Wonkette
Thursday, early evening. She turns the key to her Dungeon of Medicines, an isolated pod floating atop the highest vistas of Park Avenue. It is constructed of the finest Metals and can only be reached by rickshaw. Even after all these years, the scent of myrrh lingers. A glass of scotch is poured and she takes to the shelves. Tonight will be a night of barbiturates. Full bottles of Amytal, Nembutal, Seconal, et. al, are downed within seconds. She takes to her camel fur chair — a special model, in that it is an actual camel — and waits whilst supping on a bowl of cough syrup. The hour becomes 10, then 11, then 12. Midnight. A new day. But still, nothing. She is able to walk; this should not be physically possible. Time to bring out the typing machinery. She is struck, sober, hands on the keys, sitting on a camel, poised, wrought, a wordsmith to the death, honest. Peggy Noonan has written her headline: “There’s No Pill for This Kind of Depression.”
Thought gives thought to another thought and a thought is thought:
The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.
One would not expect Ms. Noonington to understand much about the amateurish layman’s drugs, but there is quite a difference between Xanax and Zoloft. And there’s an even bigger difference yet between those drugs and cocaine, which is what the bankers actually were taking, as usual, but this time to capitalize on the adventurous and broad profit opportunities offered by that new sign of global perfection, the eschaton fully realized and subsidized by those majestic, endless reserves from the land of China: permanently low long-term interest rates. It was Jesus speaking to the bankers: “The global real estate market, I have done things to it. Go forth, and fuck it raw.”
It’s a decent column, though, beyond the usual cerebral stuff. Peggington is scared, like everyone, about an impending collapse. No, not this kindergarten version of a downturn we’re already experiencing; none of these conventional perceptions of hell that experts “warn” us about like, say, 12% unemployment at the trough, in 2010. Child’s play! “COLLAPSE,” YOU FOOLS! Balance sheets and asset values actually reflecting the nation’s level of organic output, followed by a run on the money markets too massive and disorganized for the Fed to stop with one of its “floods,” and an economy evaporated within 90 minutes. Everyone running around the streets like a bunch of jerkoffs.
Peggy’s gut fear of a Real Collapse, though, isn’t defined by the latest economic news or political responses. It is defined by anecdotes of conversations she had with her rich friends:
They are taking cash out of the bank in preparation for a long-haul bad time. A friend in Florida told me the local bank was out of hundred-dollar bills on Wednesday because a man had come in the day before and withdrawn $90,000. Five weeks ago, when I asked a Wall Street titan what one should do to be safe in the future, he took me aback with the concreteness of his advice, and its bottom-line nature. Everyone should try to own a house, he said, no matter how big or small, but it has to have some land, on which you should learn how to grow things.
Oh come on you Wall Street titan asshole, you can’t just go saying things like that to Peggy Noonan! Do you want the poor lady to have a seizure, for Christ’s sake? It’s just cruel to throw shit like that at Peggy when you know perfectly well how much it’ll back up her digestive system.
He also recommended gold coins, such as American Eagles. I went to the U.S. Mint Web site the next day, but there was a six-week wait due to high demand. (I just went on the Web site again: Production of gold Eagle coins “has been temporarily suspended because of unprecedented demand” for bullion.)
OHHHHHH, ha ha ha, right… we see what’s going on here. Took a little while though! Kind of embarrassing, but anyway, yeah… Peggy. You’re just going to want to ignore this guy, OK. He’s part of this Internet group that’s really devoted to one Congressman, this doctor from Texas. They fly blimps and dress up like Martha Washington and… well, you get the gist. Pay no mind.
There’s No Pill for This Kind of Depression [WSJ]
Really, Lady Noonington? I thought Bear Stearns was explained by Cramer constantly shilling for them even as their stock began to crater.
Fsck all of ‘em. I’m just glad I had no investments to lose. I had nowhere to go but up…
Oh my god.
Well done, Jim. Good to have you and Dame Peggington back. You make beautiful music together!
Ken Layne: Jon Stewart will save us all, with his scorn and finger-wagging.
Howard K. Stern & Doc Scriptforger to the rescue. ( ’tis Jerry Brown that awaits around the corner to pounce!)
“Go forth, and fuck it raw.”
Best line from a Peggington post evah. Perfect for a Friday night.
Next week, Her Ladyship visits a plantation to see the future in action.
Awww Pegs, you’re scared. All those years ignoring Jose and other tinted folks while living in your white bread upper class world have finally come to a crashing halt. You know what smell is? It’s not a burrito, it’s called reality.
It’s funny to me (in a peculiar way, but not haha way) that someone who spent much of her life pushing essentially stupid policies that would knock up the world’s economy a la Octo-Pussy who gave birth to an octo brood of High Debt, Asset Deflation, Outsourcing, Government fiscal problems, environmental problems, over population, fizcal instability and massive unemployment. Sorry Pegs, it’s your turn to change the diapers and the kids ate Libertarian “inspected” raw spinach and peanut butter.
“There Is No Pill For This Kind of Depression” sounds like a lost Joy Division track.
I took the drugs, and they was good. Where id my credit cardth? I musth by some hookers with some mores of that Fourty one OK monies that grammys left fors me to watch and grow for her. HaHAHA Grammyz so funny.
America’s Mandate: grow and sell weed
I keep trying to remind people — for the bankers and investors, there WERE NO F***ING “RISKS” IF THEY LOST OTHER PEOPLES’ MONEY.
Why would their emotional view of risk be a factor when there were zero f***ing risks FROM ANY GOD DAMNED AUTHORITY WHATSOEVER?????
(And, no, Madoff doesn’t count, since that’s fraud under the law; what everyone did with credit default swaps was, by the magic of Phil Gramm, completely unregulatable.)
So prescription anti-depressants weren’t widely prescribed prior to 9/11. Ahm……OK. I thought that Xanax was anti-anxiety med. (like Ativan) and anti-depressants were what she was on about at the start? Also strange choice of words for anti-depressants - I’ve taken SSRIs and never have I thought to myself, “Hey, I need to get high now. Time for my 150 mg of Wellbutrin!”
“Pain or damage don’t end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store.”
-Al Swearingen
A house with land, gold coins, cash on hand…. could Peggy be interested in going Galt? Whatever would we do without her purple prose informing us about life for those trapped in the Park Avenue ghetto by the cruel hand of La Fortuna?
