Category: Uncategorized

The Obama administration is certainly living up to its comedic potential – Obama’s ignorance and illogic even manages to stun Paul Krugman:

I was startled last week when Mr. Obama, in an interview with Bloomberg News, questioned the case for limiting financial-sector pay: “Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football players?”

That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.

Surely? I wouldn’t bet on it, given the growing amount of evidence to the contrary. And the special case of banking is irrelevant anyhow. The reason why we’re going to cap banking compensation and not the compensation of entrepeneurs and NFL players is that entrepeneurs and NFL players actually create value. They’re not being kept out of insolvency by forced contributions from the American taxpayer. No industry that receives hundreds of billions of taxpayer money should be permitted to pay more than the average American income in salary to its executives, much less the $18 billion in bonuses that was paid out in 2008.

And if those limits mean that banksters will stop banksting as they occasionally threaten, that’s great! The truth is America’s banksters don’t deserve a cap in their compensation so much as they merit a cap in their fat collective asses.

This comment from a Calculated Risk reader made me laugh: “That is truly one heartbreaking statement of staggering stupidity straight out of the mouth of the man who has finished shattering any hope I had that we could steer this ship back on course. I will and must admit, that I was totally taken in, hook line and sinker by this fraud. Im quite disappointed in myself, although my only other option would have been to not vote at all.”

Well, better late than never. He is far from the only disenchanted Obama voter. I assume we can soon look forward to Obama attempting to demonstrate that he’s a big NFL fan… with about the same success he had with his bowling.

This is your weekly open NFL thread. I feel pretty good about the Vikings this week. Not just because they’re playing Detroit, but because Peter King picked against them.

AA Gill on the devolution of the English Rose:

[N]othing could be worse than English girls when they make an effort, dressed up for a night out: it’s then that they reach the heights of precipitous frightfulness. The clacking cankles. The tortured hair. The evil clown’s make-up. Predatory breasts, like pink water bombs. Flapping arms and glistening chins, and second-division mouths. The farmyard aggression and the zoo sex. It’s not just a class thing; it’s not only chavvy ladettes in the provinces. Look at the state of the totty tumbling out of Boujis, or waving chipped-nailed fingers at Glastonbury. Go to any £1,000-a-head charity ball and see the English memsahib, 3st above her fighting weight, swagged in a gypsy’s shower curtain, with a barnet that might have been spun in a sugary centrifuge. The granny jewellery and the blue eye shadow, the unhumpable hell of them all.

Impressive, deeply impressive indeed. Makes one downright proud to be an American. Although, one has to note that on the very rare occasions that the English get it right, or rather, the two occasions named Kate Beckinsale and Elizabeth Hurley, they do a rather good job.

According to my calculations, following the failure of the 93rd and 94th banks this year, the DIF is in the red somewhere between -3.6 billion and -13.3 billion, depending upon the difference between FDIC-estimated losses and actual losses. That multiple was 1.95 in 2008 and Q1 2009, but thanks to the special assessment in the second quarter, it fell to 1.69 in the last report. There will be another assessment in the third quarter, but regardless, it’s clear that if the DIF hasn’t run out yet, it’s going to before the end of the year.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said Friday her agency may tap its $500 billion credit line with the U.S. Treasury to replenish its deposit insurance fund, though she appeared cautious about doing so.

“We are carefully considering all options” including borrowing from the Treasury, Ms. Bair said Friday after a speech in Washington.

Ms. Bair has already warned banks that they may face an assessment increase to bolster the fund. Friday, she said there are also other little-known options available to the agency, including requiring banks to prepay assessments. The FDIC board of directors will meet at the end of this month to consider how to replenish the fund, she said.

Two observations. If they think they’re going to need $500 billion on tap, that would imply the failure of an additional 1,200 banks, (or at least the depository percentage equivalent), since the failure of 119 banks has eaten up the $52 billion in the DIF at the beginning of 2008. 1,200 is 15 percent of all the remaining depository institutions in the USA. An article in the SF Chronicle today may help explain where some of those bank failures are going to come from:

“Next year, many option ARM payments will begin to readjust, slamming borrowers with dramatically higher monthly mortgage bills. Analysts say that could unleash the next big wave of foreclosures – and home-loan data show that the risky loans were heavily used in the Bay Area…. First American shows more than 54,000 option ARMs issued here with a value of about $30.9 billion.”

Perhaps $500 billion just the proverbial Big Number meant to reassure the public. Either way, the fiction of the fund has been exploded. The second thing that springs to mind is this: how high would bank fees have to be if they ever tried to pay back that much money?

56 Mounds View Meerkats (1-0)
36 Greenfield Grizzlies (0-1)

89 Judean Front (1-0)
60 Masonville Marauders (0-1)

67 Valders Valkyries (1-0)
64 Burns Redbeards (0-1)

83 Bane Silvers (1-0)
44 Alamo City Spartans (0-1)

67 Black Mouth Curs (1-0)
63 Winston Reverends (0-1)

It’s great to see the Meerkats start off the season with a win, but it’s a bit annoying to face Nate while having to choose between having one of my starting RBs face the Baltimore or the Pittsburgh defense. I’m going to go with Sproles over Forte operating on the assumptions that a) Cutler will turn the ball over more than Rivers, and, b) Sproles wants to keep Tomlinson off the field. Just one receiving TD, that’s all I ask from the little guy this week.

John Scalzi attempts to explain, again, why established writers are seldom interested in reading the work of those hoping to break through the publishing barrier:

Dear currently unpublished/newbie writers who spend their time bitching about how published/established writers are mean because they won’t read your work/introduce you to their agent/give your manuscript to their editor/get you a job on their television show/whatever other thing it is you want them to do for you:

A few things you should know….

