Let them eat cake

Now Representative Frank, don't be greedy. Let's pass it along and make sure everyone
gets a piece.

I would find a new bar

Not because I'm offended by naked cartoons or bar owners who mistake themselves for artists:

Despite their political differences, Elliott admits to a bit of a crush on the Alaska governor. He began painting her smile and trademark glasses, he said, before filling in the details: a gun, red high heels, polar bear rug, rugged Alaska landscape and a scared moose. His daughter, who looks a little like Palin and does a great impression of her, served as model for the governor's body.

but there is something creepy about painting your daughter nude and then putting a politician's face on her. And I gotta be able to trust the guy making my drink, you know?

The Dark Bailout

For alm77, who called me a sexist pig

I'm not denying it at all.

Sometimes Christians don't, either

In a post called "Atheists don't study the bible," Ray Comfort* calls out an atheist:

Carl, Isaiah 7:14 says "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel" (italics added). If the word "virgin" had been mistranslated and should rather have read "young maiden," then that wouldn't be a "sign" from God. Every day, thousands of young maidens conceive. Only once has it happened to a virgin.

Even though I do think Jesus was born of a virgin and even though I accept Matthew's assertion that Isaiah was in some sense prophesying a coming savior, I think we need to be honest with the text and realize that that was not ALL Isaiah was prophesying.

Ahaz, King of Judah during the late the 8th century bc, was being attacked by the nations of Aram and Israel and was considering appealing to the Assyrians for military assistance. Isaiah visited him and told him to ask for a sign from God that things would work out for the best. He refused, at which point Isaiah, frustrated, gave this prophecy:

"Therefore** the Lord himself will give you a sign; Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son, and she will call his name 'Immanuel.' The child will eat butter and honey when he learns how to refuse evil and choose good. But before the child learns to refuse evil and choose good, the land that you hate will lose both her kings."
-- Isaiah 7:14-16 (my translation with help from King James)

You may recognize the first sentence, it's the Jesus prophecy that Comfort refers to. But what's the rest of this? Its words are plain enough: a young child is going to be born and before he's old enough to know right and wrong, maybe three years, both of Ahaz's tormentors would be dead.

The prophecy was given to Ahaz, at a specific time and for a specific purpose: he was to rely on God rather than on Assyrian arms, because his tormentors were temporary while the damage he could cause his kingdom would be permanent. Obviously in its immediate application, it's not remotely messianic except in the sense that God would deliver Judah (Immanuel means "God is with us"). We have no choice but to conclude that whatever sign this was to be, it applied primarily to the 7th century bc and would be fulfilled then, because otherwise the passage as written and the promise as given make no sense: what help is it to Ahaz's tenuous military situation that Jesus would be born 7 centuries hence?

Now, upon reading the whole passage, we have to ask, "What's the 'sign' that Ahaz would note?" Would it be that a virgin gave birth? It can't be, because Comfort correctly assures us that that's only happened once. Would it be that a young woman had a child? Nope, Comfort correctly notes that they have kids all the time. I submit to you at that the young woman and child is not "the sign" at all: the sign is that both kings would die, meaning that Ahaz had no need to seek outside military help***. The inclusion of the woman and child is simply a dramatic way of telling Ahaz when that would come to pass. The only way we can possibly attribute this to Jesus, born 700 years after Ahab and Isaiah were both dead, is because Matthew told us it was.

That being the case, I doubt that the virgin birth is meant to be a sign for us at all. While Matthew says it was done so what Isaiah said "might be fulfilled," he does not say that it's being done as a sign for us - he purposely leaves that part of the text out of his gospel. In fact, if it's supposed to be a sign it's a horrible one because no one but Mary was in a position to absolutely verify it.

None of this is meant to doubt the idea that Matthew was correct, he was: in some archetypal scheme unknown to me****, God was keeping a promise to the Jewish nation. But because none of us understands very well how exactly God went about that, I think that we as Christians need to be a whole lot more honest about the limitations of our own interpretations before we criticize others who find those interpretations unpersuasive.

* Yeah, the banana guy. I actually think the banana argument from design is one of the sillier arguments for creationalism that I've seen, if only because modern bananas are a result of thousands of years of human domestication and cultivation. Wild bananas don't look like the ones you buy in the store, so it's a little tough to argue that God created something because it's convenient to us, when it's convenient to us mostly because we have bred it to be so.

** The "therefore" refers to Ahaz's intransigence.

*** which he eventually did anyway (2Kings 16:7). It turned out to be a very bad idea in retrospect.

**** Matthew, John, and even Paul use an archetypal interpretive scheme that was common in 1st Century Judaism - using small snippets and key words to "illustrate" later events. That would look uncomfortably subjective were some person to do it today. I accept that they are correct because I have a prior acceptance of the New Testament as in some sense inpired. But that's not how we "do" prophecy in the 21st century.

Not right enough

Our favorite Archbishop of Canterbury discovers a new kind of idolatry:

We expect an abstraction called 'the market' to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses by a sort of natural innate prudence ... so we lose sight of the fact that the market is not like a huge individual consciousness [and] not a machine governed by inexorable laws.

And this is part of the same mindset that turns the specific, goal-related transactions of borrowing and lending into a process producing pseudo-things, paper assets - but pseudo-things that (when matters do not go well) cause real and crippling damage to actual persons and institutions. The biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality - the production of specific things, the achievement of recognisably human goals that have something to do with a shared sense of what is good for the human community in the widest sense.

In one sense the good archbishop is quite correct: building an economy on little but the movement of little pieces of paper was not very wise and therefore will cause a lot of people a lot of pain. But it is rather funny when one idolater calls another an idolater.

The supreme irony of the entire article comes in the very first line, or perhaps it's a subtitle: "Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, says that the financial world needs fresh scrutiny and regulation. In our attitude to the market, we run the risk of idolatry." And it's an irony because a man who finds that the market* cannot be trusted because it is not a machine governed by inexorable laws calls for the government to make more of those decisions, as if IT were a machine governed by such laws rather than one that makes laws in its own interest. Who is the idolater but the man who believes that the government can do all things, that it alone possesses the wisdom to not only tell every individual what is in their best interest but to force them to obey for their own good?

