"The summit of American intellectual attainment."

Several days later, we refer you to alicublog: (If you've yet to see the item in question, here.)

Think about this: the lunatic Dreher has, in the past week or so, been engaged seriously by Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, and Ross Douthat -- three writers for the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that once represented the summit of American intellectual attainment. And now its authors treat seriously a man who thinks we'd be better off if the Pope could make us say that the sun revolves around the earth.

Imagine that. It's as if people were standing athwart history, yelling "Stop!" 

And now progress has been redefined to mean barely holding on to what has been peeled from the owning classes over some three hundred yrs. 

On a different topic, the most useful link Megan has ever provided. Even Orthodoxy boy Dreher will be praying for some enlightenment after everything has gone south, & all the cars pictured have become single-family housing.

Jindalmania

Megan loves her some Bobby Jindal, and yet hasn't chimed in with anything about his massive implosion. Can't you blame it on regulations or summin, Megan?
In any case, here's a quick look at her two past posts titled "Jindalmania".

I saw Bobby Jindal talk last week at the National Press Club. He's being widely touted as McCain's potential running mate, though I agree with Ross that this would be a mistake--for Jindal. No one should run for office this year as a Republican who doesn't have to.
Mostly I was incredibly impressed. He looks like the president of the high school chess club, so it's something of a shock to my elitist coastal ears to hear a rich good-old-boy southern accent issuing from him. But he's a hell of a talker, and most of what he says actually makes sense.
One interesting thing I learned is just how far Jindal has come in fighting Louisiana's institutional problems. Bush detractors get mad when I say this...

Doopdoopdoop, digging a hole, boopbedoopdoop.

I'm willing to bet that Ta-Nehisi has never seen Jindal in person. I have. And while "swarthy" may play a small role in the Obama comparisons, it's mostly along the lines of thinking that the Republican Party's first non-white candidate would help heal the party's image a bit. The reason that they're comparing Jindal to Obama is that, in person, he comes off a lot like Obama. He's extremely positive, he's personally charming, and he's kind of skinny and his ears stick out. Like Obama, Jindal is something of an odd duck; he looks like the president of the Paramus, New Jersey High School Chess Club, and talks like a good old boy with a plantation somewhere back in the Bayou. The combination is disconcerting for northern journalists, and a little bewitching.
But once you're past that, well, the guy just has skills. His message, like Obama's, is one of hope and actual change; he tends to emphasize the work he's done reforming Louisiana's notoriously corrupt political culture. And like Obama, he has the charisma to put it over. Nearly all prominent politicians are extremely charismatic. Being in a room with them is like being in a room with the sun; you can't really look anywhere else. But some have it more than others, and Jindal has a lot of it.

Indeedilydoodily, neighborino!
Megan will never match Bill Kristol, but she's building up quite an impressive history of wrongness. Which, of course, only means she's an even bigger expert on all the things she got wrong.

Oh God, I'm Fucking Blegging...

Not MM again, but I have a question. From a Financial Times article (via Balloon Juice):

The real shocker, though, is what has happened after those defaults. JPMorgan estimates that $102bn of CDOs has already been liquidated. The average recovery rate for super-senior tranches of debt – or the stuff that was supposed to be so ultra safe that it always carried a triple A tag – has been 32 per cent for the high grade CDOs. With mezzanine CDO’s, though, recovery rates on those AAA assets have been a mere 5 per cent.

How is it even possible to have an investment that is backed by collateral fall to 5% of it's original value. Housing prices have gone down, but not by 95%!

I asked this in comments at BJ (titter) and someone replied that it was because of leverage. That doesn't make sense to me. I thought institutions were leveraged, not assets. What am I missing?

Cat Porn Fan Fiction

I love it when cats are the early stages of a play fight. They go through those tentative first moments in such an amusing fashion.

Bap! Samus gently smacks Ness on da head, then just lets her paw linger on his face. Ness just sort of looks at her like "oh, you wanna go?" but not in a threatening fashion. More like, he genuinely isn't sure whether she wants to go or not. Whap! He gives her a high five to the stomach. They both look like they're not sure whether they're angry, or confused, or what. How they manage to look confused about being confused is beyond me. Am I ready to fight? Do I know what's going on? Am I confused? Are we fighting? I was just licking you so fighting seems inappropriate, but your paw is definitely on my face right now. Has the fight started and I missed it again? What's going on?

Then Ness pounces on Samus and she slides off the leather couch and thumps onto the floor. They spring to their feet and thumpity-bumpity across the hard wood. Oh man, cats are awesome.

Now they're sitting across the room and pointedly ignoring each other, like you prolly should me...

This Week In Stupid, Part the First

'scuze me while I skip the intro.

