God Love The Onion

Wise Words

That's Entertainment

It's gettin' fun now, by golly.

Bombing of a Mosque in Florida.

Joe Arpaio = Sheriff of Nottingham.

Arizona threatens retaliation for boycott.

Yay, Germany - I think

The Germans decided to ban the practice of Naked Short Selling when it comes to European Gov't debt, and a lot of the snakes on streets named Fleet and Wall have their panties in a bunch because of it.

The way I understand it is that short selling is a necessary aspect of keeping the markets "honest" - or at least as honest as some of these assholes are willing to let it be.  But anyway, shorting is a time-honored device that lets me borrow shares of a company's stock, sell them at a price below current market value, and then buy them back when the market price goes down.  Usually, "shorting" is a bet that the market in general, or the price for that particular stock is heading down.  And it's a good thing to have because it can be a safety valve.  Properly applied, short selling can help prevent bubbles.  But if you do it on a big enough scale, you can actually force the price(s) down, and then shorting becomes just another means of manipulation and speculation.  And that's where Naked Shorting comes in.

Naked Shorting (to my mind) is really just a statement that you want the price of something to be a lot lower.  You've not borrowed the stock or the bond or whatever - and so you're not risking your own money- but you're saying you'll sell it at a price well short of the current asking price if others are interested in buying it.  This creates a kind or impromptu consortium of players which dramatically multiplies your market power.

So I'm a little uneasy about shorting because like any other useful tool it can be a weapon of malice, causing undue harm to good companies (and the PEOPLE who make up those companies) solely in the name of turning a few extra profit points for guys who never actually produced anything in their lives.  Don't get me wrong - bankers and brokers are necessary to a healthy economy, but when they elevate themselves above it, they become threats to the system and have to be beaten back.

When you sell something that doesn't belong to you, we call it fraud and you're supposed to go to jail for that.

The Awesome Power Of Rationization

The Pro-Gunners all seem nice and reasonable when it comes to abiding by the law banning all guns in order to attend their convention. I have to assume not all Pro-Gunners feel the same as the people in this clip, but these few say they're just fine with the kind of gun control restrictions at their convention site that their organization went apeshit over when WashDC tried to ban handguns. And the irony is completely lost on them. The real kicker is the guy at the end. He actually says he's more worried that the Anti-Gunners might bring guns and make trouble; and so, in the interest of everybody's safety, disarming everybody is a good idea.

Religiosity

A Catholic nun and longtime administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix was reassigned in the wake of a decision to allow a pregnancy to be ended in order to save the life of a critically ill patient.

The decision also drew a sharp rebuke from Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, who indicated the woman was “automatically excommunicated” because of the action.

Neither the hospital nor the bishop’s office would address whether the bishop had a direct role in her demotion. He does not have control of the hospital as a business but is the voice of moral authority over any Catholic institution operating in the diocese.

The actions involving the administrator, mostly taken within the past couple of weeks, followed a last-minute, life-or-death drama in late 2009. The patient had a rare and often fatal condition in which a pregnancy can cause the death of the mother.

Sister Margaret McBride, who had been vice president of mission integration at the hospital, was on call as a member of the hospital’s ethics committee when the surgery took place, hospital officials said. She was part of a group of people, including the patient and doctors, who decided upon the course of action.

So, if you're a kid-fucking priest, the church takes great pains to protect you and send you from parish to parish to spread your shit.  But if you're a nun who takes a little initiative in an attempt to salvage something less than completely fucked up out of a situation that's nothin' but fucked up, then they come down on you like a truckload of rocks.

Oil Spill

BP has resisted entreaties from scientists that they be allowed to use sophisticated instruments at the ocean floor that would give a far more accurate picture of how much oil is really gushing from the well.

"The answer is no to that," a BP spokesman, Tom Mueller, said on Saturday. "We're not going to take any extra efforts now to calculate flow there at this point. It's not relevant to the response effort, and it might even detract from the response effort."

There's a fairly simple rule about Project Management and Problem Solving that applies universally.  It goes like this: If you don't appreciate the full scope of the task, you are almost certain to fail.

2 probabilities - BP knows it's worse than they're saying it is publicly; and they're gambling that the bulk of the oil will stay below the surface, which gives them some plausible deniability. 

I guess I worry that the "anti-oilers" are seen as overstating the problem. If the catastrophe then doesn't quite materialize the way they say it will, there's an opportunity for the "pro-oilers" to whip up a backlash, and we're right back to Drill Baby Drill.

Lastly, what happens to the booms and the sandbag dikes and to the oil blob itself when there's a storm?

Solution Of The Month part 2

Conflation

As always, nothing happens all by itself.  Everything happens in some kind of context; concomitantly;  in conjunction with...etc.  So the oil flood south of New Orleans comes at a time when the dead zone (also just south of NO - and the 2nd largest in the world) is gearing up for the summer season as the Mississippi dumps a jillion tons of animal waste, lawn care chemicals, farm fertilizers, parking lot runoff, and partially treated human shit into the Gulf of Mexico.

From discovery.com

From mindfully.org

I guess we can hope that this disaster contains the usual 30% sawdust-as-dramatic-filler-material that our Press Poodles love to pimp to us.  Or maybe we shouldn't hope for that at all.  What if the media types tell us it's gonna be huge, and then it isn't so huge, and then we get the feeling that this isn't as bad as it actually is?  We can all go back to pretending that we're not driving ourselves over the cliff.

