How Close Were We To A Meltdown?

According to insider masters of the universe economists, pretty fucking close:

What would be the dollar cost of not bailing out Wall Street? Try a number north of $30 trillion. (The awful math is detailed below.) That’s why Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke were so scared last week. And, yes, I think “scared” isn’t too strong a word. You don’t think they convened an emergency nighttime meeting of congressional leaders and then walked out with something close to a blank check for a trillion bucks because they thought we were headed for an outright recession, even a fairly nasty one?

Nope, I think they believed, and got Congress to believe, that the economy was on the verge of something far worse than the worst downturn in a generation. And that is why they went with the so-called nuclear option: the biggest financial bailout in history. In the words of JPMorgan Chase economist James Glassman, “Thankfully, we and our friends around the world who are watching the economic lights come on will never know where events would have led, if the clock had not stopped [last] Thursday afternoon…. Last week’s events made the 1987 stock market crash look like child’s play.”

It’s looking more and more like we dodged an ICBM… for now.

The author argues that there were non-governmental pro-market solutions to the growing problem, but that the time to enact those solutions was last year, before the system reached critical mass:

But what would have been a smart, free-market plan in August 2007 or March of this year isn’t enough for right now. Just as government created the environment for the credit crisis, it failed to enact quick solutions. The situation has gone critical. It’s time for shock and awe.

And who is to blame for this clusterfuck? Many interwoven factors, but some really stand out as primary causes.

We intend to keep his money in an S&P 500 index fund, money markets, commodities, and foreign currencies. He plans to gamble a small percentage on short selling multinationals which operate in demographically shifting countries.

Read Full Post »

Sarah Palin Inspires Feminist Hate

I predicted that Sarah Palin’s most fevered foes would be the modern single urban childless feminist:

But Sarah Palin’s worst enemy is not the mincing liberal betaboy, oh no. It’s the childless, career-tracked, urban slut machine, government-as-daddy-and-husband-substitute, spinsterette. Palin shits grizzly-sized dung all over that lifestyle with her outdoorsiness, large brood, and prole tastes. The thing about her they really can’t swallow are her FIVE kids. There’s no better way to remind a hip clubgoing single chick in the city who loves to travel and sip pinot noir of her impending infertility and genetic obsolescence than with the image of a woman who’s chosen not to ignore her biological imperative in favor of playing the field indefinitely.

Palin makes blue state SWPLs nervous because she is the chill up their spines that they are being outbred into insignificance.

Commenter Sebastian Flyte forwarded a NY Sun article to me confirming my prediction:

“All of my women friends [editor’s note: Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and the fat friend Rosie O’Donnell], a week ago Monday, were on the verge of throwing themselves out windows,” an author and political activist, Nancy Kricorian of Manhattan, said yesterday. “People were flipping out. … Every woman I know was in high hysteria over this. Everyone was just beside themselves with terror that this woman could be our president — our potential next president.”

Ms. Kricorian allowed that she was among those driven to distraction, upon occasion, by Mrs. Palin’s nomination. “My Facebook status last Monday was, ‘Nancy is freaking out about Sarah Palin yet again,'” the writer said.

Facebook! Fuck her fiercely with a ferret. Here’s a Facebook status update for these freaked out feminists: “My life is a joke. A triviality. A nothing. A barren womb of emptiness. Politics is my religion substitute and gives me a belief to cling to when my life is a meaningless, mindless void of handbag shopping and mimosas.”

There. Much better.

“What I feel for her privately could be described as violent, nay, murderous, rage,” an associate editor at Jezebel, Jessica Grose, wrote just after the Republican convention wrapped up. “When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull.”

“I am shocked by the depths of my hatred for this woman,” another commenter, CJWeimar, wrote.

This is an endless font of humor. Recall what Devlin said about women who delay childbirth:

“Motherhood has always been the best remedy for female narcissism.”

When you have your own children to raise, the sight of a mother on stage at a political convention won’t fry your neural network with murderous impulses. This kind of acute self-absorption naturally places great emphasis on fighting those whose lifestyle choices mock your own.

“It is impossible for me not to read about her in the newspaper in the subway every morning on my way to work and not come into the office angry and wanting to kick things,” a commenter using the name ChampagneofBeers wrote. “My boxing class definitely helps.”