Post-finance New York:

Likewise, it's hard to overstate just how far left and economically illiterate most of New York City's council members and state representatives are. The politically powerful head of the transit union was, the last time I checked, an actual communist. The financial industry was the closest thing that New York now has to a vibrant business community, and with its power ebbing, so is the only remaining natural check on the left's worst instincts. [Emphasis in original]

OOOOOOoOoOoOooOOOOOOeeeeeeeeeeeeeeOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. The commies are gonna ruin Mayor Mike's perfect Manhattan, where it's just like Vegas only without the legal gambling. There's five banks on every corner, glass yuppie enclosures everywhere you look, and assholes like Megan just LOVE IT.

In my grimmer hours, I wonder how much of the broad urban renaissance can be sustained absent the credit bubble. Easy money makes even distressed property look good, and brought an influx of young urban homeowners who put pressure on the political system. As they flow out, will we be back into the territory of the ungovernable city?

To translate, Megan worries black and latino folk will get all uppity and burn down Park Slope. We should be so lucky.

Everything you always wanted to know about the banking bailouts but were afraid to ask:

Once upon a time a couple friends and I were spitballing movie mashups we'd like to see. I came up with "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex*, *- But Were Afraid To Ask Forrest Gump". (Tagline, "Thu vah-GI-nuh is like a box of choc-colates.") Somehow, I think that's more relevant to the bailouts than anything Megan said in her post.

Festina lente:

In response to someone mentioning Norm Coleman isn't being a benefit to Minnesota by dragging out his legal challenges as long as possible in an obvious political play to deny Obama a Senate vote for as long as possible, Megan sez,

To state even more obvious facts, the reason that this is in litigation is that half of Minnesotans did not vote for Franken--indeed, the measurement error being what it is, there is a decent chance that more Minnesotan voters desired Norm Coleman in the senatorial seat.
Given that, it is not good politics to get snippy at people because they're not giving up soon enough to suit you. Moreover, I seem to recall that the Gore campaign's endless new plans for lengthy recounts polled pretty well. As, of course, does divided government. The state Democrats would be very, very foolish to complain that Norm Coleman needs to knock off these challenges because Obama now has to get two whole Republican votes to pass legislation and we deserve to have the whole Senate to ourselves, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Megan almost deserves credit here. She's pretending Coleman has a principle to his plainly obstructionist/bad loser tactics while mocking Gore's "endless" challenges which ended in December of that election year. We're about to hit March, the Senate is in session, and no one seems to actually believe Coleman can find enough votes to change the certified results of this election. There's no legitimate comparison to Florida in 00 to be found, Megan's just being an asshole. She probably doesn't like Franken for helping to start up the left wing snark machine.

The problem of administrative costs:

*sigh* Should I even mention the font/spacing/margin issue? No? Ok. Then let's jump right in, without getting into the quote from Hilzoy Megan is responding to.

This seems to presume that we will spend more on administrative costs than we will save on disallowing bailouts for those who took cash-out refis. That's unlikely. The average mortgage is $150,000 and the average US government subsidy is $20,000. Once your hypothetical expensive administrator has disallowed 5 subsidies, he's paid for himself. Everything above that is pure cash to the taxpayer.

Quite the unintentionally revealing moment, no? Megan would much rather someone make $100k disallowing people from government benefits than 5 people receive $20k in government benefits. But she's against make-work programs. Woof.

Back with more soonish.

Back to the Grindstone, Part II

eff the foreplay.

Thought for the day:

Us stupid humans don't understand how frustrating it is for a higher life form like Megan McArdle to have to deal with us.

Assuming that we are indeed facing, in large part, a crisis of confidence, would this crisis be solved more quickly if we stopped nattering about the banking system and simply burned us some witches?

Blaming people for the mistakes they've made = horrible persecution. Megan constructed a self-serving hypothetical..... ummm, pretend logic proof that doesn't involve logic to prove it. She used capital letters like X and Y and Q and everything. QED, bitches.

A for effort:

Nutella touched on this one, but I'd like to draw attention to some of her words.

The purpose of a grade is to show mastery (or not) of some volume of material. Is it fair to set the bar higher for me than for someone who isn't as capable? Or vice versa? Is it fair to send the signal to employers that I wasn't up to scratch even when I did objectively better work than some other student?

Not comprehension, mastery. And the personal turn is just... mwwwah!
Megan thinks she got Bs because she was sooooooooooooo inherently awesome she was being graded on a different curve than the mere mortals around her in a fucking Ivy League school, as opposed to her work was mediocre compared to her classmates who were there on merit and actually trying. No, it's the old Randian truth that inherent superiority as a person is a drawback in our crazy screwed up world.

