the subprime bubble? Anyone who bought a house in the last ten years. Yes, that's right, you, with your low fixed interest rate on a reasonably sized house. You're the profiteer who laughed all the way to the bank.

Megan is so clueless here that it's astounding. She thinks the people who massively overpaid for their houses and are threatened with foreclosure and/or bankruptcy are the ones that made out like bandits?

NO, YOU FUCKING IDIOT! The ones who made the money are (aside from the hedge fund managers and such) the ones that SOLD THEIR HOUSES. See, when prices are artificially inflated, it's a good idea to sell things.

I know that "buy low" and "sell high" are complicated economics concepts, but you'd think that Megan would've picked it up somewhere. I guess that little factoid isn't buried up her ass with the rest of the "knowledge" she craps out.

Doing our job for us.

The stupidity and absurdity of this post is so apparent that all we have to do to mock Megan is just link to her.

brad adds:

You have to realize some of our readers don't click over, rick.

Megan apparently believes Trig Palin, the Downs baby, is not actually Sarah Palin's son, but her daughter's.
Further, Megan believes that this 'fact' should have no bearing on how we evaluate Palin's candidacy. In Megan's world Sarah Palin wore a fat suit for months and has lied to the entire world about whose baby Trig was, but that's not important.

And damn, I dunno rick. That post might need further documentation. It's "Jail the Jena 6" level stupid. Future greatest hits stupid. Wow.

There's the Insight for which I've Been Looking!

Oh, Ta-Nehisi, I'm so glad you came to The Atlantic so that you could provide the stunning challenges to my way of thinking that had been previously lacking:

I have this deep-seated suspicion that the things we think decide elections--ads, gaffes, rallies, counter-punches--aren't as important as we make them. I mean they are important, but often I suspect that they're just distracting us from much deeper, uncontrollable--and in some ways unknowable--questions. How's the war going? How will the economy be doing in November? What do the voter reg numbers look like? How many of those are likely to turn out?

MORE IMPORTANT THAN GAFFES??!@??!! WHY DO THEY ALWAYS HAVE TO BLOW MY MIND!

I ask them SOOOO nicely not to do it, and then just -boom!- they blow it to smithereens. Can we please get back to something more comfortable?

What's going on at the local level with this thing? What's happening--right now--in the voting precints of Ohio and North Carolina? Stop telling me how much money Obama is pouring into those states--I want to know what that money does, how is it being put to work. Less top-down coverage, more bottom up.

Phew, yes, let's get some stories about what we really KNOW is important, like whether the money is going to pay staffers to canvas or to fund the creation of more buttons and signs in the Cincinnati suburbs. THAT'S the kind of campaign coverage that would be TRULY useful for us to have so that we might properly decide our next president.

Is there a single IQ point in the entirety of the blogosphere? I guess with a name as stupid as "blogosphere" it just has to be dumb.

We Have a Winner!

The best comment ever has been made:

Warren Buffet sacrifices a lot less when he gives up 10% of his income than does his secretary when she gives up 10% of hers

But we as a society lose out on a lot more by taking Warren Buffet's income than his secretary. He has shown that he can use that wealth to create vast amounts of wealth. His ROI is much better than what the federal government is going to get on it.
His secretary has never created jobs and wealth for others, like Warren has. Wouldn't we be better off as a society if Warren was able to keep his wealth to generate a bigger pie for us all, rather than trying to just take a slice of his and divvy it up among us?

Posted by the Gooch | August 22, 2008 2:44 PM

Yes, the rich are just better people and we should give them all of our money so that they can make us all as rich as they are!

I'm going to pass out.

Another County Heard From

Dear Nutty:

Just some observations & points of fact.

The immediate point: There is a difference between your Quaker ancestors & (perhaps) unthinking acceptance of their creed & dogma, & the actual ancestry of Mr. Yglesias. You can always give up on Quakery, but Matt is cursed/stuck w/ his ancestors, & whether or not they "haven't managed to grow out of nap time yet" (And if they're his "ancestors" they probably won't have many more chances to grow out of anything, most of them being dead, & the rise of air conditioning probably making the siesta less common – or is it their fault they weren't the first nation to be able to afford AC?) doesn't really have much to do w/, well, anything, let alone Yglesias's stupid positions.