Oh christ, the stereotypical absurdity never ends. I can picture this broad in the latest trendy gymwear, huge oversized boxing gloves, grunting ridiculously while swinging like a tankgrrl at a punching bag and cursing red state women who rub her face in her failure with their large broods. I bet the next time she storms out of class fired up with righteous anger and belief in her jujitsu boxing skills, she makes the mistake of giving some homeless bum lip and winds up knocked out when he takes a swing at her.

Even some prominent figures admitted to being overcome by anti-Palin feelings. “I am having Sarah Palin nightmares,” an acclaimed playwright and writer, Eve Ensler, wrote on the Huffington Post.

Eve Ensler: divorced, ugly, 0 biological children.
She’ll need to call her next play “The Nobody Wants My Vagina Monologues”.

“I think a lot of women felt insulted by the idea you could just take any woman,” a longtime editor of women’s magazines, Bonnie Fuller, told The New York Sun. “A lot of women feel it was a very cynical decision. … What got some women’s backs up was the idea she didn’t earn her stripes. It’s been so hard for so many women to get ahead both in business and in the political worlds and she just seemingly slips in.”

Oh, Palin earned her stripes. The problem is that she didn’t earn the *right* stripes as dictated by the Loony Kommissars of the Crusty Cunt Revolution. Send her to the reeducation camps!

Ms. Fuller also said she and other women were troubled by Mrs. Palin’s decision to have her daughter, Bristol, 17, on stage at the Republican convention, despite news reports about her pregnancy.

Cute, young, pregnant teenagers drive these ugly shrikes right over the edge. How dare they not delay childbirth and devote a decade of their most fertile years to climbing the corporate ladder alongside the boys?

Ms. Grose posited that some of the anger was because Mrs. Palin, a former beauty pageant winner, resembled a high school homecoming queen. “She has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys’ game with her big guns and moose murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it,” Ms. Grose wrote.

Jealous much? High school never ends. Adults just dress up their status jockeying with social niceties.

“Their entire image of themselves is based on the fact that they are paving the way for women. What do they see? Women getting ahead, women being empowered who don’t agree with them,” Dr. Santy said.

Fear and ego are being disinterred for public scrutiny. The id monster emerges from the depths of its subconscious lair. And what do they fear most of all?

Judgment.

Palin’s attractivness, femininity, fertility, and “wrong” politics are the perfect storm to batter the psyches of the SWPL modern feminist. I have loved every minute of this national Rorschach test. It has paid truth to everything I’ve written about the blue state vaginacentric culture in which I swim and exploit for my own uses and pleasures. I hope it never ends.

To fathers everywhere I say: Continue sending your daughters to the big city in droves. I, and those like me, will be waiting.

Read Full Post »

Severing Risk And Reward

Mark Cuban had a good post on his blog regarding the financial sector meltdown and what to do about it:

If the government must step in and provide any sort of financing or guarantees for any part of a public company’s business, then all officers and directors lose all rights to severance pay and all outstanding vested or unvested options or warrants immediately become canceled. In the event the CEO of such corporation is not fired, but instead chooses to step down voluntarily, then the last 12 months of earnings is considered to be an interest free loan which the CEO must pay back over no more than a 10 year period.

Honestly, i dont think it would have changed the actions of CEOs who have been bailed out. They would have thought it “couldnt happen to them”. But once it happened a couple of times to a couple of big company CEOs, it would be in the decision making process of every CEO running a huge financial company.

Making it harder for executives to walk away with huge sums of money after deep-sixing their companies into the ground and fucking over the taxpayers who ultimately get stuck with the bill will mean they’ll be extra careful about taking absurd risks and ignoring market constraints (i.e. subprime loans). Properly incentivized CEOs will still take risks, but they’ll do it within the bounds of reality. It’s time for a return to the fundamentals — 20% down payment on big ticket items like houses.

Some would argue that turning CEO golden parachutes into lead zeppelins would restrict the market for available and talented CEOs. I agree with Mark Cuban that this is ridiculous. Potential CEOs don’t get into the business of running companies primarily for the money; they do it for the power.

Read Full Post »

Fannie Mae Lessons

Bailing out these big financial firms may be the right move for a short term fix, but it was a mistake in the long term.

Pop quiz: When a person is shielded from the consequences of his failures is he

a. more likely or

b. less likely

to repeat the same mistakes?

