"Aaaaaaand that’s then I want to start pressing the “It’s time for the goddamned revolution” button. By the time we get to the breakdowns of the monthly expenses of the seven 1% households profiled for the article, which features line items like $800 a month on wine and $1200 for the vacation house on the lake, I’m vaguely surprised Toronto isn’t on fire. The only people I feel any sort of commonality with are the immigrant family, who pack their own lunches for work and aside from the hair salon line item seem to have some perspective on their cash. The retired couple who invested well and are living off the proceeds also gets a pass, because, hey, that’s the goal, right? Otherwise: Purification by flame."

"If we are to take the version of events proffered by Ron Paul's defenders, the Congressmen voted for a holiday which his Chief of Staff publicly denounced as "Hate Whitey Day." In Ron Paul's own name, no less. This version of events should inspire skepticism even in a Paul admirer. I am happy to report that in some, it did.  

I want to reiterate--again--that I make no claims on the heart of Ron Paul. How he truly feels about black people is best left to Paul and his conscience. His actual record, however, is wholly subject to the wiles of google."

"Hate Whitey Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have all the pressure to be perfect, like Christmas, or everybody getting along, like Thanksgiving. Just white people cowering in their houses/retreating to their heavily armed compounds in rural Oklahoma while America’s non-white population runs riot, more or less totally burning shit down. And the clean-up and re-building costs always add a bump to the January jobs report, as Matthew Yglesias has noted."

Of COURSE Amazon sells pepper spray.

While I don't _think_ this is actually Krugman, it's a little disturbing that I can't be sure. --- ETA: It's not (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/onion/).

" Specifically, there seems to be some serious misunderstanding of the dynamics of national elections in the US.  So let me try to clear this up once and for all.  You are welcome."

"Get Smart insisted that we’d trapped ourselves in a game of Spy v. Spy, that it was ridiculous (and very funny) that we were plowing huge amounts of money into developing levitating shoes, or having agents brew up coffee in a lab. The conflicts never really required more in the way of resolution than a punch in the face. The prospect of infiltration was about as serious as the threat of vampires. I can’t imagine the reaction to a mainstream show today that so forcefully and hilariously insisted that our whole national security enterprise was a fraud, but an equivalently funny show would be incredibly bracing."

Sometimes, good taste is inappropriate.

"We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities ... or steamrollered if they try to resist. In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion."
(Stross is right that the existence of Communism forced capitalism to moderate itself, but that just meant we played one inhuman entity off against another, not unlike William Tenn's "The Liberation of Earth".)

""If you had to do it all over again what would you do different?" says me.
"Nothing!" says Giblets. "Giblets has no regrets!"
"I think I'd travel more or go back to art school or maybe not drive the car off that cliff back when you said 'Hey Fafnir let's drive this car off that cliff'," says me.
"Oh, so we're back to this again!" says Giblets. "That was like, eight whole seconds ago. Let it go already! You're livin in the past!""

"Wouldn’t it be awesome if the Fed and other government agencies took advantage of domestic Nobel Prize winning economists? For christ sake- someone google “Krugman+lost+decade” and tell me how many hits you come up with. He’s done just about everything except tattoo it on his chest and back and then do a pay-per-view boxing match with Tonya Harding." --- Would that work, I wonder?

Indeed: what IS our third current war? Is Central Command also secretly fending off the lizard people from planet XII, come to reclaim Sumeria?

"Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream." (See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bu-pt1H5_EQ)

"Still, just as a brief refresher, recall that over the past two years, the movement’s flagship publications and most prominent pundits have found it urgent to discuss: Bill Ayers’ potential authorship of Obama’s memoir, the looming threat of death panels, the president’s crypto-Islamic background and allegiances, his attempt to create a “private army” via the health care bill, his desire to see America come to ruin, the imagined racism of Sonia Sotomayor…"

"Did You See John Yoo's Easter Sunday Op-Ed? In the Washington Post: "Crucifixion is legal when ordered by the president in his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.""

"Maybe we can outsmart global warming with gumption and can-do and thousands of tiny robots!" says me.
"Maybe all we need is a simple technological solution, like installing blinds on the sky or an off switch for the sun," says Giblets.

A battle of wits with a room full of unarmed men.

"I want to address all of the criticisms that Obama should have returned to the White House rather than staying in Hawaii after the attempted bombing. While the readers of this blog know that I am very critical of him, I can’t fault him on this one. If you were a black guy with close family in Africa and a Muslim name, would YOU get on an airplane while the TSA is on the alert for Nigerian Muslims?"