Some of us can’t afford pills even if they would work. And I’m shocked to discover Peggy doesn’t already have bars of gold lying around her house. She redeems herself when she asks a friend, ‘a perceptive writer,’ if he sees what she sees. He concurs, as only someone truly perceptive would.
Yes, gold coins will be awesome when the Mad Max-esque collapse is upon us. You can eat them, or use them to fuel your car/weapon. They are certainly no more pretend than paper money. No siree.
Thank you Jim. All is right in the world. The Pegster has finally seen the view from her Upper East Side condo and it is terrifying. Long live Pegs, long live the Revolution.
Despite the depressing–pass the Zoloft–subject matter, that was one hell of a fun read. Bravo.
Hey I can sympathize. I know that feeling well — Friday night and I’m all out of pills. Best cure for depression is to take the elevator up to the roof, board my Blackhawk helicopter and go out for a night of sniping at poors up in Harlem. Or hunting down the homeless in the canyons of Wall Street. Gets the adrenaline flowing.
A Samozaryadniy Karabin sistemi Simonova, with copious amounts of stripper-clipped 7.62×39 FMJ and soft ball rounds, 12 gauge Mossberg pump paired with #1 buckshot, and Taurus .357 with a side of Winchester Silvertip 145 trump Wall Street Titan’s US Mint Gold Giggles…
Uppers, Downers, Laughers, Screamers… Our Dear Lady Dame Noonington is a veritable kaleidoscope of insightful, well-reasoned pearls of chemically-induced upper-crust-twit bullshit…
We r in yr fnancyul nstitooshuns, snffin yr coke.
Bearbloke: We need ether to set things up properly.
“The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge, and I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon.” - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Also.
Lovely work James. Me heart Peggyday.
Still, Dame Nooningbottom has always had a tied up digestive tract. The “advice” she received just confirms the fears she has always had. The tragic part is the policies she and her ilk advocated put us there, not the boogie-man of a welfare state.
I do agree with her about the overmedicated society. One suspects her drug of choice is odorless vodka, so as to not disturb her fancy-pants brethren who were flipping out on coke & ecstasy. The Pegster should get out and help people for heaven’s sake.
Forget it Peg it’s Chinatown.
President Beeblebrox: How can I forget the ether… this must be a more vicious, twisted high that we’re used to… but what really worries me are the fucking bats…
Somebody get Princess Noonington some ’shrooms from the Shire. We shall melt away her prison bars.
Snark momentarily aside, if you ever want to know what the unemployment rate REALLY is - not the massaged number you get from press releases but the real state of employment in America - here’s what you do.
Go to the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and dig up Table A-12. Alternative measures of labor underutilization.
Read off the U-6 number (Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers).
Then add a percent, because the government massages even realtively raw data.
And voila: the real umemployment figures for February 2009 was 17%.
Discuss.
will pegtards be this year’s paultards?
Forget the busy soup kitchens - there’s a run on the jeebus snacks in a church in Manhattan. Doomed . ..
Great write-up. I love the image of her typing atop a camel.
About five years ago, I surmised that she had rigged Pez Dispensers that had Magic Jesus Dolphin heads to give her the PNDA (Peggy Noonan Daily Allowance) of Xanax. I sense she has gone to the “see how many she can eat in sixty minutes… and then try to break that record!” game.
AxmxZ: Holy tomatoes.
Mr. Newell, this is the kind of gold plated, stab the bitches with the rat tail of a stylists comb and piss in her cornflakes writing that keeps us coming back here day after day.
I raise my glass to your wordsmithery.
AxmxZ: Waiting for China’s unvarnished employment numbers to come out…only to be crushed under a tank track!
Full employment will be assured when Formosa is repatriated from the Kuomintang splitters…
That has got to be the dumbest thesis for Wall Street’s craziness that I’ve ever heard. If she’d suggested evil aliens implanted mind-control devices into every trader and investment banker in the industry and then manipulated them into destroying the world’s economy to cause global chaos and collapse the aliens could use as cover to conquer the planet and enslave humanity so they could harvest our sweet sweet bone marrow to use as some sort of alien aphrodisiac, I’d be way less gobsmacked then I am right now.
Of course that could just be the weed talking. No telling what will happen when you mix that shit with Effexor.
Gallowglass: That’s exactly how *I* feel about gold coins! Can we eat a bowl of Krugerrands? No. Maybe we could trade them to some of the idiots for real stuff, but … even they will catch on after a few hungry seasons.
In Lehman’s fall, we sinned all.
“We are actors in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move forward or back.”
Right, My Last Duchess, as I watch you drop back 15 in front of the Republican end zone and punt.
AxmxZ: Or you could just multiple U3 (the one that gets reported) by 2 and you’d be roughly there. No need to do all that work of actually looking up what U6 is. Call it a productivity gain and give me a bonus!
imissopus: Shh… ix-nay on the an-play.
PULITZER, JIM! PULITZER!
Truly, one of your finest, funniest posts.
Anxiety medication makes crises seems blase. On cocaine you can do anything with hot, cool energy and only vaguely remember your actions in the morning. Wall Street was taking the latter.
Yay! Thanks for the Nooner post, Jim!
And as usual, Peggy’s got it wrong — the anti-anxiety drugs weren’t the cause of the collapse, but one of its leading indicators. They were taken to allay the creeping fears of a bunch of people who — being trained in the field of finance — knew that by selling overvalued mortgages as securities and allowing people to speculate on such vapor on margin (i.e. putting a 4% down payment on a gamble of a hundred million dollars or more in the hopes that its rise was inexorable) they were spreading a great sickness through the entire world at the same time they were bringing on the inevitable collapse.
Those shits — just like Jim Cramer — knew this was going to happen. Mabye Peggy didn’t — someone who uses the passive voice as often as she does probably thinks the world is controlled by angels and demons moving magnets under the table and that cause and effect are mere illusions, when they can be discerned at all. But others knew because this is how rampant speculation on margin always ends.
Of course eventually the ship will right itself just as mysteriously as it capsized. Ecclesiastes will give way to motivational posters once again and her neighborhood will buzz once again with boutiques devoted to gold-leafing your thimble collections and mechanical eyebrows for botox addicts. Because if the recovery has no cause but was just some sort of historic phase in the precession of the eonomic equinoxes, then neither did the collapse have a cause. And certainly not the economic policies she devoted so much time to advocating. No, of course not.