A parallel if secondary irony is this: Williams condemns the practice of producing "pseudo-things, paper assets," and in the next breath asks if we can "recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality" - as if modern money were not the biggest paper "pseudo-thing" involved and the one that underlies the entire problem. There is no connection between money and material reality because money is no more real than any other paper pseudo-thing. The market problem we have today is a wholly predictable (some would say inevitable) result of the fact that money is not real on purpose, and it is government - and only government - that makes it unreal for its own purposes.

But the final error is in believing and promoting the idea that somehow Wall Street Finance is "unbridled capitalism" rather than a government-regulated scheme for financing deficits and fulfilling social functions**. You and I have no free-market ability to create money from nothing, lend it on a house, lend it to the government, or roll it into a bond, rate it, leverage it, and sell it. To do so, one needs the blessing of government. That same government that the good archbishop would call upon to deliver us from evil.

UPDATE: Amy says I'm bumming her out and she may have to run off into the woods and live on rain water and rabbit stew, so would I please knock off the Doom and Gloom? Yes I will, and not only because 90% of the posts these days seem to be chronicling our financial death spiral which, while interesting, exciting, and scary, also gets old. Hey, I'm not looking forward to subsistence farming any more than the next guy***. On the other hand, other than the election of the old white ignoramus or the young black one, there is not else a lot going on in the world, other than the fact that Bush jumped the ObamaGun and invaded Pakistan.

UPDATE II: Since I'm not going to post any boogieman posts for a week or so - assuming I can help myself - I figured I'd better add a little-noted section of the bailout bill to this one:

Section 132. Authority to Suspend Mark-to-Market Accounting.
Restates the Securities and Exchange Commission's authority to suspend the application of Statement Number 157 of the Financial Accounting Standards Board if the SEC determines that it is in the public interest and protects investors.

The SEC is being reminded that it should allow banks to value assets at a mythical value if such lying about their actual value would protect investors. Is this a great country or what?

* which is billions of people acting in their own perceived self interest without external coercion

** As Fannie says, "The government established Fannie Mae in order to expand the flow of mortgage funds in all communities, at all times, under all economic conditions, and to help lower the costs to buy a home." In other words, Freddie and Fannie were founded by the government to bypass the free market for a social purpose.

*** Even though I can make one hell of a rabbit stew. I just hope I can still get Copenhagen for seasoning.

The view from 2006

Peter Schiff gets laughed off of a Bulls and Bears* segment by the same kind of experts who are now sure Plan 9 will save us all. Some people should not be allowed to own a TV, much less be on one.

* which is a pretty funny name, considering that the hostess says of Peter, "it's nice to have someone with a different opinion." How can you have a show called Bulls and Bears when everyone on it is a perpetual bull?

Don't worry, I won't let it go to my head

Fezzik, you did something right:

A rescue for the U.S. financial system unraveled late Thursday amid accusations Republican presidential candidate John McCain scuppered the deal...

I guess dreams really do come true. Not that I think the House GOP plan that McCain jumped on will work*, but it is going to be funny how quickly the leftern half of the blogosphere will retroactively find Bush's obscene plan to have been the one thing that would have saved America from having to change.

Oh, and the rest of that sentence also happened:

...and Washington Mutual was closed by U.S. authorities and its assets sold in America's biggest ever bank failure.

WaMu's assets: $309b. Previous biggest failure: Continental Illinois (1984), $40b. The FDIC said the closure would not affect its insurance fund, which weighs in at a svelte 15% of WaMu's assets. Not sure how that works yet, but I'm not the one saying it.

Anyway, gutsy move by McCain, assuming he did it on purpose**, because if the market tanks between now and the election - and I believe it will - McCain will get the blame. It's not that he deserves it, it would have happened anyway. But the plan that didn't happen is always the one that would have avoided all the pain, while the one that's passed and fails is always an excuse for another Double Magic Plan that fails just as hard but for twice as much money.

Can we write about something else now, please?***

* it will, however, not work for a lot less money.

** I think he did, though why I have no idea.

*** So anyway, I had to work the last shift in the University Advancement booth at the career fair today, along with one of the college's web guys. Nice guy, I've talked to him on the phone before when I dumped on him a junior college business professor who wanted to bring his class down for a visit. Pretty smart guy, too. So anyway, he doesn't even remember meeting me before, but suddenly he starts bemoaning the fact that he doesn't have enough property to be able to grow all the food he's going to want when the economy collapses later this year. Oh, wait, I was going to talk about something else. Gus Frerotte, baby! He's not the best QB, but he is the best one the Vikings have on their roster.

They'll still be good for something

Here he comes to save the day

It appears that fighty mouse is on his way:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Republican presidential candidate John McCain announced Wednesday that he is suspending his campaign to return to Washington and focus on the "historic" crisis facing the U.S. economy.

It would be supremely ironic if John McCain's economic incompetence, combined with his legendary temper, brought this Hindenburg of a bill down in flames.

Well, I can dream, can't I?

UPDATE: Scott Ott hits a home run:

The president, in remarks to the news media clearly aimed at reluctant Republicans in Congress, said, “Our financial system rests on a foundation of huge banks, brokerage houses and quasi-governmental agencies that followed Washington’s lead by gambling on long-shot, poorly-collateralized investments. Now this glorious way of life is threatened, and we must act to preserve it.”

Read it twice.

(hat tip: Magruder)

UPDATE II: Just in case anyone thinks a $700b is closer to the end than the beginning, know this:

The banking system needs another $500 billion to survive beyond the $700 billion rescue plan being contemplated by Congress, said Pimco founder Bill Gross...

"The plan goes far but it doesn't go far enough in terms of recapitalization," he said. "The banking system and the investment banking system in total really requires about $500 billion more. Where that comes from is still up in the air."

It's not up in the air at all. They just haven't told you yet.

Don't know much about history

In everyone else's history, FDR was not the president when the market crashed in 1929, and he never spoke on television until he addressed the New York World's Fair on April 30, 1939. That's nearly 10 years after Jumpin' Joe has him conquering the ignorance and soothing the fears of all Americans in the way that only our national mommy can.

The only thing we have to fear, is Democrat mythology itself.

That's because it's not saving the planet

It's therapy:

Stewart Barr, of Exeter University, who led the research, said: "Green living is largely something of a myth. There is this middle class environmentalism where being green is part of the desired image. But another part of the desired image is to fly off skiing twice a year. And the carbon savings they make by not driving their kids to school will be obliterated by the pollution from their flights."