Sign of the Times:

In case you missed it, Megan followed a google alert that her name was used on the interwebs to Dhalgren's place, (Hi Ann Althouse! I'm not you!) and decided to do her whole fakey kill em with kindness act. I'm not sure it had the effect Megan wanted, as Dhalgren linked to us in his first sentence, and FMM got a mention or two in the comments, leading to a substantial bump in traffic. I don't care, but it's nice to know it'd irk Megan.

Law for law's sake:

This post is comically desperate. Megan is trying to get people to link our natural distaste for lawyers with her bootlicking toady desire not to regulate the financial doings of the masters of the universe.

FEMA couldn't send all the trailers it purchased for Katrina victims to the gulf because of rules about deploying mobile homes on floodplains, and it couldn't deploy them to help tornado victims in Arkansas because the affected area wasn't big enough to be an official emergency disaster zone. So instead the trailers rotted in storage.

Geez, stupid regulations prevented the government from doing that in the middle of hurricane season? And those trailers were pure awesome, not at all having problems with formaldehyde fumes and asbestos. There are no flaws, whatsoever, in Megan's example here.

I wonder how Megan felt about Jindal's speech last night. She's probably upset and confused by the negative response from all quarters. She laughed about volcanoes with him. Isn't Alaska cold, anyway? They should be glad for the lava giving them a chance to go out to the beach.

Back to the Grindstone

Holy shit.
I know.
The stupidity of the last couple days is astounding, even considering the source. I can't keep slacking. First up, old fashioned catch-up shorters from the end of last week, then I begin the descent into the depths of this week's hell.

Damning with faint praise:

Megan has found a new way to be unprofessional; mistakes with fonts. For some reason when she blockquotes now her entire post switches to the font, margins, and spacing within the blockquote. Sure, it's a small thing, but the woman's title includes the word "editor". She either doesn't look at her work or doesn't give a shit.
As to the post itself, Megan seems to think banks can save themselves by becoming real estate companies, and that everyone with a bad mortgage would rather be homeless.

Do you mind if I rant a minute?:

Oh, boy.

Here's my position on what ended the Great Depression: I don't know.

And therefore no one else in the world does, either.

I also think it's possible that nothing the government did ended the Great Depression. It may be that, like Topsy, it "just growed".

I think it's possible Bugs Bunny ended the recession by reinvigorating the cartoon carrot and bullet market. It may be that every time Elmer Fudd took a shot the unemployment rate dropped a hundredth of a percent, we'll just never know.
And, ummmm, then the font, margins, and spacing change for absolutely no reason. It's like she started speaking in an accent mid conversation for no discernible reason.

Once again, I am driven to quote the immortal Charles Murtaugh: the universe is not here to please you. Fiscal stimulus will make the economy grow faster, or it will not make the economy grow faster, without regard to whether taxation is theft or universal healthcare is an immediate moral imperative. I doubt I'm the only one who is wearied by the way so many of the participants in the debate seem to already know the answer they want, and are merely looking for a set of questions that will get them there most expeditiously. Was there ever a time when people didn't think that tricky economic conundrums could, or should, be used to "prove" that their personal values about the level of taxation and spending are a scientific fact? Probably not. Still, given how important this question is, I wish more people would treat this as a problem to be solved, a question to be answered, rather than a battle to be won.

Just because people's lives are being held in the balance of this artificial debate Megan and allied ideologues are trying to force into the conversation about how to begin fixing the mess Megan's fellow travelers created doesn't mean anyone should act like they give a shit. Megan is totally being dispassionate, when she isn't calling anyone who isn't as confused as she is a jerk.
In any case, as always, do as she says, not as she does. Human failings are for the little people.

A tale of two theories:

Here we see Megan at her conservative pundit "best", trying to use the knowledge imparted by Spencer's comment (Update: That's not our Spencer, I withdraw my lazy semi-endorsement.) to her previous post on the Great Depression as evidence she's totally right. Sure, he was explaining that we do pretty much know why the Great Depression ended, that she's wrong to claim it wasn't over before our entry into WWII, and that a number of FDR's policies demonstrably worked, but all that just adds up to why she doesn't credit him directly when dishonestly restating his words.
Well, maybe not dishonestly, perhaps she's just utterly lost.

If you take money out of the system in taxes, and spend it, you've created barely any stimulus at all, because more than 90% of that money would have been spent by private parties. (At our current savings rates, close to 100%). It's borrowing the money and spending it that creates the stimulative effects.

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but that seems like an amazingly stupid thing to say.
Oops, but that means I'm insulting Krugman.

I'm not really saying anything much different from Paul Krugman, though I'm much more cautious about the marvelous benefits of World War II spending than he is.