And thus she will be able to get through each day without imagining each glance from a friend or neighbor whose fortune has been wiped out contains some sort of implied reproach. That and a daily scotch on rocks specially made with two vicodin apiece frozen into them.
Hewaven forbid Lady Peggy ever stand in an unemployment line. That’s when she’ll need the heavy stuff.
As I was admitted to Bellevue for Delirium Tremens and while I clutched a glistening fifth of brandy (New Jersey vintage February 2009) in my hands, I spoke to a CERTAIN Manhattan-based psychiatrist, who said there is an uptick in the number of his NeoCon patients reporting depression and anxiety. He believes part of the reason is that they’re in a new place, that, “When NeoCons have a home surrounded by Hispanics, Negroes, Slavs, French Canadians and other ethnic Europeans, they increasingly recognize the importance of their previous environment and their loss of having the first tee-time on the country club golf course .”
Noonie: Haldol is now generic.
HUH? I DONT GET IT. WAKE UP POEPLE, WERE ON ARE WAY TO COMMUNISM.
I don’t have time for Noonan. I have a Bushville tent town to build. I predict Academy’s stock will go up.
iolanthe: Gallowglass:
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Apparently they think some tiny part of the globe will be untouched by this worldwide clusterfuck, perhaps an isolated island in the Pacific, and on that Island people will want shit-tons of jewelry.
Not to hijack this thread, but I cannot resist sharing this with all of you. It is the only thing remotely related to Fox news that has ever brought me joy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9JE5SBm9UU
I have no idea what’s going on over there, and I don’t care to find out, but it seems even the rest of Fox hates Glen Beck.
“Congressman, this doctor from Texas” Hmmm, who could that be. Give me a hint: Is it the same Congressman from Texas whose savings are in a box buried under a cactus in his back yard, and have tripled in value (measured in central bank money) over the time POTUS Bush II was in office? Measured in real money his savings have not changed in value since it was stolen from the Aztecs.
As far as Peggy-poo goes, are they filling up the Journals ad pages with those buy gold/free report on the end of the earth ads? Anyway it’s not serious until she starts talking about zog, or is it Zog, or even ZOG. ZoG maybe? Peggy, I bought 20 boxes of instant stuffing on sale, when the end comes we’ll make a fire with the refuse of our now fallen city and cook it with the remaining water in my hot water tank. When the end comes, come over. Serious offer Peggy.
iolanthe: well, Peter Schiff thinks gold will double this year to $2,000.
Is he right? i dont knoes.
NoWireHangers: I have been alive for a long long time. And I know this: Republican administrations always equal cheap cocaine and lots of it, but you can barely find good psychedelics anywhere. During Democratic administrations, these situations reverse.
Maybe this isn’t an immutable law, but I’ve seen this pattern three times now since my youth.
sati demise: I’d be a hell of a lot more likely to pay $2000 to somebody to build me a rain catchment system with a cistern, than to buy a hunk of metal that I can’t even use to stir my coffee or dig a ditch.
AxmxZ:
Making me read that wasn’t nice.
You take it back.
I will make a dress out of the curtains and be just fine.
Fiddle-dee-dee.
Coming next week: Peggy buys a gun
Tra: That’s hilarious. It’s like Shep Smith had been hoping to work for a newwwwws channel. And if he keeps that up, he might soon be doing so.
Also, apparently the MSNBC producers were told not to use any of the Jim Cramer evisceration on their shows. Anyone know if Maddow or Keith “At last, sir, have you no shame?” Olbermann went the integrity route or the corporate shill one? Help a cable-less hobo out.
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/03/13/msnbc-dont-talk-cramer/
For the love of God, shut uppington.
guerilla-nation: No, but pegging might be the favorite activity of Paultards this year.
ManchuCandidate: I’ve smelled reality, and it’s remarkably close to a burrito. Maybe closer to a sopito, but definitely in the realm of Mexican food.
The suxorz haz destroyed economy with lazors!!!!1!!11! Martini, stat!
SayItWithWookies: Yeah, sad. Absolutely no mention on either of their shows tonight. It’s like they’re in the pockets of corporate America or something. I especially liked when Stewart said something about “doucheborough”. No wonder Joe’s kept this mouth shut about this…after cheering Cramer on in the beginning.
iolanthe: You need to publish your theory on presidential cycles and the relative cost/availability of cocaine and psychedelics.
“Thought gives thought to another thought and a thought is thought”
Jim, you ginger-headed genius, you, if we both didn’t have cocks, I’d be mouth-fucking you with my tongue right now. Oh what the hell….
Texan Bulldoggette: A friend of mine just called me and said Rachel Maddow mentioned it, but didn’t use any of the footage, and Olbermann (like all the other MSNBC shills) pretended it didn’t exist. At least Rachel has some shred of integrity.
Texan Bulldoggette: I missed the doucheborough comment. Was that in the televised interview or just the online?
DEAREST MS PEGGY
I am writin to you of upmost urgencies and importants. I have USD$100,000,000 of 100% gold BOULLION left to me but inaccessable in SABIC BANK, BENIN, AFRIKA. please contact me to arrange wire transfer and transfer of said GOLD BOuLLION.
By the way, Klonopin is awesome. If anythiing its helped me make more money than lose it, but it depends on what year your talking about.
SayItWithWookies: I especially like how he seems to be trying to ignite a Beck/O’Reilly feud at the end. That would be fun.
Peggy, next time you get liquored and pilled up, please invite me over, but only if you have puchased your gold ingots. As a second choice, if you have $90k cash on hand. We’ll party all night.
SayItWithWookies: I didn’t see the whole 60 minutes of the show, but thought I saw most of it. I know it wasn’t a marquis moment for her because it wasn’t advertised or puffed up.
Tra: I ‘think’ the doucheborough mention was in the non-edited version. But it was so quick that you could have easily missed it.
Suckers. If Peggington Noonington is writing about the bust, you can guarantee that now is the time to buy.
“Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin”
Judy Garland Trail Mix! Yummy!
Awesome! The current clusterfuck o’finance is NOT the result of joint malfeasance twixt deregulating assholes and greedy corporate-types; it’s all due to…psychiatric medication?!?!
Mmhmm, yup, makes sense to me. Also, too: that was a good parody of Noonington’s writing style. It reminds me of a shitty wannabe trying to channel DeLillo.
Bruno:
“Dearest Bruno,
Only if I can have rainbows and lollipops as securitization, and maybe a tiny trunkload of uppers. Some ludes, also. And a lid.