Some people even said they deserved such flights as a reward for their green efforts, he added.

A lot of people are critical of the blatant hypocrisy of most* proponents of so-called "green living," those who fly around the world telling people they can save the planet by only using one square of toilet paper. "When Al Gore turns his thermostat down," they say, "I'll listen to him prattle on about how mine is set." And they are correct; it is profoundly hypocritical and is itself evidence that the green livers are full of crap. But one problem they face in trying to get this logic across to those attracted to sorting trash and giving carbon credits for Christmas is that it's not a matter of logic.

In some cases it's a matter of style - like politicians, people want to be seen doing something worthwhile. Yes, it's shallow and vapid, but at least no one gets hurt - not driving your kid 4 blocks to school is a good idea whether you do it to save the planet or because he needs the exercise.

But in serious cases, it's not a matter of people cynically wishing to appear caring, but a matter of them fulfilling a desperate emotional need for relevance. They are nothing. They know they are nothing. And they can't handle it emotionally.

That's why Gore says, "The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what few generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge." He and other green livers need a climate crisis to exist far more than the rest of us need it solved.

Of course, there have been hundreds of religions and philosophies that claim to deal with the essential nothingness of the individual, that universal feeling that "all is vanity and vexation of spirit, and there is no profit under the sun." They remain with us to fulfill a very human need.

Environmentalism, as practiced by the masses, is simply another one of them.

* Yes, I said most. the article notes, "Only a very small number of citizens matched their eco-friendly behaviour at home by refusing to fly abroad, Barr told a climate change conference at Exeter University yesterday." That's science, baby. Don't argue with science.

For what it's worth

Dear Senator Roberts:

I am writing to ask you to oppose the current banking bailout proposal that Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke are presenting before the Senate today.

The truth is that this bailout for Wall Street will not avert a recession, will not stop house prices from falling, and will not make more credit available in the economy. Like each of the half dozen plans Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke have implemented this year, from extraordinary lending facilities to the bailout of AIG, this plan is meant to reduce the impact of the banks' own foolishness by passing their losses off to the taxpayer. It is already reducing the value of the dollar and will cause imported items like oil to skyrocket.

Senator, I know that you know that a market economy is the strongest economy, and it is the strongest not only because it maximizes production but because it punishes foolishness. What the banks have done is foolish - that is the underlying problem - and the only way to maintain the strength of our economy going forward is to allow them to learn from their mistakes.

It is not, and can never be, in the interest of the nation to pass the losses of gamblers off to others and pretend it is really for the good of those who must pay.

Save the Hippies

(hat tip: Snoop)

All women secretly hate each other

Livescience draws precisely the wrong conclusion:

Women who had only one female boss reported more psychological distress (such as trouble sleeping, difficulty focusing on work, depression and anxiety) and physical symptoms (such as headaches, stomach pain or heartburn, neck and back pain and tiredness) than women who worked for one male boss...

The findings, specifically those of female subordinates with females bosses, contradict theories suggested by previous studies that demographic similarities between a boss and their subordinate would promote harmony in the work place, while demographic differences would create problems.

I would suggest that the "theories" mentioned above are based more on political presumption than studies, as it is obvious to anyone who has worked in an office where a woman manages multiple women that they simply do not - cannot - get along with their subordinates.

During my professional career, I've had numerous female bosses*, and I've gotten along with them swimmingly. I've never had a problem with any of them. They've been as competent as any other middle managers, as willing to listen to others as men, and basically not a problem for me to manage**. But where they had problems, it was always with the women that they managed.

The reason is not that women are incompetent in managerial roles; they're not***. The problem is that All Women Secretly Hate Each Other (AWSHEO). While men have friends they seldom see - I have best buddies I see but once every five years, and we pick up just as if the last time I saw them was last Friday - women have few friends like that. They are either best friends and inseparable or worst enemies - irreconcilable and willing to go out of their way to undermine that woman's position, reputation, and other friendships in the most hurtful way possible. Because women attach far more emotion to relationships than men, those relationships, whether at work or play, carry an intensity that cannot be set side just because one happens to be on the clock.

While exceptions are probably not hard to find I suspect, I think that part of it arises from the nearly universal female trait of taking everything personally. If I have a boss - male or female - who's an idiot, I can accept that as a price to be paid for the fact that I don't aspire to that position, and I don't lose any sleep over it. But women, being by nature egalitarian creatures, are completely open in despising a female boss once they discover that she is not the boss because she's "better," but only because for whatever other reason, she's the boss. Female bosses, who also take such insubordination personally, are liable to go out of their way to make sure a female subordinate knows her place. The result is a continual catfight, especially when multiple female subordinates feel the same way and can gang up.

All that said, I've never had a boss who was either a declared career woman or a feminist, consciously trying to prove that women were as good as men and therefore (over)using the male traits that all people find so insufferable in bosses, so maybe my experience is unusual. Each of them *were* just as good as men, though most of them eventually left their positions to raise their kids full-time, a decision I completely understand and respect****. But none of my bosses who did that, so far as I know, considered exchanging their adult female charges for infant charges anything other than a bonus.

* One of whom Jozum also had at a previous company, and since he's in India and may not read this, it's only fair that I admit that he did not have the same impression of her that I had and would be the first to tell you so. And I was lucky to never have the managerista from hell that Craft once had.

** Successfully managing one's boss is the secret to vocational happiness.

*** Such an attitude may deprive me of the $8500 per year that's due me for holding "traditional" attitudes, like women should be at home. That's fine, I call them as I see them.

**** maybe someone owes me $8500 after all.

She blinded me with science

The cost thus far

Somewhere, the Founding Fathers are writing suicide notes:

• $700 billion for Paulson's Double Magic Plan™ to save the world by buying crappy bonds, even from foreign banks
• $50 billion from the Exchange Stabilization Fund to guarantee money market funds
• $10 billion in direct mortgage purchases by the Treasury
• $144 billion in new mortgage security purchases by the newly-nationalized Fannie and Freddie
• $85 billion loan for American International Group, effectively nationalizing that insurance holding company
• $87 billion in repayments to JPMorgan Chase related to the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy
• $200 billion to shore up Fannie and Freddie's capital*
• $300 billion for the FHA to re-finance mortgages on the edge of default
• $4 billion in grants to buy and repair foreclosed homes
• $29 billion in financing for JPMorgan Chase related to the Bear Stearns takeover
• $200 billion in Fed loans as part of the Term Auction Facility
  

And the beautiful thing is that the Double Magic Plan™ won't be implemented for weeks, maybe months. By that time, the government could conceivably find half a dozen more companies to buy.