And while this reporter doesn't keep up w/ the exact ethnic extraction of the entire blog-o-sphere, he's not sure that nachos are from anywhere but Mexico (or Tejas-Mexico) & he doesn't think Matt Y. is of Mexican extraction.

Nutella, you sound awfully angry for a pacifist.

I wish that I weren't a fucking pacifist so I could go knock on your door and do some preemptive warring on the intellectual void that is your little section of the blogosphere.

Isn't the idea not to have thoughts like that in the first case, as opposed to this "Why I oughta – oh wait, I'm a pacifist" approach. Is it cool w/ the Quakers to scream & shout vitriol about people's actual genetic background, as opposed to their stupid beliefs?

Or, give our founder a break & start your own web log where you can let the real (?) NoT out. I was doing that before signing on here, & calling for various rabid weasel's widowed mothers to be assaulted (euphemism) w/ a splintery broomstick, as well as the usual calls for the violent, un-Constitutional overthrow of everything & daring Russia & China to come at me w/ a cyberattack are merely where I get started. It's great therapy, & I must head there now, & not devote further time & effort to this unholy mess.

Yours in the spirit of progressive self-criticism,
I remain, as B/4,

M. "Chas." Bouffant

Elements of Style©: Spell check is your friend. As a person of (only partial, I'm glad to say – self-deprecating humor there, no one else need take umbrage) Italian descent, I am offended to see "wops" all in upper case. And "kikes" w/ a "y?"

Do Not Tell Me I Am The Source Of Your Knock-Up. The Mud Elephant, Wading Through The Sea, Leaves No Tracks.

Once again, our heroine saves herself the trouble of coming up w/something clever & original by referring to another web log. (Not unlike the way it's done chez moi, but I digress.)

I've never had a baby, of course[.]

That goes w/o saying. (P. S.: We're all very appreciative of that.)

The interesting question he doesn't ask is what this would do to the politics of parenting.

By "parenting" she means "abortion." (Seriously. Read it.)

The minute you can take an aborted fetus and put it in an artificial womb, that argument falls away, and we get down to what pro-choicers really care about: not having a kid.

Ectogenesis must be pretty special if you can take an "aborted fetus," slap it into one of these artificial wombs, & it will come back to life & grow to term.

I can construct a libertarian argument for a right not to parent, but once the pregnancy leaves the sacred space of the individual body, both the logical and the emotional arguments get a lot weaker. What will society look like when unwanted pregnancies start turning, once again, into unwanted kids?

Can she "construct" (Betcha any argument McM. constructs would collapse in a heap of watery concrete & sub-standard rebar.) an argument for her continuing to pontificate for money? Or "deconstruct" (I know, not correctly used, but how can I resist?) this connection between the pregnancy (fetus?) leaving the woman's body &, well, anything? Does she mean pregnancy in general, having accidentally added the "the" there? Is there an implication that some future theocracy will require any woman who is pregnant to check the embryo/fetus in an artificial womb?

Or, in classic FMM style, what in the hell is she talking about?

Also sad to note: Mlle. McArdle received three times as many comments as the original item @ EconLog.

WARNING! DANGER!

The authorities at Fire Megan McArdle would like to pass on the following public service announcement:

Beware of blog posts that fraudulently claim to offer you a "Morning Smile"

Several unsuspecting Americans have contacted the FMM authorities to report one Megan McArdle (who is not an employee of Fire Megan McArdle, despite persistent rumors to the contrary) is posting videos on her blog "Asymmetrical Information" under the above mentioned heading. We believe her plan is to attempt to get readers to view the video embedded into said blog post thinking that they would be viewing something entertaining. The truth is, the video contains a disturbingly unfunny clip of a man (or possible women, FMM has been unable to verify) pretending to cry in distress about the attacks ads recently posted by the McCain campaign against Barack Obama.

We warn you that said clip is nauseating and not at all clever. Some claim that this is evidence of McArdle's completely skewed sense of humor (a phenomenon that has been thoroughly document by FMM before) but there is a second opinion held by respected FMM authorities. High ranking members of FMM fear something more nefarious is at foot.