Madame De Nooningville”
Fuck all of you. Jim Newell just wrote a beautiful fucking thing, and unless you are Trig, you don’t deserve shit.
Tropical Thunder: Now on DVD, January 11. It’s like September 11, and equally as inaccurate.
BUY IT NOW. If you do, they will advertise here more and all of that business stuff
WAY to loyal to this damned commie website.
Texan Bulldoggette: You’re right, apparently it was in (so my friend says) a non-headlined segment. I haven’t seen it yet, so this is just secondhand.
Tra: TPM has the whole thing here: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/03/jon_stewart_interview_with_jim_cramer.php?ref=fp5 which is just an embed from Comedy Central, but I’m being lazy and linking to the first page I found that had them all together. The edited segments are the last two, which were cut up into one bit.
Magnus Maximus: “…it’s all due to…psychiatric medication?!”
Damn the 60s. Everything about the economy today is them druggie hippies’ fault, what with their free-love and drop-in, drop-out, pass/fail or whatever the fuck it was. Wait. I’ve anticipated David Brooks’ next “adventures in pop NeoCon sociology” NYT column. I demand copyright.
JEEBUS WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? GIVE HER MORE OXYCONTIN AND SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Dang, shorts, go get yourself a 1.99 Taco Bell seven-layer burrito. I think by this time of the evening, people are just glad to have not kissed their cousin.
Well, there’s a positive note.
Ms. Noonan writes in her WSJ article:
“Gun sales continue up. The FBI’s criminal background check system showed a 23% increase in February over the previous year, a 29% increase in January, a 24% increase in December and a 42% increase in November, when a record 1.5 million background checks were performed. Yes, people fear President Obama will take away the guns he thinks they cling to, but a likely equal contributor to what The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch called a ‘gun-buying binge’ is captured in the slogan on one firearms maker’s Web site: ‘Smith & Wesson stands for protection.’ People are scared.”
Now, how can that be taken other than as a positive response to the inauguration of our unconstitutional Immigrant President and the installation of his National Socialist Democrat Asshole Party (NSDAP) recycled Clintonista band of flaming incompetents?
Americans are still willing to kill in self-defense, and are lining up in droves to secure the means with which to do so.
That is NOT the attitude of clinically depressed people. That’s a bunch of folks who want to live, especially if it makes people like you clowns posting on Wonkette die in the process.
=====
“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”
– L. Neil Smith
a
Noonan can snort cocaine off Rush’s tits in the Glenn Becks Doom Room while Laura Ingraham eats out MegMcC.
Babs Johnson: Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, oh MY!!!!
Personally, I’m down with the K or as they call it in these parts Clonazepam. Oh, but my anxiety and insomnia is all put to rest just to have Lady Noonington back with us on Fridays.
Oh pshaw, she’s just vomiting up “Looking Out For #1″ an old Con favorite from the 70’s.Dark teenagers playing music on their radios cause a world wide economic collapse and only people with guns, land and gold will survive. The idea of Peggy surviving on garden produce is sublime.Eat the rich.
“The hearts of the wise are in the house of mourning, while the hearts of the foolish are in the house of mirth,” or something like that.
knock knock Hello, is this the House of Mirth? Can I come in and play?
gurukalehuru: Hi, everyone is asleep here. Me especially. It’s the pills they give us.
It’s captivating to see the Duchess’s “evening in America” prose matched with all deserved sarcasm. If only it were possible to introduce this Noonington to the N’ton of 1980, via time machine or wormhole.
Lady Peggy, take care when mixing the scotch and barbiturates! I hath seen it done with tragic results …
Hmm, bad behavior, behavior modification…what are three prescription drugs that I can remember?
Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin
Ok, and three banking/investment firms to match that number…um, how about:
Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi
Ok, literary device of the day complete!..
…Also, does anyone have any ludes?
Lady Peggingtonnooninhamshire’s scariest epiphany was actually that of her “friend”, who wants to go where Atticus Finch gave his summation. Remember that place? Where they fucking convicted the innocent black guy and the good guys were all happy that it took the racist country fucks awhile to make the decision to do it? But only because the complaining white victim was trashy, poor, and a patent liar? Yeah, that’s where her shriveled bag of a “heart” is leading her. Yay for economic fears stoking underlying racism!
Now, back to your regularly scheduled Trucknutz.
Abuse of prescription meds? I’d had to see Pegs apologize to Rush, because, you know, aesthetics.
imissopus: sweet sweet bone marrow is soda lishus. You are awesome.
Might I point out that in Florida, withdrawing $90,000 in hundreds has an alternative explanation? Along the lines of, “payment for this month’s shipment”?
I suspect Noonan’s elephantine drug stash is only rivalled by her contact list of anonymous ‘friends’, ‘professionals’ and ‘experts’. Conveniently enough this chattering, nameless horde invariably amplifies her views, while speaking in voices that uncannily resemble her own! For this column alone she’s consulted an un-named “perceptive writer”, an Ecclisiastes quoting “attorney in a Park Avenue firm”, a “Wall St. titan”, an evangelical “friend”, a “friend” looking for failed farms, another “friend” looking for Atticus Finch-land and a “Manhattan based psychiatrist” who diagnoses the American malaise in startlingly Noonan-ian terms: “a psychological pandemic of fear”, he gravely intones, confirming that great minds think, and more remarkably, speak, exactly alike. A more sceptical reader might suspect that Ms Noonan, like Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, is simply “inventing” multiple sources to pad out the flimsiness of her lament, and the utter predictability of her insights. I remained convinced, however, that Peggy genuinely believes in the existence of all her imaginary friends and consults them in perfectly good faith.
SJ Doc: So Doc, how *was* the “We Surround Them” rally?
Ha ha, We Surround Them, by Glenn Beck The Human Taint.
I joined. I hope they’re still trying to wrap their heads around the picture I sent them.
Back in the early ‘00 I was on a shitload of Celexa. That was some pretty good dope. No, it didn’t make me feel particularly good–though it could make me a little buzzy. But mostly, what it did was put a nice thick wall of glass between me and everyone else’s problems–that was pretty cool. The girlfriend at the time liked mixing prozac and alcohol, and she tended to take two every other day (& none in between) for a nice roller coaster effect (I’m not recommending this, unless, like her, you also enjoy extended sleeping/crying jags).
SJ Doc: Doctor oh doctor. If irony is your intention you have succeeded. If not, physician heal thyself (or perhaps with assistance from a Power greater than yourself).