It's probably safe to say that little of this will end up in the budget. With a record budget deficit of $482 billion** even before cabinet wars are added in, it might be bad for the dollar if the world didn't think our government had a handle on its spending.

On a sadder note, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are abandoning the investment banking field for the greener pastures of directly borrowing from the Fed. This means that of the five major American investment banks at the beginning of this year, zero are left. They will be sorely missed.

UPDATE: Upon further review, and a little counting, I have decided to change the title of Comrade Paulson's Double Magic Plan™ to Plan 9, which is how it will appear in the future***.

UPDATE 2: CNBC has a great headline this morning: Banks Suffer Despite Short-Selling Ban. Wrong problem solved once again. What do you bet Plan 10 will include a long-selling ban?

* I don't know if this is a double count, but it is possible. If so, one can substitute $200 billion in helicopter money that was supposed to solve this problem last spring.

** Funniest Quote of the Year Award goes to OMB Director Jim Nussle, who said "that the deficit would fall after the 2009 budget year, and he predicted that the government would have a surplus in budget year 2012, if the president's budget blueprint is followed." So if Bush's budget plan is followed for three years after he's no longer president, the nation will get back to where it was when he became President***. Oh if only it would be that easy to recover from Bush.

*** except for all the debt accumulated while he was President, of course.

*** Because future events like these will affect you and I in the future.

Obama's first day

(hat tip: Huck)

Ample opportunity

"We must act now to protect our nation's economic health from serious risk," Bush said at a White House press conference. "There will be ample opportunity to discuss the origins of this problems. Now is the time to solve it."

I guess maybe there will be ample opportunity to discuss the nature of this problem as well, but not until we've passed a law banishing inconvenient mathematics to the furthest ends of the cosmos. Given the indisputable fact that, as another article notes, "The effort is a recognition that Paulson's and Bernanke's earlier efforts failed to revive financial and housing markets," I do not see a single reason to believe this one will cure a disease that has been purposely misdiagnosed from the start. But I do see plenty of room for a poorly-thought-out imposition of martial law on the markets to have very bad unintended consequences.

Two interesting lines in the draft proposal that ought to make every sane person's blood run cold:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency...

Sec. 10. Increase in Statutory Limit on the Public Debt.

Subsection (b) of section 3101 of title 31, United States Code, is amended by striking out the dollar limitation contained in such subsection and inserting in lieu thereof $11,315,000,000,000.

Our Democrat Congress*, sworn enemies of Smirky McBushitlerchimpco™ (or whatever their Legion of the Least Clever minions call him) and all that he stands for, and defenders of the middle class from the predations of greedy Wall Street privateers**, are falling all over themselves to give Bush's Secretary of the Pirate Booty Treasury, the billionaire former Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, unreviewable authority to spend a trillion dollars buying from his friends assets that they don't want anymore, before he leaves the government in 6 months.

In what bizarro world does this farce not write "National Bankruptcy" in fiery capital letters across the midnight sky?

* Even Obama is on the bandwagon: "I fully support the efforts of Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke to work in a bipartisan spirit with Congress to find a solution of this sort. What we're looking at right now is to provide the Treasury and the Federal Reserve with as broad authority as is necessary to stabilize markets and to maintain credit."

** And defenders of the poor from all who oppress them by offering them jobs.

Not the first time we've tried this ford

I mentioned before* that I was giving up on Nennius as a subject for my thesis, mostly because I don't know enough Medieval language but in the end because when I found the answer I was looking for it turned out to be far less impressive than I'd hoped. So next on the list was Custer, who was the subject of a very interesting conversation my dad had with an Indian guide he pigeonholed at Little Bighorn last summer. Basically, it was this:

[The] attack at Little Big Horn was a perfect pincer: split the troops and hit the Indians from 2 sides. But when Custer's group got to a ford that was defended by no more than half a dozen Indians, the crossing of which would have given Custer unimpeded access to the interior of the Indians' position, his group inexplicably turned aside after a brief exchange of fire. They didn't cross but turned back up a hill, whereupon they were slaughtered. The Indians say that Custer, leading the charge, was killed at the ford...

I had never seen that idea before, and while the pincer idea may be a bit overstated**, the idea that Custer was killed almost immediately seemed like decent one. Custer was an arrogant and feisty leader who led from the front. One Indian account of the battle says that there were just 6 Indians at the ford when the Americans came to cross it; they shot a guy or two and the whole column stopped, reorganized - very poorly - and turned back up the hill where they were slaughtered. The original Indian accounts do not say they killed Custer at the river, but if that's what happened it might explain the Americans' unusual actions in the face of a far inferior force.

So then tonight, I'm reading a book my dad picked up there, put out by the Parks Service, and buried on page 62 I found this:

"What Custer intended, or indeed whether he accompanied Yates or Keogh, is conjecture. Some students even believe that he fell, killed or wounded, with Yates at the river and was carried to the hill where his body was later found."

There might just be one more student who thinks that today. It's not Parks Service doctrine in the least, but sometimes it's strangely reassuring when you find that a few others see the same possibilities you do. HIST 700 - Kansas and the West definitely looks like it's on the agenda once I finish up with Alexander the Great in December.

In other news, Comrade Paulson has a new magic plan to save the world, and this one involves spending half a trillion dollars*** in taxpayer money to buy up enough bad debt that we can all turn our clocks back to 2005. A famous colonel was once informed, "You don't have enough bullets to kill all those Indians." I for one doubt even 500 billion bullets will be enough to get the troops across the river this time.

UPDATE: Make it a cool trillion. Something wicked this way comes.

* I even used this same picture. Who says recycling is a bad idea?

** I realize now there may simply be too much time between Reno's attack and Custer's to make that argument watertight.

*** This is simply an opening bid based on what Paulson thinks is politically acceptable and likely bears no relation to what it will cost us all in the end.

Every day is "Manage like a Pirate" day

Quote of the Day, from Vox:

Those who have never sat on a corporate board or had much contact with the executive class don't realize that the executive class is largely parasitical ... it can be more accurately understood as a sort of pirates union that is loosely allied in common cause against the capitalists who actually own the companies that they are systematically pillaging under the guise of "managing" them.

