September 29, 2008 archive

I can hardly make sense of it anymore.

Things seem to be spiraling faster and faster circling around a black hole of an energy drain.

Trouble in River City my friends.

I had my dad insist tonight there was a deal, but there’s not nor is there any indication that this one is a good one-

It’s not $700 billion in a lump (a made up number anyway).  It’s subject to legislative and judicial review.  It’s punitive in terms of executive compensation.  It will purchase equity except that most of it won’t.

Or so people say, but they’re the same people who said things were ok in the first place so why should I trust them?

Krugman is mildly in favor, Sirota thinks it’s a sellout.  Pelosi is peddling that there isn’t enough discipline among House Democrats and who knows?  I don’t think I’d vote for it.  Calls are said to be running 100 to 1 against.  It is a Republican policy meltdown and is correctly labeled that way in public perception.

Notable items on my agenda that are missing or unclear is where is the attempt to shore up the underlying asset rather than the 40x leveraged derivative?  I think that would be a heck of a lot cheaper.  And why do you want to maximize buy in?  This is not fucking flood insurance.

I don’t get the urgency either.  The fact is that given our actual economic activity we ought to be trading 2000 points lower and it will happen sooner or later.  Forty days is going to change things a lot.

Or not.  It’s very disappointing to hear dial backs in the urgent program of public works and infrastructure projects including green energy.  How come we’re not spending an Iraq Occupation on them?

And Chinese me no Chinese, someone who owes you a billion or 2 is a thief, a trillion or 14 a valued customer.

Or in for a penny in for a pound and as any fool knows a pint is a pound the world around and if you’ve ever paid $2.50 for a beer you know how true this is.

Earlier today, at the Yokohama Bunka Gymnasium, the legendary Great Muta won the All-Japan Triple Crown chamionship.  Muta, the alter ego of the also legendary Mutoh Keiji, added to their belt total, as Mutoh is the New Japan Pro Wrestling IWGP Heavyweight champion and also holds an independent tag team title.  IE: It’s five belt Mutoh/Muta!

Eighteen months ago, when the Department of Interior began talking about removing the gray wolf from the endangered species list, and leaving control of its population to the states, eco-advocates sent out a warning: if this goes forward, wolves will be eradicated. They were sneered at, called alarmists and ignored. Six months ago, on March 28, the wolf was removed from the endangered list in the northern Rockies,

The critics judged right. Nobody who knows the history of the wolf in the United States should be surprised. The government’s decision to delist might as well have included transportation to wolf country and free ammo for a few street gangs. The operative word for what occurred: slaughter. So the feds stepped back in last week.

You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to have your blood boiled by what Julie Cart writes about that slaughter in today’s Los Angeles Times. “Sportsmen” on snowmobiles rampaged through the area. They bragged that they’d shot a wolf. Some had them stuffed:  

And that’s a pleasant way to describe the bailout in the works by the corrupt politicians of the United States, these narcissistic, craven sellouts, who couldn’t bring themselves to stop their own country from invading another and killing 100,000s and displacing millions more, who couldn’t stop their military interrogators and gestapo-like spies from torturing thousands. These moral zeros are about to send something just under a trillion dollars to the scions of finance capital. These latter have lived high off the hog, raking in millions, and in some cases billions of dollars, off a pyramid credit scheme, leaving us — the suckers — to pay up for a generation or more when their con finally went spectacularly bust, unraveling into a wilderness of economic “instruments” and “derivatives” so convoluted and intertwined that no one could ever untangle it.