It’s ironic that Scalzi has to point this out so often, considering that he does more for beginning writers with his Big Idea posts than any writer not named The Original Cyberpunk. My reasons for not reading unpublished fiction are a little different, however. First, I simply don’t have the time. I don’t even read much good published fiction these days; I prefer to spend my reading time on history and economics. For example, yesterday afternoon I was reading Bernanke’s The Great Depression, about which more will be said anon, and finished with Demosthenes’s Orations as the nightcap. I’m not saying I don’t plow through my share of mind candy, having just read Conn Iggledon’s four Emperor books last week, but unless a novel is particularly good or original, I find that I’m less interested than I used to be.

Second, after two spells on the Nebula novel jury, a year participating in the Critters Workshop, and six months working as the de facto gatekeeper for a fantasy publisher, I never, ever, want to read any new writer’s unpublished fiction ever again. Still less do I feel like arguing with a writer over why my opinion of his writing, which he sought out in the first place, is wrong. If you think much of the fiction that is published today is pretty awful, you’re correct. It is nevertheless markedly superior to the stuff that is being rejected. I don’t care if you think your first scribblings are brilliant or not, the probabilities dictate otherwise and I’m quite willing to swap the chance to be the first to recognize an unpublished masterpiece for the privilege of not having to read three dozen attempted crimes against the reading public.

There are some talented writers out there who are just beginning their literary careers. I occasionally read them over at the Friday Challenge and wouldn’t mind publishing two or three of them someday if I ever find myself in a position to do so. If you want advice and constructive criticism, I strongly recommend participating in the activities there. However, since I don’t use an agent and at least half the publishers in the States and UK would rather chew off their fingers than sign a publishing contract with my name on it, you’d probably be much better off not doing things my way anyhow.

Now, I have certainly had the benefit of help from established writers such as Bruce Bethke, Joel Rosenberg, Lois Bujold, and Pat Wrede. But keep this in mind. At the time the OC was kind enough to look over my work and tell me to throw away my second novel attempt – which a few of you may be interested to know was set in the world of Summa Elvetica, albeit a version sans religion – I was already a nationally syndicated columnist. The lesson is: if you have the talent or the ambition, or preferably, both, and you are willing to be persistent, you’ll eventually find a way.

Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are frightened that someone, somewhere, might read Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort’s introduction to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life:

Back in June, I reported on this new sleazy tactic by Ray Comfort: he produced an abridged edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, and then had the gall to tag on a preface that he had written himself, full of the standard creationist misconceptions.

Sleazy? Gall? Only two cowardly charlatans who consistently run away from debating anyone they suspect will make them look like the hopeless buffoons they are could possibly have a problem with what is nothing more than an introduction to an abridged text. This is hardly the first time a book has been abridged or that an introduction is written by someone who a) isn’t the author, and b) doesn’t believe in the sacrosanct nature of the work being introduced, but of course, this is the sacred text of Saint Darwin of the Galapagos with which we are concerned here.

Obviously, it should be bound in gold plates and read only by the favored few possessed of the holy science degrees.

If this outrages you, then you’re not alone. There’s something we can do though. We can amass as many of these books as possible, remove the 50 page intro, and then donate perfectly good copies of ‘Origin of Species’ to schools, libraries, and Goodwill…. This is a shameful thing that Kirk Cameron and the Banana Guy are doing by altering another person’s book in order to push their agenda. But we can help to restore the book to how it was intended and keep young minds from being brainwashed by misinformation.

In case you’re not convinced yet that the New Atheists and their acolytes are genuine morons, read that last paragraph again while keeping in mind that these are the people who genuinely believe they are particularly gifted in the reason department. But regardless of whether Cameron and Comfort can produce effective arguments against evolution or not, and I have my own doubts on that score, they have not altered anyone’s book! Have they altered a single word from the text? Is the abridgment a dishonest cut-and-paste job? Do they pretend that their own words are Darwin’s? If not, then there is clearly nothing objectionable about what they are doing, no matter how effective or ineffective their arguments are.

Atheism may not be a religion, but Darwinism has clearly become one for some. And such sensitivity from the very people who proudly piss all over the sacred texts of other religions is astonishingly hypocritical.

Or at least, they try:

86 per cent of London lap dancing clubs in London provide ‘discreet receipts’ for expenses claims, allowing fees to be reclaimed without reveal what sort of establishment the money was spent in. Kat Banyard, the Fawcett Society researcher who wrote the report, described the sex industry as “a major threat to women’s equality at work” and said employers have failed to halt the trend.

She said: “The sex industry is increasingly targeting the corporate market, with lap dancing clubs marketing themselves as ideal venues to host meetings and client entertaining. Yet lap dancing clubs are a form of commercial sexual exploitation and fuel sexist attitudes towards women. Their use in a work context discriminates against female employees and undermines women’s status at work.

I don’t think Ms Banyard understands that declaring women are inferior, and, like children, incapable of making their own decisions, undermines women’s status at work and everywhere else far more than the ability to write-off lap-dancing expenses. If it’s acceptable to write off entertainment expenses, then who is Ms Banyard or anyone else to decide what is and what is not entertainment? No doubt this is somehow tied to the whining of professional women who don’t like it that the men in the office may occasionally go out and have a good time doing something that they don’t want to do. But they won’t be happy until the government institutes a law requiring all extra-office socializing to involve knitting or reading Twilight novels.

The irony, of course, is that the main reason strip clubs have become the entertainment venue of choice for professional men is that their traditional men’s-only clubs were outlawed by the same sort of women who are now pushing to make the strip clubs off-limits. Gentlemen, the feminist demands will never end, so your best bet is to refuse to give in from the start.