Daaaaaaaaa-uuuuuuuuu-iiiii? Gaaaaabbbaabababababbaaaaa?
Are we sure Megan actually speaks english, and not some bizarrely similar entirely personal language where words have radically different meanings?

What do you mean by "New Deal"?:

When you ask whether fiscal stimulus shortened the Great Depression, you should be simply asking

1) Was there a fiscal stimulus
2) Did it shorten the Great Depression?

*blinkblink*

It is not arguable, in my mind, that FDR's biggest contribution to fixing the mess was fixing the banks, not building dams. But the national narrative puts the FDIC somewhere down there with paying writers for taking oral histories of sharecroppers, and elevates the massive public works projects to center stage.

Because in a nation crippled by unemployment FDR's projects put millions to work building the underpinnings of the national infrastructure we now take for granted? Stupid me, I'm thinking about the little people again. They plain old don't matter except as props. The only important thing is whether financiers were living the high life.

It's also important to point out--which I've done, like, eighty times--that this is not an argument over works projects. It's a technical question: how much does fiscal stimulus do to counteract a really nasty depression? This matters in part because we're not going to build the Hoover Dam again, and we don't need to--we have social insurance to deal with unemployment in a way that we didn't then, and so we don't need to create make work in order to keep people from starving.

Sure, Megan sneeringly dismisses all government works projects as "make-work", and considering the state of our nation's infrastructure we essentially do need to build the Hoover Dam again, but if we give the unemployed a crust of stale bread every day for a couple months the problem will fix itself. Just don't make the mistake of getting caught up in worrying over the little people.

This is getting long, so I'll brb with part two of the catch-up.

Sort of Off Topic

I know, I've been slacking. Busy n not in the mood for her highness.
But I have to ask, did Bobby Jindal actually mock money for volcano monitoring systems in his rebuttal to Obama tonight?
The Governor of Louisiana thinks disaster preparation is a topic to be belittled?
I.... find that difficult to believe, yet there it is. Wow.

Your Narcissist is Showing

Megan is talking about grading (wtf?!?! why?! The last thing she should want is for someone to think of analytic objective evaluation when they're reading her blog!)

It's mostly boring shit. She's actually discussing whether or not to judge people on merit or ability, an analysis that most of us knock-out in about five minutes when we're twelve. Naturally, Megan's wording is rather telling:

Is it fair to set the bar higher for me than for someone who isn't as capable? Or vice versa? Is it fair to send the signal to employers that I wasn't up to scratch even when I did objectively better work than some other student?

Who uses the first person singular pronouns when discussing hypotheticals? Don't people usually use "you" or "they" or, occasionally, "one?" No, not me! When I'm imagining a situation where I'm better than others, I like to make sure that I can connect with it! I wouldn't want the point of how superior I am to be lost on YOU the reader, now would I?

Maybe. After all, one of the things that employers and graduate schools are presumably looking for is ability to exert oneself consistently.

Alright, first of all, the word "maybe" DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN ENTIRE FUCKING SENTENCE YOU FUCKING GRAMMAR ASSASSIN!!!!! YOU'RE A FUCKING ENGLISH MAJOR! NO AMOUNT OF BRAINS OR WORK CAN ACCOUNT FOR THE FAILURE TO LEARN THE FUND-A-FUCKING-MENTALS OF THE FUCKING LANGUAGE YOU PURPORT TO "MASTER!"

....okie... deep breath, Toast.... we've made real good progress with our shrink.... c'mon man... come on down....

phew

ok... moving on...

Anyway, who's fucking surprised that Megan thinks that employers aren't looking to hire people that actually know shit? Clearly, it's not a phenomenon our muse has encountered directly. That must mean she views herself as a "hard working" type. I wonder how she figures that?. I guess it is difficult for her to throw out the occasional "rich people shouldn't be allowed to literally eat the poor" posts. Man, she really slaves away.

I Really Can't Add Anything

It's surreal the way I'm watching all you people drown when the lifeline is right there. This market dive was not only predictable, it was predicted. By me. By Peter Schiff. By Marc Faber. By Ron Paul. By Jim Rogers. By Lew Rockwell.

One of the first Doctors to figure out that washing hands before surgery would save lives was ridiculed by his colleagues who refused to even consider that they were actually causing disease. He would stand outside the hospital screaming "Wash your hands!" until he was horse.
Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis was not only drummed out of the profession, but he was put in an insane asylum by his family where he died.

Megan is John Law in drag. Obama is rapidly becoming the American Robert Mugabe. Paper money pushers have done this to us and history will not look kindly on them. Get out while you still can.
Buy gold. Buy guns. These tremors are a prelude, not aftershocks.

Posted by Bearded Spock | February 20, 2009 1:16 PM