“Clinical depression” is another way of labeling people and a dangerous one at that: a predominance of behavioral criteria are met, prescriptions are writ, pharmaceutical companies get fatter, insurance companies get their cut, and most importantly psychiatrists maintain their vocation with a stable of semi-functional, manically self-focused bots.
Dubya, Peggy, Princess Rush, and the wingnuts all “want to live,” but in a way you surely recognize as futile. That is, ensuring their own fruitlessness by projecting their despair onto the world. To name a few sociological memes that are the culmination of this inability to be adult : “WMD,” “Fast Money,” & “Government is the problem.” It’s called acting out and should be reserved for teenagers and shrewish cougars.
Fortunately resistance to power will always produce “clowns” like J. Stewart with the courage to name and kick the moneychangers out the temple.
windupbird: Time for my 150 mg of Wellbutrin!
What kind of reaction do you expect from a child-sized 150mgs?? You ain’t flying till you hit that magic 450. Then — watch out, world!!
Ok. So the first paragraph was by far the funniest thing I have ever read in well over a year.
My hubs and I were reading it outloud and cracking up….and then! the money shot“There’s No Pill for This Kind of Depression.”
Sir, thou slayeth me.
Peg, I suggest you learn to grow (and cook) your own potatoes, onions, beans. Get a few chickens, too. Of course, you’d need some land not covered with concrete,which probably means leaving Manhattan. I suggest the outskirts of Fargo, North Dakota! It should be an education for you, almost as educational as a term in prison will be for your banker friends!
Zhu Bajie
All that was missing was a pithy statement from a taxi driver.
Bruno: Is that the chicken bouillon or the beef?
Zhu Bajie
“Zoloft”
Gimme that z, o-l-o-f-t
Gimme a grip, make me love me
Suckin’ ‘em down, I’m happy man
Can feel it inside, makin’ me smile
…realize that the sky’s not made of gold
don’t disguise the nature of your soul
Gimme that z, o-l-o-f-t
No longer pissed and you don’t bother me
I’m makin’ it through, I’m givin’ my all
When base are loaded, I’m whacking the ball
…don’t suck the mind, don’t drain the source
the path of life’s not so easy to course, buddy
-Ween from “Quebec”
hobospacejungle: Wow. A splooging cock-nail. Wow.
you all are so funny
DoctorCulturae:
Nice, nice very nice, Thank you.
MG
Vanity Smurf: Oh, no, she’s not “Going Galt”. You have to be a titan of industry for that, but she’s a titan of journalism, a dying industry (we are told).
Her only choice is to Go Paultard, and she is doing it fabulously. She is almost Going Dianetic, with her disdain for — and confusion about — psychoactive substances.
This article underscores a point that’s been made before: Peggy Noonan really needs to get laid.
Texan Bulldoggette: Yup I was drunk as hell. Blame my boss.
iolanthe: So Doc, how *was* the “We Surround Them” rally?
Wouldn’t know. Don’t care. I’ve always preferred the strategy of the central position. “They got us surrounded - the poor bastards.”
Good heavens, are you mistaking me for a REPUBLICAN?
=====
“…this is why the Republicans are worse than the Democrats. The Democrats openly talk of increasing the size and scope of government – no matter which party is in power; the Republicans talk about fiscal conservatism when the Democrats are in power (while sometimes supporting their fiscal liberalism anyway), and then increase the size and scope of government when they are in power. They are political charlatans and con artists, almost to a man.”
– Laurence M. Vance
DoctorCulturae: “Clinical depression” is another way of labeling people and a dangerous one at that: a predominance of behavioral criteria are met, prescriptions are writ, pharmaceutical companies get fatter, insurance companies get their cut, and most importantly psychiatrists maintain their vocation with a stable of semi-functional, manically self-focused bots.
Shows how much you’re NOT a physician, “Doctor.” The pshrinks have had a sour time of it since the SSRI and SNRI mood elevators got onto the market. Over the past 30 years, the Mangled Care suits have been pushing us “gatekeeper physicians” to initiate and sustain treatment for patients with mild to moderate depression because - even when drugs like fluoxetine (Prozac) were on-patent and expensive, their side-effect profiles were better than the earlier meds in that category (MAOI inhibitors, tricyclics, etc.) and didn’t need as much psychopharacological expertise to prescribe with reasonable expectations of safety and efficacy.
Costly as the on-patent drugs like Prozac and Paxil were, it was still a helluva lot cheaper to payfor expensive medications than to pay for far more expensive endless “talk therapy” pshrink visits.
And the HMO clowns won’t let the psychiatrists keep on seeing almost all of the patients diagnosed with mood disorders - even the severe cases - once they’ve been gotten stable enough to maintain with monthly or quarterly re-evaluation and medication refills. They come back to their primary care physicians. Didja know that depression and anxiety - mood disorders - account for the second most common diagnosis among chronic care patients in the average American family practice now? Essential hypertension still leads (last time I looked), but I expect the up-spike to continue and to grow.
Well, hell. Now that we’ve got the “Hope” and “Change” you leftist assholes voted into office (though considering the only alternative the Elephantine clowns vomited up - Crash Test Johnnie - that little boxing match was settled by a dive arranged long before the gloves ever went on), the situational conditions for clinical depression are just fucking wonderful, aren’t they?
The mood disorder discussed by Ms. Noonan is situational, not endogenous.
But, then, you don’t know enough about the subject of clinical depression to realize what I’m writing about, do you, dickwad?
=====
“This week, with his pronouncement that ‘credit is the lifeblood of a healthy economy,’ President Obama reiterated what has been one of his most common themes in diagnosing our economic problem. The president has relied on this bedrock belief to propose policies that place the restoration of credit as the highest priority. However, despite his seemingly earnest intentions, the president and his economic advisors have misdiagnosed the ailment. Savings, not credit, is the lifeblood of a healthy economy. When not used properly credit can be like a cancer that sickens an otherwise healthy economy.
“What everyone seems to have forgotten at this point is that credit does not come from thin air. Even in a system in which bank reserves are leveraged many times, someone has to put savings in a bank for the bank to turn around and make a loan. As a result, the bedrock is the savings, which allows for the credit to flow. Credit extended without adequate savings inevitably leads an economy into disaster.”