The only problem I see with Vox's quote is that, here in late-stage, bureaucratized corporate capitalism, the capitalists don't actually own the companies; the pirates own them in the form of the mutual funds and pension plans they direct. And every dollar that the middle class capitalist contributes to his mutual fund is another dollar that falls under the control of the Pirates Union.

There are damned few individuals who directly own enough of any sizeable company to be able to have any say in what the company does or even who runs it. The rest, owning shares in a fund that owns shares in the company, are owners only in the loosest of senses.

"Capitalists by Proxy" is probably a more accurate description.

But there is good news

I would rather it be Chad Pennington, but still:

After losing the first two games of the season, Minnesota coach Brad Childress decided the Vikings can no longer afford to let 25-year-old quarterback Tarvaris Jackson learn on the job. On Wednesday, Childress turned to 15-year veteran Gus Frerotte to run the offense.

Actually, I would even be happy with JD Booty.

I think Coach Childress realized that that if he showed too much more patience, the next decision might be that the Vikings could no longer afford to let Coach Childress learn on the job.

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K

I don't know what this means:

10:35 am : The Treasury is setting up a temporary financing program at the Fed's request. The program will auction Treasury bills to raise cash for the Fed's use. The initiative aims to help the Fed manage its balance sheet following its efforts to enhance its liquidity facilities over the previous few quarters.

I don't have any idea what it means, unless it means that the Fed is simply out of saleable assets. They may have taken on so much crap that they are broke, and so Treasury has to hold a bake sale to raise money* for its central bank. I don't know the implications of that, only that they are bad. Given that gold is up more than $50 in the last hour, it would appear I'm not the only one drawing that conclusion.

Check or Checkmate, that is the question. We'll have an answer soon enough.

UPDATE: Nothing to see here, people:

The announcement represented an unprecedented action in which Treasury will be selling debt securities in the form of Treasury bills for the nation's central bank.

Treasury officials said the action did not mean that the Fed was running short of resources but simply was a way for the government to better manage its financing needs.

Move along.

* From whom? The Fed has been trading its assets for crap to all those financial companies that are now going bust. If they had the money to buy this debt, the Fed could just recall a few of those "temporary" loans.

In which the government goes into the Insurance business

Congratulations! It's a basket case!

The Feds have just announced that they will borrow $80b from the Chinese to take over AIG. I'll spare you the details and cut to the chase:

Reports Tuesday said the Fed was considering a conservatorship for AIG—which would mean bringing in an outsider to run the company. But sources told CNBC that no legal authority exists for such an arrangement.

Why should that be an issue?

(picture hat tip: DL)

This will make it easy

The voters are presented with a stark contrast:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama on Monday both blasted regulators and managers for failing to head off the financial woes rocking Wall Street and called for an overhaul of the rules governing financial institutions...

Obama has called for modernizing regulations "to suit a 21st-century market" to protect investors and consumers...

[McCain said] that a top priority of his administration would be to "replace the outdated patchwork quilt of regulatory oversight and bring transparency and accountability to Wall Street."

So Obama says that the problem is that government's regulation is not working and he has a new set of regulations that will fix it. On the other hand, McCain says that government's regulation is not working and he has a new set of regulations that will fix it.

All I can say is that it's a good thing we only have two major parties in America. I'm not sure Americans could handle more choice than they already have.

My way is not very sportsmanlike

I've never been able to understand the kind of hunter* who pays a bunch of money to go to a ranch and shoot birds raised in cages and put in the brush, as if it's some manly feat to kill it. And I think the same can be said for shooting wolves from planes. I suspect that is the kind of hunting one does merely for the opportunity to have one's picture taken in the manner of Teddy Roosevelt. That said, it's not like Sarah Palin invented the idea of shooting animals from planes. The government does it in Kansas every couple years and then wastes perfectly good pork chops to boot.

But the funny thing is that I doubt this commercial - even ignoring the brutalities it commits against the English language** - is going to have any effect on people inclined to vote for Palin anyway, and especially not for hunters or farmers, who know exactly what a wounded animal looks like. The latter, in fact, are probably happy to see a dead wolf. It's better than a dead sheep or foal.

No, it's designed for people who see nature as made up of two things: humans who are destroying the planet, and various members of the bunny rabbit family. And those people*** are voting for Obama already.

* Ahem, Dick Cheney

** "The more voters learn about Sarah Palin, the less there is to like." - Does that sentence make any sense at all? Seriously, does it mean that there is less for me to like about voters who learn about Sarah Palin? Does it mean there is little to like about the fact that voters learn about Sarah Palin? They went on to say something about how wolves can fly planes and shoot bears in Alaska, but all I kept hearing was blah, blah, blah.

*** with the exception of a few particularly stubborn remnants of the Termagant Brigades, but this is not made for them.

Mocking from the grave

Big is dying

Wall Street, we have a problem:

Stocks fell sharply at the opening bell Monday after a trifecta of Wall Street pain: Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch was bought by Bank of America and AIG asked the Fed for short-term financing.

What's important is not that Wall Street is down over 300 500 points at the open close today. Stocks go up and they go down, and they'll be going down for a long time - though punctuated by massive barnburner rallies - just as they went up for a long time, just as before that they went down for a long time.

What's really important is to put a picture together:

• With Lehman going bankrupt* and Merrill wed via the shotgun last weekend, three of the five largest investment banks in America as of 6 months ago no longer exist.
• Freddie and Fannie, the nation's largest mortgage holders, were nationalized last week.
• AIG, the biggest insurer in America, is begging the Fed for cash, just as the biggest automakers in America are doing across the street at the Capitol.
• IndyMac bank, the largest bank failure in 2 decades and the second largest ever, wiped out 1/6 of the FDIC's insurance pool. There are 117 more banks** on the FDIC's trouble list.
  
• WaMu, the nation's largest S&L, looks to be the subject of this weekend's emergency Fed/Treasury meetings.
  

What they have in common is that they are all huge, they are all leveraged, and they require the ability to issue tons of debt to stay in business. That ability is gone, but not only for big.

* With over $600 billion in debts, Lehman Brothers is the largest bankruptcy in US history. Do not expect them to hold that record very long.

