The most extreme of the “right wing” candidates are proposing measures far too feeble to make a difference. Consider for example, the mortgage scandal. Where is the candidate that suggests that to fix our financial system, the bums (the entire financial sector of wall street and the regulators to which they are connected by a revolving door) need to be fired for incompetence and imprisoned for fraud? A lot of …
Category: politics
The whitewash proceeds
One of the bigger criminals in the mortgage scam was Former Countrywide CEO Mozilo. The SEC has made a symbolic settlement with him and a couple of his accomplices for seventy two million dollars, not a dime of which he has to pay personally, and which would be peanuts even if he had to pay it personally. As a part of the agreement, all potentially embarrassing details associated with his …
The enormous mortgage-bond scandal
Felix Salmon has found an interesting document in the financial crisis inquiry hearings. It seems the banks not only knew that the loans they were selling to investors generally failed to meet underwriting standards, they were so careless as to have documents lying around saying so in plain English. Seems like they were a bank of morons. When I was involved in criminal conspiracies, none of us would write in …
Conspiracy
If you watch the reality show “survivorâ€, you will have noticed that in any power struggle, the winners usually have invisible connections – there is a group that conceals from outsiders that it is a group. Conspiracy tends to be a substantial part of any winning strategy. Conspiracies are therefore as common as cockroaches and crabgrass. Conspiracy theory has a deserved bad name because it tends to be invoked to …
More astroturf
The one nation rally was largely AstroTurf, students bussed by their teachers, unionists bussed by their unions. If it was not hundred percent AstroTurf, it was close enough to one hundred percent that it was hard to see the difference. Jon Stewart’s “March to keep fear alive” rally is looking like it will be more of the same. On the morning of October 30th, we’re loading up a fleet of …
Astroturf
Casting Call: It’s a Bit Part Playing a Concerned Ordinary Citizen Shannon Love found an interesting job listing at website advertising acting jobs: Casting Notice Search Results New Casting Notice Search 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next 158 Casting Notices found | Posted Date Casting Notice Summary 10/7/2010 PRESIDENT OBAMA TOWN HALL, DC PRESIDENT OBAMA TOWN HALL, DC MTV, BET, and CMT (prods.) are casting the audience …
Duelling Rallies
Verum Serum compares the rallies: Notice the mass of buses at the left of the “one nation†rally – those were unionists who were bused, government employees, rather than people who chose to turn up by their own individual decision. To judge by the number of buses, the “one nation†rally was 90% astroturf. Had they relied on voluntary unpaid attendance, the rally would have been invisibly tiny.
No Pressure 10:10
Murder children for a greener tomorrow. Most honest political ad of all time. By now, you have probably seen the No Pressure video, depicting the warmist wish fulfillment fantasy where they get to blow up the heretics. It starts with a warmist teacher blowing up skeptical children, then depicts every people of every part of society being blown up, then finally the revolution devours its children, with a warmist blowing …
Mao’s murders
Rummel estimated that Mao killed wrongfully killed seventy seven million, and the Black Book of Communism estimates sixty five million – but, of course, it is notoriously difficult to say what a totalitarian terror state based on slavery and mass murder is up to.  They called it an iron curtain because you could not see what was behind it. So how should we judge the accuracy of estimates? One good …
The cause of the crisis
Roissy wonders why the elites are so stuck on the obviously false idea of literal equality. Understood as a species of Christian belief, it makes sense, because the Christians believe that the most important part of the self is immaterial. If it’s immaterial, then material differences have nothing to do with it. So Christians are free to believe pretty much anything they want about this most important part of the self, unconstrained by material evidence of any sort.