– Peter Schiff
http://www.lewrockwell.com/schiff/schiff7.html
Hey, didn’t we have a spat of really hard economic times when Lady Noonington’s king, the Emperor Douchebag (oh no, John McCain’s at my door with his two heads!) seized power, causing all to tremble in his wake (i.e. the Iranian students/hostage takers who as far as I know still have their little Casio watches set at US Eastern Standard time…) Didn’t gold spike? Anyone remember the Kruggerand sex scene from “Rabbit Returns”? Didn’t silver go through the roof? Shit for brains, all of these people. I look at the stupid asshat Repubs around me on the North Shore of Chicago and wonder how so many of them became rich, and then I remember. They’re thieves!
Mahousu: Or a foolish, newly recruited mule, more likely.
SJ Doc: Nice manner Doctor. So you are in a caring vocation? “Perhaps we should take a look at why this bothers you.” I’m sure you agree your behavior is interesting. But then also, sadly, it seems your current medication is ineffective. Have you considered upping your dose?
Which infers of course you will continue to be part of the problem instead of the solution.
‘Tis pity she’s a whore.
EnBuenOra: Thank you! La Noonington asserts those behaving reasonably and profiting mightily under the system built by her pretend boyfriend Ronnie and his pals did so because they were HIGH?
Outlandish as that is, her alternative is to claim some responsibility as cheerleader. (And I apologize for the image…I’ve got her as Sally Kellerman in MASH with the blingee crown and a camel. I had no idea she was so well endowed. Disturbing.)
SJ Doc: There’s plenty of savings. In fact we have a glut of savings and it’s getting larger now due to the economic downturn. With the Fed rate at effectively zero we are experiencing a liquidity trap. But whether savings or credit is the lifeblood of the economy is an argument no one cares about. The problem now is credit is not flowing because would-be creditors don’t believe they’ll get paid back, and are keeping their savings in short-term cash accounts rather than investing in long-term projects.
As for whatever you’re going on about with anti-depressants, well, every HMO psychiatrist I’ve ever visited with is a drug dealer not remotely interested in my problems or in talking about them. They just wanna prescribe and get me the fuck out of their presence. They have no interest in ever seeing me again. They have ceded what was once their territory to LMSWs who do actually give a shit about a patient’s problems. PCPs prescribe anti-depressants because their patients ask them too, not necessarily because the patient actually needs them. These drugs are over-prescribed, putting, in the public’s mind, the people who actually need them in the same category as the bored housewife with “social anxiety disorder” which was solely created to sell more SSRIs.
What am I going on about? No idea, just like you. Only I’m a leftist asshole not an MD so my opinion doesn’t count in your eyes. Your patients must really lap up the tough love you deliver.
hobospacejungle:
Thank you. I’m too damn tired to reply to Doc Ego’s comments or his/her cut-n-paste quotes.
SJ Doc:
“Gun sales continue up. The FBI’s criminal background check system showed a 23% increase in February over the previous year, a 29% increase in January, a 24% increase in December and a 42% increase in November, when a record 1.5 million background checks were performed. Yes, people fear President Obama will take away the guns he thinks they cling to, but a likely equal contributor to what The Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch called a ‘gun-buying binge’ is captured in the slogan on one firearms maker’s Web site: ‘Smith & Wesson stands for protection.’ People are scared.”
Now, how can that be taken other than as a positive response to the inauguration of our unconstitutional Immigrant President and the installation of his National Socialist Democrat Asshole Party (NSDAP) recycled Clintonista band of flaming incompetents?
All this proves is that the unbalanced paranoids who were screaming about UN black helicopters during the Clinton administration (you may remember it as the KKKlinton administration) are still out there. Or maybe they’re just buying these guns to shoot themselves with. Or maybe both. Would sure cut down on the unhinged-reality challenged internet chatter over the next 8 years… you know stuff like:
how can that be taken other than as a positive response to the inauguration of our unconstitutional Immigrant President and the installation of his National Socialist Democrat Asshole Party (NSDAP) recycled Clintonista band of flaming incompetents?
Over the past 30 years, the Mangled Care suits have been pushing us “gatekeeper physicians” to initiate and sustain treatment for patients with mild to moderate depression…
Based on that, one might conclude you’d prefer Obama as president — at least his administration is committed to science-based science instead of the faith-based kind. If we’re going to have some sort of universal healthcare, then psychiatrist visits will be cheaper, and general practitioners won’t have to rely, as they seem to now, on patients’ self-diagnosis for putting them on antidepressants. I’m sure you know how unreliable that process is, what with commercials persuading folks of this or that condition and their own selection bias reinforcing it.
Then again, maybe you just want to get the whiners out of your office and back on the street where they belong — which makes you more of a pharmacist’s enabler than a doc, in which case why are you complaining about an alternative?
Dang, there’s some long-assed posts in here.
Camel FUR? Not camel hair? Must be a particularly fuzzy camel, endangered species perhaps.
Terry: The camel, unused to Manhattan’s chill, wears a sable.
Admit it, Jim, you had some starbursts when you saw the title of Lady Peggingtonshirehampton’s latest missive. And unsurprisingly, it was thus that your opening may go down in Wonkette history as one of your most inspired. I salute you, sir.
Gallowglass: Dear God, no! That means the Paultards were right!
JudasConstant:
Portugese New Order vinyl discs will be worth more than heroin. Women will trade their virginity for picture discs of Boy George. Are you ready for the 80s?
President Beeblebrox: In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.
Serolf Divad: Gun sales certainly up on the Arizona border. so much so that the drug cartels have gone on a killin’ spree of gigantic magnitude…..more people killed in the Mexican drug wars than in Iraq this year. Guns supplied by the good ol’ US of A, of course. Gun shops right near the border is a great idea, makes gun smuggling so much more efficient.
Sales of machine guns, Up! They were even able to get their hands on some hand grenades to throw into the newspaper offices in Hermosillo. That will teach them to ‘report’ on the ‘drug war’.
As to ‘prescription drugs’, well they are finding more and more ‘uses’ every day…..give them to teh kids! Expand that market for more sales.
SJ Doc:as you can see, the gun sales may be more than what your limited ideology will allow you to acknowledge. Has nothing to do with Obama, except in the dreams of wingnut fantasies, as in Y2K, the End Times, Mad Max, et al.
U oh, La Noonington becomes a doomer.
Run you fools! It’s gone viral!
need some gold coins? i have some collectors edition “Obama Presidential Series” coins you can buy. Hurry up and get them before the stickers peel off.