** though in all fairness, most of them are tiny compared to IndyMac. Though in unfairness, Indymac didn't even make that list until a few weeks before it imploded, so whether that number is meaningful is debatable.

I guess they're right

Sorry, Sparky. In the pot you go. There's a good boy.

The bible is not what's important

Jack Kinsella lays down the wrong plumb line:

The Christian faith stands or falls based on the truth of the Scripture. Christianity has no plan “B”. Should the Bible somehow fail, Christianity fails with it.

The Bible claims of itself that is 100% accurate, 100% of the time. It is, as 2nd Peter 1:21 tells us, the product of holy men who “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

Therefore, if Noah didn’t build an ark, if Jonah wasn’t swallowed by a big fish, if David didn’t slay Goliath and if Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, then our faith is in vain and we are yet dead in our sins.

But that's not what the bible says.

The last sentence is instructive, because it contains a quote from the Apostle Paul from his first letter to the Corinthians*. The Corinthians had some real questions and real arguments about a specific event and a specific theological point, which Paul explains as being *the* key to Christianity:

If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins - 1Cor 15:17

The proof of Christianity is not a book but an historical event celebrated by Christians as Easter: the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on a cold Sunday morning following Passover.

It may seem a subtle distinction, but it is an important one, and it's one Christians often miss because they confuse the messenger with the message. The Christian may ask, "How do we know Christ is raised unless we have an infallible bible?" and from there he runs off in all directions trying to prove the bible is accurate and can therefore be trusted as a witness to the resurrection. But let me ask it this way: if every newspaper account, every special edition DVD, every silly blog post concerning 9/11 contained inaccuracies or even disappeared in a puff of smoke, if every memory of that event was wiped out, would the twin towers still be standing?

Of course not, 9/11 happened. In history. In reality. It had real causes and its real effects were themselves the causes of other real events. The man whom no one remembers was still born. That no one knows Homer's mother does not mean the Iliad did not mold society for 1000 years. In the same way, if the Bible ceased to exist, Christ would still have died for the sins of Mankind, he would still be risen, and so Christianity would still be true, because it's not based on a book; the book is based on it.

It is interesting to read the sermons in the bible, especially in Acts, because if there's one thing that's seldom mentioned, it's the bible. In fact, when those sermons were delivered, the bible did not yet exist**. When Peter stood before the Sanhedrin (Acts 5:3), he said, "The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree." When Paul argued with the philosophizers at the Areopagus (Acts 17:22), he said, "[God] has made the fact certain to every one by raising Him from the dead." It was the Resurrection, the real-life return of Jesus Christ from death in a real city on a real day that "proved" Christianity. Christianity is not based on a book, it has a book that tells of Christ.

Of course, without the bible, it is very difficult to spread that message. Peter and Paul did it, but they were witnesses whereas we are not. They are our witnesses, and what they saw and said are our proof that the event happened. The bible is the way that message is spread.

But that makes bible the messenger, not the message or the object of the message. It tells us about the savior, but it is not the savior. If David did not slay Goliath in history, Christ is risen, or not. If the story of Noah's Ark or Adam's Apple or Lot's wife are fables, Christ is risen, or not. And it is not whether Jonah was swallowed by a whale that determines whether we are still in our sins, it is whether Christ is risen, or not. The bible can tell us so - it does tell us so and I believe it is so - but the Bible does not make it so.

The issue is simply this: The Christian relies on his bible as proof of the resurrection, and therefore he believes those who wrote the bible told truly what they witnessed. But that should never lead us to believe that it is the bible that saves us, that somehow if there is a problem with it or a contradiction in it or a copyist error in it, that our faith is destroyed. Our faith should not be in the book, but in the man the book tells us about. If he lived in history and died in history and rose in history, then Christianity is true in history whether we have a perfect bible or not.

* I have laid out chapter 15 here in the form of Greco-Roman rhetoric. If you want to get a feel for Paul's entire argument, it's a very helpful tool for understanding exactly how (and for what) he's arguing.

** Parts of it did, but not Acts or the rest of the New Testament.

Something in common with bankers

(hat tip: JD)

Conditioning

Dr. Pavlov would be so proud:

A high-level meeting between top Wall Street executives, US Federal Reserve and Treasury Department officials Friday night was, at least in part, an attempt to prepare Wall Street for the possibility that a Lehman Brothers deal might not get done this weekend, CNBC has learned.

That the government now has to hold meetings with executives to inform them that maybe there is no plan to save this week's losers illustrates how quickly the captains of capitalism have become conditioned to rely on the government.

Perhaps it would be fitting to have Comrade Bernanke ringing the opening bell on Wall Street from here on out.

(picture hat tip: DL)

Vote!

Maybe she's thinking of the other Georgia

Not surprisingly, Financial Times goes looking for the wrong debate:

Sarah Palin, the running mate of Republican presidential candidate John McCain, on Thursday said the US would be obligated to go to war with Russia if it invaded a Nato ally – a status she advocated for Georgia, which Russia invaded last month...

Her response, while technically accurate, is likely to reinforce the debate about whether the Alaska governor should be a “heartbeat away from the presidency”.

Sarah is exactly correct: if Russia invaded a NATO country, the United States would be obligated by that treaty to go to war with Russia. That's the purpose of the treaty. Period. End of story. Why understanding the consequences of the NATO treaty should "reinforce the debate*" over Palin's qualifications is beyond me. Perhaps she's only qualified if she doesn't take our nation's legal obligations seriously?

NATO was created to offset the power of the Soviet Union and its slave states in Eastern Europe. That objective being successfully completed since the Berlin Wall came down 20 freaking years ago, the US is now trying to sign those former Warsaw Pact starters to come sit on our bench. In short, we are trying to make the countries we would go to war against into countries we will go to war over. Unfortunately, Palin is herself caught up in this kind of world-saving, democratic-crusade nonsense.

The real debate that ought to be reinforced** is why - given that Georgia and Moldova and the like are NOT worth fighting over - NATO still exists at all.

* whatever that means. How does one reinforce a debate? As Obama says, "just words."

** By which I mean "started."

Cheer up, America

CNBC starts throwing the D word around:

The end result of the global economic slowdown may be the U.S. announcing national bankruptcy as the government cannot afford the bailouts that it promised and the market will not bail out the government, Martin Hennecke, senior manager of private clients at Tyche, told CNBC on Thursday.