A Fitting Tribute to Ken Cuccinelli

The Coochster is taking lots of heat.

Listen to the mp3, and follow along with the lyrics below.

As published in Richmond Times Dispatch (by Bart Hinkle 5-7-2010)

I am the very model of a mad Attorney General,
My politics are paleoconservative and visceral --
I'll sue the pants off Democrats and wreck their plans historical
With writs and briefs that I'll compose, tendentious and rhetorical . . . .
I'll stop environmentalists from regulating greenhouse gas
By proving carbon dioxide does not have an atomic mass --
That solar-radiative forcing's nothing but a liberal plot
And dendroclimatology is superstitious tommyrot.
I'll prove the EPA is overrun with Commie militants
Who haven't shown a single lick of scientific diligence --
In short, in matters legal, ecological, and federal
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.

I'll stop the federales, too, from passing mandates medical --
Our Founding Fathers would have found them utterly heretical:
There's nothing in the Constitution that allows the government
To take upon itself an act of such obscene aggrandizement.
Our hospitals and clinics do not need yet more bureaucracy
The whole scheme is most antithetical toward democracy;
ObamaCare could mean as well a case of hip dysplasia
Might put your grandma on a gurney, bound for euthanasia.
The situation's reached the point that it is nearly critical --
And so I'll sue to save the life of our corpus political.
In short, in matters Hippocratic, curative, and medical,
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.

I'll save our universities as well from filthy sodomites;
The colleges have got no grounds to grant those fellows equal rights.
The legislature has declared they constitute a second class --
Though some might find that attitude as dated as Depression glass
I do not think we need more men who know how to redecorate
Or women dressed like lumberjacks -- God meant us all to procreate.
It's right there in Leviticus: Verse seventeen of chapter eight
Requires colleges to let their faculties discriminate.
I simply want to guarantee our young men's masculinity
By keeping Sapphic types far from the commonwealth's vicinity
In short, in matters non-Euclidian or homosexual
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.

I also like to think myself a rather high-browed classisist
And artifacts of history are something I cannot resist
But images of Virtue that expose her breast and mamelon
Are too risqué -- they're apt to turn the concupiscent rabble on.
There's nothing more erotic than the Iliad or the Odyssey
And so I'll substitute a pin that manifests more modesty
(One mustn't risk the chance that some poor lad's Attic exuberance
Could lend itself to lusty thoughts and some turgid protuberance).
I'm simply trying to keep things clean, I don't believe in censorship --
But won't go down in history as the man who let a nipple slip.
In short in matters glandular, lactiferous, and sensual
I am the very model of a mad Attorney General.

Today's Quote

Something politicians might wanna consider.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact. -George Eliot

Fallout

We haven't heard much about it lately, but apparently there's still some effort to get back at the US for our high-handed approach to "fighting terrorism" during the Bush administration.

From Harper's Mag online.

I use the term "get back at" because I think these attempts are more about grandstanding for public consumption than they're about justice and substance.  That said tho', the Spanish seem to have a real bug up their butts about it.  And it wouldn't exactly hurt my feelings if somebody from Bush's team took a fall.

I think it's more than a little interesting that not one of the former Bush officials has ever gone out of the country to do any kind of victory lap anywhere but Saudi Arabia.

On Conspiracy Theories

There was a thread over at The Agonist today, trying to make some sense of the recent Flash Crash.  One of the commenters asked the author to "dumb it down a bit" because he didn't understand all of the jargon. The author then provided what I consider the best insight on conspiracy theories I've heard so far.

Paraphrasing:

You see why there is constant demand for alternative conspiracy theories. People at least have to understand the terminology. A conspiracy theory would be more credible to me if it contained concepts which a layman couldn't understand; but they never do; because the theory has to survive in a story telling market.

Brilliant.

Ten Years Of Hell

Whether or not you believe it, I'm not always looking for dark clouds that surround the silver linings.  There has been some decent economic news of late and I really do wanna be up and enthused, but I'm not going to be sucked in by the happy talk that managers and bureaucrats throw at us every other day.

The Credit/Debt Monster is still on the loose, and the bail out schemes for Wall Street and Greece (and the rest of the EU), plus the Stimulus Package (the 2nd half of which hasn't even started yet) are still way too recent for anybody with any sense or credibility to make a good assessment.  So we're operating on the assumption that "we're on the right track" and "things will be back to normal soon".  Where have we heard that before?

Here's a little ditty from Rupert Street Journal from last month that passes on to us exactly what the Gov't told the "reporter".  But there's a gimmick the lenders use when reporting  problems with these loans that actually helps them under-report the loans in default by a factor of up to 5.  Where most of the loans showing up in these statistics are the "traditional" ones held by 20- and 30-Somethings for loans they took out to go to "traditional" institutions, the real story in the last couple of years is that a huge amount of money has been borrowed by a much wider range of people to attend the non-traditional For-Profit schools like Univ of Phoenix and Capella Univ which have been enjoying a massive boom.  Any guesses on what those default rates are?  Take a look at this episode from Frontline. At about the 40 minute mark, the picture of our future servitude comes into very sharp focus.

And Jesus wept.

Wastefulness

Ya wanna know what Government Waste really looks like?

Here it is.

The wrangling over Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's investigation of a climate scientist continues...

After indicating last week that it would comply with a subpoena sent by the AG, demanding documents relating to the work of former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann, the university is now equivocating. "Our intention is to comply but we are looking at some options," a UVA spokeswoman told theWashington Post yesterday.