I cannot wait for HRM Mme Peggy Nooningtonshire, ESQ to write a sex column like K-Lo. I bet she’ll recommend camelskin condoms for all the kids, and sex on mattresses stuffed with $100 bills.
And serfs, also.
WadISay:
Are you volunteering?
When Dorothy Parker was asked if she ever took sleeping pills she replied, “In a big bowl with cream and sugar.” I plan to do the same for at least the next six years. It is my solution to this depression. I also want Peggy Noon to have multiple seizures and to “throw shit” at her before, during and while they are happening.
Hey, did you all know we’re surrounded by “them”? Glenn Beck says so. Funny, I looked out my window and didn’t see any Jesus goblins massing in front of my house or torching my Obama/Biden stickered car. Where are all of “them”?
President Beeblebrox: They walk among us.
DoctorCulturae: Nice manner Doctor. So you are in a caring vocation?
Nah. I’m a medico. I fix the problems that people bring to me, like any other professional. Usually I get paid for it. Sometimes not. But I do my job anyway. It’s the oath, y’know.
Who considers it a “vocation,” anyway? It’s a job out of which some flaming bureaucrat (who has never so much as gotten Betadyne on his shoes) in the state government can shove you pretty much as he fucking well pleases. For any sane patient over the age of six, there’s not a damn given whether I’m “caring” or not. Simply that I address him as a human being, pay attention to what’s bothering him, treat him carefully and effectively, and respect his dignity.
You’re not my patient, therefore I need not feign for you a respect for which I find no evidence in your conduct.
But, like I said, you’re no kind of “doctor” at all, are you?
=====
“America wasn’t founded so that we could all be better. America was founded so we could all be anything we damn well please.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
My sister ate at the Reagan Library the other day, serenaded by a harpist. Maybe Peggles oughta hole up there until the all-clear. You know, say NO! to drugs and instead fill her lungs with the traditional, rarified air of Good Ol’ American Denial.
If you do buy cold coins, keep them in the fridge or the chocolate will melt.
Um guys? Uh Michelle’s doing food porn right now on Paula Dean.
hobospacejungle: [i]There’s plenty of savings. In fact we have a glut of savings and it’s getting larger now due to the economic downturn. With the Fed rate at effectively zero we are experiencing a liquidity trap. But whether savings or credit is the lifeblood of the economy is an argument no one cares about. The problem now is credit is not flowing because would-be creditors don’t believe they’ll get paid back, and are keeping their savings in short-term cash accounts rather than investing in long-term projects.
As for whatever you’re going on about with anti-depressants, well, every HMO psychiatrist I’ve ever visited with is a drug dealer not remotely interested in my problems or in talking about them. They just wanna prescribe and get me the fuck out of their presence. They have no interest in ever seeing me again. They have ceded what was once their territory to LMSWs who do actually give a shit about a patient’s problems. PCPs prescribe anti-depressants because their patients ask them too, not necessarily because the patient actually needs them. These drugs are over-prescribed, putting, in the public’s mind, the people who actually need them in the same category as the bored housewife with “social anxiety disorder” which was solely created to sell more SSRIs.
What am I going on about? No idea, just like you. Only I’m a leftist asshole not an MD so my opinion doesn’t count in your eyes. Your patients must really lap up the tough love you deliver.[/i]
On point (1), follow the link earlier incorporated. The standard Keynesian line (”With the Fed rate at effectively zero we are experiencing a liquidity trap”) was successfully hammered out of existence a long time ago. In 1959, Hazlitt published his *The Failure of the New Economics*, perhaps the most cogent and definitive (as in “Killed the sonofabitch dead right there”) attacks on John Maynard Keynes’ virulent misconceptions ever put into print. Hey, it’s *still* in print. Check out a recent review pertinent to the present economic mess at http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/40499302.html
===
“But why are Keynes’ thoroughly debunked notions still in vogue? Why was the usually brilliant Murray Rothbard so wrong when he predicted this 1959 book would mark the death knell of the economic nonsense preached by John Maynard Keynes?
“This question appears at first a lot harder to answer. Henry Hazlitt, after all, was not some obscure gadfly. He was arguably the nation’s best-known and best respected financial writer and commentator.
“I believe there are two answers. First, a dumbed-down American populace, trained to believe that economic theory is deadly dull and of no practical use, tends to cover their ears when such stuff is discussed.
“But the second reason is far more obvious. Imagine any of our egotistical and money- and power-hungry members of Congress or chief executives (of either party) today announcing, ‘Gee, this economic downturn sure is a misery. Too bad there’s nothing the central government can do but to slash spending till our budget is in surplus so Washington is no longer crowding out private borrowers, meantime putting us back on the silver standard and shutting down the Federal Reserve. So all you lobbyists here to plead for special favors just might as well go home. Store’s closed.’
“What? Give up the greatest excuse since Hitler and Tojo for enacting every pork barrel spending spree they can imagine? Are you crazy?!”
===
On point (2), you lack the perspective you could gain with a History of Medicine course out of the first-year curriculum. Ever heard of “Mother’s Little Helper”? Called Miltown and Equanil (meprobamate), brought on the market in 1955, where it became a best-seller. Lots of “social anxiety disorder” - or just plain unfixed anxiety - in the population, previously self-medicated with booze or opiates (or with prescribed barbiturates). Meprobamate offered a less toxic, more reliable alternative. Almost simultaneously, the first of the benzodiazepine drugs - Librium (chlordiazepoxide) was developed, followed by Valium (diazepam) in 1953.
Each time, the drive was to find anxiolytic medications with better pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic profiles, and better ways to use them. Because if these patients weren’t treated with something to blunt the anxiety, they were going to “treat” themselves with booze and similar harrowingly dangerous alternatives. Were they infallably safe? Of course not. But were those non-prescription alternatives safer?
Seen a cirrhotic patient die in full-blown liver failure lately, putzie?
The history of pharmacotherapy for mood disorders - anxiety and depression, which frequently mix - goes back a helluva lot longer than you obviously understand. Jeez, you’re on the Internet. Why the hell didn’t you just look it up?
The mood elevator category has an even nastier history. Did you know that “The Greatest Generation” fought World War II just about entirely on amphetamines and amphetamine congeners? Millions of guys on either side (and all those folks pulling double shifts in the factories and shipyards) were wired to the gills on freely-available “speed.” Discussion on how these people had to be gotten down off the ceiling [i]after[/i] the war isn’t much noised about. Oh, well. Some things the Ministry of Truth just sweeps down the memory hole….