"We expect a depression in the United States. We expect a depression, very possibly, also in Europe," Hennecke said on "Worldwide Exchange."

We are now some 15 months into the credit crisis that is actually a debt crisis that was set off but not started by subprime. The Fed has created a virtual alphabet soup of lending facilities to provide liquidity to the market, but which has in reality just filled their balance sheet with unsaleable crap. Fannie and Freddie have just been nationalized, even though exactly a year ago Washington* was still manipulating them to act as a bridge over a troubled real estate market. Bear Stearns, the nation's fifth largest brokerage, was forced via shotgun wedding to merge with Chase. It looks very much like Lehman Brothers, the nation's fourth-largest, is next**. The failure of IndyMac reduced the FDIC's insurance pool by nearly 20%, meaning that even though the FDIC has more than 100 banks on its trouble list, and banks nationwide are bleeding all over the place, it can afford just 4 more IndyMacs before it, too, must go to Congress. Add to that the fact that the wiping out of Fannie's shareholders, even though it should have happened, has roiled the entire preferred-stock market, just one more hit to bank balance sheets and perhaps more importantly, pension funds. Write "Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation" in your notes somewhere. That will become a household name pretty soon, and you'll be glad that you heard of it first.

The government bailed out all these failing organizations because it is not the goal of the government to bring change, presidential candidates notwithstanding, but to help people avoid it. If you know anything about the last depression, one theme you will notice is that the government tried to avoid change, tried to keep stock and commodity prices from falling, tried to keep people in homes they couldn't afford - they tried to help people avoid the changes necessary to fix their own screwups, those of their employers, and those of their government. And in helping people avoid fixing the problem, they managed to stretch the Depression out for better than a decade and increased the suffering wrought by it immensely. In the end, it took a world war and 40 million dead to completely shake it.

We are doing the same thing today that we did in the last Depression, for rather than allowing the markets to wash out our bad debts naturally, we have fought it tooth and nail. Rather than allowing a bottom to be found, we have tried anything and everything to keep the market from falling, while declaring a bottom all the way down. The problem is, the government cannot set the direction of the market, only its pace. It cannot keep a Depression from coming, it can only make it last 10 years or longer. But it does have the power to destroy the currency, the national bank***, national finances, maybe even itself. National bankruptcy is the kind of thing that stops with guillotines, not soup lines.

It has become obvious that the federal government is not going to allow any failures: everyone will be bailed out. All the climbers are going to be tied together under the wise and beneficent leadership of the Fed and the Treasury, all financial risks shared equally among 300 million of us. Maybe Bernanke and Paulson are smart enough to make it all work.

You should know they are betting the existence of the United States of America that they are.

* The complete lack of foresight exhibited in the article, in light of the wholly predictable events of this past year, is guaranteed to suck any remaining hope you have right out through your eyes. I suggest that you do not read it under any circumstances.

**I would not be surprised to see the announcement either tomorrow after the markets close here or Sunday before they open in Asia. That seems to be the way things work.

*** The only thing Bernanke is doing that is actually in the best interest of Americans, albeit accidentally.

OK, in response to the guy tired of my jerking around and just making fun of people and not telling him what I think about the Large Hadron Collider already, here it is:

While I'd rather the government not fund toys like this, I don't know anything about the science and I don't particularly care. I don't like, dislike, support, oppose, dream about, lose sleep over, want a scale-model of for Christmas, or ponder the odds of disaster from the LHC. But I do find the reactions of people to it both informative and amusing.

If I have one expectation from it all, it will be that this results in a) us thinking we learned more than we really did, and b) funding requests for an even bigger one.

But there are two points I guess I ought to make, considering all the sky-is-falling and name-calling and preening and posturing taking place over this. All the frantic Christian worry-warts aside, I don't think that God has given us permission to destroy Mankind*. Ergo I don't think that the LHC will destroy mankind.

The second builds off the first perhaps a little. The fact that God will not allow us to completely destroy ourselves does not mean that we will not be able to mostly destroy ourselves. In fact, I think it utterly laughable when SciFi books posit future fundamentalist societies in which science is forbidden because it's so advanced that all the superstitious mental midgets are frightened speechless by the pure magic and majesty of it.

I've always been rather of the opinion that if such a society ever arose, it would be a direct consequence of a science screwup so epic, so monumental, so blatantly dangerous and in retrospect so obviously stupid, that the few thousand people left on the continent would unanimously agree that the mere wearing of a lab coat should be counted a capital offense.

* That is God's job and he takes it very seriously.

Ask El Borak

There seems to be a bit of confusion out there over the real and potential effects of the Large Hadron Collider. On the one hand, a CNN Science Editor* assures us that, as he understands it, the Earth is in no danger. On the other hand, the respected** International Earth Destruction Advisory Board regrets to inform us that the earth has already been destroyed***.

I'm not the only one confused, therefore I feel an obligation take up the role once played by Kevin Bacon in Animal House and stand in front of the rampaging crowd screaming "All is well!" Remember, the most important thing is that people remain ignorant calm. Since I have no knowledge to get in the way, it's a service I am perhaps uniquely qualified to provide.

Erik wonders: "I am not a physicist myself, though I consider myself well-informed as a lay-physicist. I teach in the public high school of my hometown and try to incorporate certain principles and ideas of Newtonian and the New Physics into my English and Social Studies curricula... I am not sure how to respond to those Chicken-Littles out there with little or no understanding of particle physics."

Dear Erik: You're a high-school English teacher. Stick to Shakespeare.


Sam Bandak makes a discovery: "Do you notice the laser exponential progress of technology? Here is a summary:

5 Billion : Age of Life on Earth
4 Thousand : Civilization
3 Hundred : Real Civilization
2 Ten :Technology Explosion

It is obvious that the next line is “1-One”.

Is it The Large Hardon Collider?"

Dear Sam: I congratulate you on discovering that John Holmes will soon destroy the earth. Keep up the good work.


Anonymous asks: "what if they accidentaly the whole thing?"

Dear Anonymous: That would realy the whole thing.


Grace has never heard of subprime: "When an experiment puts the whole world and everyone in it in danger I think we need to rethink a bit."

Dear Grace: Housing prices always go up.


Jacqueline is trying to outfox God: "I am totally against this 'project' or 'game' as they call it. God does tell us in His Living Word that man shall destroy himself."

Dear Jaqueline: Who knows better, you or God? No, it's God. Trust me on this one.


