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 plain English, and we would very rarely speak in plain …
Category: politics
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 explain away unwanted evidence, as for example Chomsky explaining that …
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 buses here at 1515 Broadway and sending as many 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 for a town hall meeting with President Obama. Shooting Oct. …
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 up another warmist for inadequate faith. A lot of blogs …
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 way is to see what happens to those estimates when …
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.
Rigging the vote
Why bother rigging the vote; even the tea party supports unsustainable welfare, affirmative action, social security, and healthcare programs. I fear the vote rigging is merely over who gets the gravy, since the major function of government has become handing out the gravy to true believers.
After mass democracy
A couple of hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom was that democracy with broad voter participation was unstable, violent, ruinous, and short lived. A hundred years or so ago the world moved to mass democracy, universal franchise. Many people predicted that this would result in the masses trying to vote themselves rich, resulting in social and economic collapse Well guess what. The masses have been trying to vote themselves rich, social collapse is under way, and economic collapse looms. The …