Nevermind the current fluctuations of the market. The rot has metastasized. Coercing or otherwise easing the way for these lenders to approve loans to huge swaths of heretofore unqualified buyers was bound to ricochet. Expect to see another crisis of even greater magnitude in the near future.

Lesson not learned.

One of the ugly universal truths of humanity is encapsulated in the stark equation proximity + diversity = war. Increase the variables, increase the carnage.
The weapons of this war are not always guns. Sometimes they are backroom dealings, status saving lies, ideological purges, redistributive taxation Danegeld, and deliberately arcane financial instruments.

Begun, the clone wars have.

Read Full Post »

Sarah Palin, The Mirror

This made me laugh:

Yes, Sarah Palin didn’t know what [the Bush Doctrine] is. But neither does Charlie Gibson. And at least she didn’t pretend to know — while he looked down his nose and over his glasses with weary disdain, sighing and “sounding like an impatient teacher,” as the Times noted. In doing so, he captured perfectly the establishment snobbery and intellectual condescension that has characterized the chattering classes’ reaction to the mother of five who presumes to play on their stage.

Memo to Charlie Gibson: Never open your mouth unless you know the shot.

I no longer care about Sarah Palin’s qualifications for the job of VP. I’m just enjoying the overreaching hate she elicits. Not that I would know anything about that…

Read Full Post »

How Not To Win The War On Terror

Tens of thousands of Iraqis could come to U.S. in ’09.

The United States expects to admit a minimum of 17,000 Iraqi refugees in fiscal 2009, which begins October 1, the department’s senior coordinator for refugees said. Thousands more Iraqis and their family members could arrive via a special visa program for people who worked for the United States or its contractors.

I’m absolutely POSITIVE none of these war-torn, culturally alien refugees will be nursing a grudge against us. I hope we assume full control of Iraq’s oil wells in return for our generosity. If you’re going to be accused of imperialism, may as well enjoy the benefits of imperialism.

“I think you’ll see the U.S. government admitting over the course of fiscal 2009 tens of thousands of Iraqis into the United States,” coordinator James Foley told reporters.

I had a Welsh roommate — a very smart guy who was an astrophysicist and enjoyed red wine and jazz — who wanted to work fulltime for NASA once his contract was up, but the obstacles presented by our formal immigration laws were too restrictive, and so he had no choice but to move back to Europe. He’d have made an excellent and productive American citizen. Little did he know an invasion of Wales would have substantially smoothed his citizenship process!

It’s not often one gets to say he was witness to his country’s dissolution.

But it is still lower than the number some other countries have taken. Sweden, a country of 9 million people, has admitted over 40,000 Iraqis since 2003.

This is what happens to a country when its native men relinquish their masculinity. What are the odds on Sweden existing as it is currently constituted in 50 years?

Read Full Post »

Sarah Palin’s Masculine Digit Ratio

I mentioned in the comments over at Half Sigma’s blog that if the rumors of Sarah Palin’s adultery were true it wouldn’t surprise me since she has a masculine jawline which suggests higher levels of testosterone than the average woman. More testosterone means more sexual impulsivity. Curious, I looked for a photo that would show her index finger to ring finger digit ratio. Here’s the clearest one I could find:

looking like a woman, feeling like a man.

The evidence is in — her right hand’s ring finger is considerably longer than her index finger. Sarah Palin was exposed to higher than normal amounts of testosterone in her mother’s womb. This would go a long way to explaining her love of non-metrosexual alpha men, caribou hunting, moose dressing, shooting, tattoos, having lots of sex, crushing her enemies, and her meteoric rise to the top of the manly world of Alaska politics. Bristol Palin probably inherited her mother’s strong libido.

Personally, I like Sarah Palin, mostly because her mere existence drives SWPLs crazy with hate. I wouldn’t be attracted to her as girlfriend material, though. I prefer my women sweet, girly and feminine, not hard-driving and bloodthirsty. I would be suspicious if a girl I was dating told me she liked hunting or wanted to run for public office.

PS: This will be my last post on Sarah Palin. She embodies a lot of modern cultural and psychosocial baggage which is why I’ve been writing about her. I won’t write much about politics until election day. Our prediction: Obama by fewer than 100,000 total votes. The red blue electoral map will look nearly identical to the previous two elections. Same old same old… for now. Reconquista!

Read Full Post »