Elizabeth is no Republican: "I am horrified at the amount of money spent on this project which has NO practical applications. There is a whole lot of suffering in this world that could be alleviated with 8 billion dollars."

Dear Elizabeth: Yes, it's called Lehman Brothers.


Vicky is no longer eating for two: "im a 17 year old girl and im 5 months pregnant. im getting really ticked off about all this fuss as ive stopped eating because im so scared that the world is going to end !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Dear Vicky: There are worse things than dying fat. At least I'm pretty sure there are.


Julio urges: "just pray and have hope that this experiment will no cause major damages or any minors."

Dear Julio: You should ask Vicky what causes minors.


Timothy has a practical question: "If the world ends, do I have to go to work that day?"

Dear Timothy: Not if you're salaried.

There. I hope that helps. Sleep well, and don't bother calling the boss if you're not going to show up. He won't be there, either. At least not if he's salaried.

* who admits that "particle physics is not my strong suit." He and I have much in common. Well, this anyway.

** Well, maybe just "impressively titled."

*** You may have noticed the red image on the left side of this page declaring such, though you may not have noticed that it has been sitting there a very a non-threatening green**** for the last two years. I myself was momentarily confused by the declaration on their website, because for an hour after the shocking notice was posted that image remained green. Now it's red, so at least their story is straight.

**** If the red one bothers you, click on it (what's the worst thing that could happen?) and you'll be taken to a post where I have saved the green one for posterity. If there is any.

Panic Time

A funny little problem just arrived via email:

We are on Mill 7.6, Crystal 9. We just got groovy new computers with Microsoft Office 2007. The problem is that when I click Database \Database Expert \History to access Tables and Views, nothing’s there but a sad little “no items found.”

I do have an ODBC connection; I am able to run reports in Crystal and export them. I just can’t create any new reports or do any editing that involves adding new tables or views.

My IT department is stumped. They even retrieved my old computer in order to fish through its hard drive to find the old settings, but are not getting anywhere.

Does anyone know what the problem might be?

Thanks.

When I figured out the solution to this technological conundrum, I laughed pretty hard...

Anyone else want to take a shot at it? Everything you need to solve it is right there...

Famous Last Words

CNN addresses the fears of those who figure scientists will probably destroy themselves and us* later this week:

Fears have emerged that the [Large Hadron Collider] could produce black holes that could suck up anything around them -- including the whole Earth...

Although physicists acknowledge that the collider could, in theory, create small black holes, they say they do not pose any risk.

So there you have it. No worries, mate.

*If it does eventually happen, you can be assured it will have been paid for with tax money.

Funny, Obama made the same vow

According to CNN, "McCain vows to have Democrats in Cabinet":

(CNN) -- Promising a "very bipartisan approach" to how he'll run his administration, Sen. John McCain said in an interview broadcast Sunday that he would appoint Democrats to his Cabinet...

It does have to make Republicans feel good to know that if they work hard to keep the Democrats out of the executive branch, McCain will give those Democrats agencies to run as sort of a consolation prize.

Almost makes holding an election worthwhile, doesn't it?

I'm from the government

And I'm here to save you:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Federal officials unveiled an extraordinary takeover on Sunday of troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, signaling the most dramatic move to date aimed at shoring up the nation's housing market...

The cost of the government intervention remains unclear.

I guess Paulson needed that bazooka* after all.

I don't know what it will cost either, other than "more than you can possibly imagine." The money is less important, however, than the socialism of investment losses implemented by allegedly free-market, conservative Republicans. Those who made money on mortgage debt get to keep it, those who lost money will get their losses repaid for by the taxpayer**.

While the move was probably inevitable considering that the voters insist that the government "do something" about every conceivable problem, it was the government doing something in the first place that caused the mess. Freddie and Fannie were both created by the government in order to foster home ownership by those to whom regular banks would not lend - in other words, it allowed people who could not afford homes to buy them***. It turns out that whatever noble intentions that entailed and no matter how popular it was, it was still a bad idea.

But the political irony is that when conservatives who spout the free-market line act like socialists, then free markets get the blame for the failures socialism creates. As Jozum notes, "Conservatism, as a political choice in this country is dead." But I would allege it was killed by those calling themselves conservatives.

UPDATE: Paulson is so full of crap when he says that the takeover is necessary because of:

"...the ambiguities in the GSE Congressional charters, which have been perceived to indicate government support for agency debt and guaranteed MBS. ... as a result GSE debt and MBS are held by central banks and investors throughout the United States and around the world who believe them to be virtually risk-free.

So we taxpayers have to bail out the foreign central banks because they are too stupid to read?

From the Freddie FAQ:

7) Are FreddieNotes securities guaranteed by the federal government?

No. FreddieNotes securities are obligations of Freddie Mac only. FreddieNotes securities, including any interest on FreddieNotes securities, are not guaranteed by, and are not debts or obligations of, the United States or any agency or instrumentality of the United States other than Freddie Mac.

From Fannie's website disclaimer:

Securities issued by Fannie Mae are not guaranteed by the United States and do not constitute a debt or obligation of the Unites States or of any agency or instrumentality thereof other than Fannie Mae.

Helicopter Ben has also said, on more than one occasion, that "as numerous government officials have asserted--the government has given no such guarantees."

There is no ambiguity, and there is simply no way that one can argue that investors' perceptions that the government guaranteed the debt - in the face of longstanding statements by both agencies and the government itself to the contrary - necessitate the government providing an ex-post-facto guarantee of it. What is happening is that the government has looked into the abyss - an abyss that they caused - and decided they must throw the taxpayer into the breach in order to push that catastrophe a few more months. As the blog "Radical Left" put it: "Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac Bailed Out: Capitalist Catastrophe," and they're half right, it is a catastrophe.

But it ain't capitalism.

* "If you have a bazooka in your pocket and people know it, you probably won't have to use it," he said at a July 15 Senate Banking Committee hearing. But now Paulson is readying the bazooka, because the markets didn't respond as hoped. I guess markets don't run on hope, either.

** At least the shareholders will get hosed. The plan is not all bad.

*** As is usually the case, it had the opposite effect: increasing the pool of potential buyers drove home prices up, making them even less affordable. Now that the bubble has popped, those who could not afford houses they bought now have a debt called "negative equity" on their balance sheets. But at least the government did something.