Said authorities believe that McArdle's post is an attempt to weaken potential readers of her blog. Her idea may be to intentionally present something stupid and annoying that is not her own work at the start of the day. This tactic is designed to leave readers of her later blog posts inured to stupid and annoying ideas. Such inoculation to idiocy and cruelty is designed to make McArdle's own moronic and evil ideas look intelligent and benevolent by comparison.

FMM has assembled a full investigative team to look into this issue. Until a conclusion can be reached we highly recommend that McArdle's blog be avoided at all costs. If it cannot be avoided, we warn you NOT TO CLICK any embedded video or to read anything that McArdle calls funny, says will make you smile, or otherwise endorses in the name of entertainment.

Your brain may be at stake. Reading such poorly thought-out and inhumane posts as those provide by McArdle is not recommended for most people. FMM are trained professionals hand selected for their ability to resist dumb and self-centered ideas. Do not attempt at home!

Sincerely,

NutellaonToast

Director of Long Winded Curse Filled Vitriolic Rants
Fire Megan McArdle Inc.

Russian Dolls of Incoherence

Megan quotes Arnold Kling quoting Marc Pesce who says:

Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade's time we've gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile.

...fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty...each behavioral innovation is distributed globally and instantaneously...Any fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over to a new kind of mob rule...the more something is shared the more valuable it becomes...All of our mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal era, are backed up against the same buzz saw. Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions, now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer works and a future of chaos.

Arnold wonders what this means for "educational and political institutions."

Megan wonders what this means for "social institutions."

I just wonder what the fuck it's supposed to mean at all. It's hard to think, though, with the sound of the buzz saw I'm backed up against. I'm also really tired of balancing on this knife edge. I wish I could get the past working and then maybe we could sort out the chaos over in the future.

God damn it, if someone would just turn the damn amplifier on the human network down I could maybe get a coherent thought going! How else am I going to stop the collapse of 50,000 years of cultural development? Am I the only one who realizes how important it is that we prevent the fringe from multiplying?!?!?!?!?!!!?! THE FRINGES ARE MULTIPLYING PEOPLE!!!!!!!!! DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS!??!!?!?!@?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!

Oh, well, neither do I.

Wtf?

Wtf?

Defending America's Image

So I was up at Yosemite this weekend with my father.

After he'd gone to bed I went out and made friends with a couple of Germans I found at a bar.

We talked a bit about politics and I found myself embarrassingly telling tem about how one of our presidential candidates had been made fun of for daring to suggest that Americans might be better off if they bothered to learn a foreign language.

They were shocked.

Fortunately, I did learn that Americans are still considered the epitome of cool in Germany, despite how much Bush is hated over there. Which I guess makes sense. The cool kids always pick on the nerds.

Shallow and Racist, a McArdle Double Play

WEEEEEE!

So speaking of guilty pleasures,

Oh, Megan, I love your conversational tone. You make me feel like we actually were just speaking of guilty pleasures. Such a joy.

one of mine is "So You Think You Can Dance", the dance version of American Idol. I don't watch any of the other reality shows, the ones that bloggers proudly lay claim to, like Project Runway or Top Chef. No, I just like watching people dance, mostly because I don't Think I Can.

"Guilty pleasures" is such a god awful ridiculous phrase. She was just recently mocking the pretension of those who don't own a TV. Why in the fuck would she feel bad about liking something simply because it's not high brow enough? I guess you're only allowed to be condescending about your entertainment in certain ways around Megan. It's okie, honey, you're allowed to like stupid things. We won't judge for that. Well, we will, but not the dancing.

What's struck me about this season is that with eight contestants left, three out of the four men were black.

1) I love how often Megan gets struck. If only she'd get struck by something larger occasionally.

2) I also love the giddy sense of foreboding I feel every time she starts to talk about race. What amusing bits of clueless derision will our heroine put forth next?

For the last three seasons, the show has tended to be very, very white by the time it gets down to brass tacks. This may be because the black dancers are very disproportionately hip-hop dancers, and don't have the technical skills of other contestants. Or it may be racism.

How magnanimous of her to allow for both the possibilities that black people may be inferior, or people may just think that black people are inferior. Her worldview is all encompassing!

Or it may just have been a fluke. But it's interesting to see this turn around, at least temporarily.

Yes, I always think to myself "Wow, here's an example of cultural if not overt racism playing out. How INTERESTING!"