"Suppose that the hundred members of the present U.S. Senate were trapped on a desert island with a man-eating dragon and only you could save them. In which order would you save them, and how many would you save before you decided to quit? I’d save six right off and then think about the next eleven. After eighteen at the most, I’d just sit in my boat and watch the dragon movie."

"If I am reading the figures right, there were about 370,000 babies born in Canada in 2008. Our infant mortality rate is about 5 per 1000 live births so presumably something like 1850 babies died soon after being born in 2008. The US infant mortality rate is about 6.9 per 1000 live births so if we adopted the US system and then had similar infant mortality rates, the net effect would be similar to if we kept our current system but began tossing 700 viable babies into the hyena enclosure in the nearest zoo. Sorry, that should be 700 per year. Instead of spending 11.9% of the GNP on health care, we would get to spend 17.6%. This means that we'd get much the same benefit from adopting the US system as we would if we kept out current system but set fire to a stack of currency containing about 88 billion dollars. Per year."

"Ask your doctor about universal health care"

Words fail.

Lowering global GDP by 5% can be achieved by eliminating countries which have over 40% of the world's population. Now, if one wanted to follow this particular line of madness to its end, you'd have to include the cost to richer countries of trade disruption (e.g., we might have to pay more for tea and commodity software without India, more for t-shirts without Bangladesh, more for coffee without Malawi) --- but the point is clear.

"You know, in every movie I've seen about the end of the world, civilization collapses because of something wicked cool happening - an asteroid hits, nuclear war, a supervirus, an ape revolution, whatever. If civilization collapses over credit default swaps I an going to be pissed."

Preach it, brother Rees!

... in which Kieran wins the Internet.

I need some of these for my office.

in which Citibank gets taken for $27 million.

Raising the important historical question: _did_ Baal Mammon take human sacrifices?

An illustration of the necessity for counterfactuals.

Draft inspector general's report on the Iraqi reconstruction project. I've not finished it yet, but: Unbefuckinglievable.

Chronicle of a bubble foretold.

"Things are looking up for John McCain. Last week ended with a bang with the announcement of his fresh-faced new running mate Sarah Palin, who should provide McCain many more years of extended existence through gradual consumption of her life force, and, if needed, a new host body should his current vessel fail him. But McCain's true masterstroke is his planned convention trip to the permanently hurricane-ravaged wasteland of New Orleans, where he will demonstrate his awesome powers of Presidentiality by climbing atop a mountain of corpses and emitting a series of ear-piercing shrieks before unfurling his once-gnarled bat wings to absorb the radiance of the city's succulent Death Energy. He will then speak on the need for sacrifice, courage, and a new spirit of national unity in these times of extraordinary crisis before loping off to strangle and devour an aid worker."

I don't know whether to snort or to sigh wistfully.

"That's that no-nonsense down-to-business style I like about you, Hillary Clinton! You don't just talk about change. You talk about how much you don't just talk about change!"

"Iraqis have often been observed weeping and wailing in apparent anguish, but the study offers evidence indicating this may not be exclusively an outward expression of anger or a desire for revenge. It also provocatively suggests that this grief can posse

"great news for the McCain campaign, since the end of the world would allow him to really mobilize his base of poison-breathing flesh zombies. But can Obama make inroads into McCain's demographics by "reaching across the aisle" to pick up the traditionall

"The point is, we saw a problem and we dealt with it. Did the problem actually exist? Who knows! Did our solution end up killing lots of people who'd otherwise be alive? Who can say!"

Fafblog continues to be the only source of news able to deal with current reality at its own level.

"I can't believe that even a Bush official can go around spewing nonsense like 'being lesbian is worse than being a Democrat'. Sometimes I think they've hit bottom, but then the trapdoor opens and I fall into a whole new cellar of bullshit rightwing ignor

"Yes, I certainly feel safer that there are cops on the interstates scanning for terrorists who might be transporting "dirty bombs" and stolen Pakistani/Russian nukes. It's a good thing that they are out there, looking for phantoms and busting the occasio

"The strength of our nation depends on all of us feeling—and, more importantly, acting—as if a sniper could blow our head off at any moment. Let's all come together as in fearful days of yore and do what we must to keep America free from peace of mind"

"It's like being the drummer for Spinal Tap."