On point (3), despite being a “leftist asshole” you may be educable.
It’s up to you, isn’t it?
=====
“Inflation is what happens when people increase the money supply by fraud, imposition, and breach of contract. Invariably it produces three characteristic consequences: (1) it benefits the perpetrators at the expense of all other money users; (2) it allows the accumulation of debt beyond the level debts could reach on the free market; and (3) it reduces the purchasing power of money below the level it would have reached on the free market.
– Jörg Guido Hülsmann, http://mises.org/story/1570
Serolf Divad: On the positive indicia provided by incresed firearms sales.
Much as you leftist assholes would like to believe that it’s necessary for folks to acquire firearms to attempt or complete their own suicides, the methods for an adult reliably extinguishing him/herself are manifold, and do not require the expense and bureaucrat-masturbating involved in the exercise of a right that government officers are by law forbidden to infringe. Remember Dorothy Parker’s little litany?
It can (and should) instead be taken as a sign of hope widespread in the general population that people are demonstrating a robust survival drive. They’re taking the trouble to obtain firearms and ammunition with the intent of making use of these implements to PRESERVE their lives, their liberty, and their property.
For the average “Liberal” - you left-wing state-sucking, “spread the wealth around” motherfuckers - this is obviously bad news.
Your prospective victims intend to kill you.
Ain’t that nice?
=====
“The first and most important thing to understand about politics is this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy. Every government that exists — or ever existed, or ever will exist — is a kleptocracy, meaning ‘rule by thieves’. Competing ideologies merely provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what they produce. If the taxpayer/voters won’t willingly fork over to end poverty, then maybe they’ll cough up to fight drugs or terrorism. Conflicting ideologies, as presently constituted, are nothing more than a cover for what’s really going on, like the colors of competing gangs.”
– L. Neil Smith
The lady Noonith is correct, not a pil, light up a fatty
SJ Doc: Fuck You you give me a sad
I am sooo impressed with your use of many syllable words, a doctor and economist\ historian all rolled into a large asshole
SayItWithWookies: “Based on that, one might conclude you’d prefer Obama as president — at least his administration is committed to science-based science instead of the faith-based kind. If we’re going to have some sort of universal healthcare, then psychiatrist visits will be cheaper, and general practitioners won’t have to rely, as they seem to now, on patients’ self-diagnosis for putting them on antidepressants. I’m sure you know how unreliable that process is, what with commercials persuading folks of this or that condition and their own selection bias reinforcing it.”
Given our alternatives in that great electoral Kabuki theater presentation last November - the Mealy-Mouthed Marxist Mulatto versus the Admiral’s Spoiled Brat - either fake alternative presented by the Big Bipartisan Boot-On-Your-Neck Party was odious.
Hey, but false alternatives are all Americans have been offered since the presidential election of 1892. Profligate, big-government, “progressive” Republicans versus profligate, big-government, “progressive” nominal Democrats. Imperialist versus imperialist, “constituent-servicing” consumer-screwing sonsofbitches versus….
Well, you get the point, don’tcha?
As for what Mrs. Soetoro’s Failed Abortion is going to do to health care in these United States being abso-fucking-lutely horrible no matter how far up your own personal incontinent “Liberal” ass he shoves your tongue, there’s that old Spanish proverb from *Don Quixote*.
“Whether the rock hits the pitcher, or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.”
Government is goons with guns. Everything government does, it does by dint of its power to send out Officer Friendly out to your house in the middle of the night to drag you out of bed, bag you, tag you, and do whatever violence to you strikes his fascist fancy.
That’s true whether Officer Friendly is sent to your home by your caring, charismatic Commie Crioulo-in-Chief or by some sagging Republican gerontocrat who unfortunately didn’t die in the Hanoi Hilton.
You want government to manage the “caring vocation,” eh?
Careful what you ask for, witling. You’re gonna get it.
=====
“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
– Frédéric Bastiat
Low overhang: Oh, is that what they’re calling long-winded troll LPNs nowadays?
Low overhang: “I am sooo impressed with your use of many syllable words, a doctor and economist\ historian”
Nah. You’re too much of a flaming “Liberal” asshole to understand or appreciate dick in the way of an appeal to logic. Or common sense, for that matter. How else?
I started digging into political economics back during the first Jimmy Carter administration. Hitherto, I’d been able to avoid the “Liberal” professoriate malpracticing in the area during my undergraduate years, and though I’d read all my father’s old college and grad school textbooks on the subject back when I was in my teens, nothing of what was in his library accounted for the phenomenon of “stagflation.” According to Keynes and his disciple, Samuelson, “stagflation” is supposed to be impossible.
Like any good student of pathology, I looked further into the literature, and found a bunch of economists in whose work there WAS an accurate prediction of the conditions, causes, and likely outcomes when Carter-type “stagflation” smashes down upon an economy. Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, F.A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises - guys like that.
You could do the same thing, asshole. It ain’t rocket science, and it doesn’t necessarily involve the shit-polishing “garbage-in/garbage-out” futility of “econometrics.”
Start here: http://mises.org/story/3128 and read around, why don’tcha?
=====
“”The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
– Henry Hazlitt
I think it’s cute when trolls sign up for word of the day calendars and still use every other word incorrrectly.
SayItWithWookies: He is firing blanks and just likes the noise and flash. The smell of powder burning gives him an orgasm
Possibly a Puma low on estrogen
For a doctor who can’t be assed to learn how to quote… yeah. What’s with the auto-quote sig thingy? Who honestly thinks it’s cool to sign off their post with someone else’s name every single time?
Kraftwerk - each me sun she {{un deux}} each me sun she [[computer hans hans]] un deux deux quatro {{un deux}} each me sun she <<>> computer rules
Who invited the longwinded schizo asshole?
If the best you got is “flaming liberal” as an insult
you betcha that hurts so good. Are you some relation to that Sarah P who also uses talking points out of correct context. gosh don’tcha know
So you were able to find textbooks that said stagflation was impossible and the you found textbooks that predicted it. Obviously the solution is to only use textbooks that accurately predict what we need to know.
“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” This tells me that if it rains too much we are going to drown, but it should be based on an accurate forecast, not on how deep the water is.
also SJ Doc: also fuck you asshole
Low overhang: “If the best you got is ‘flaming liberal’ as an insult…”
Hey, considering what you fucking socialists have done to the word “liberal,” what could be a better expletive?
Used to be that “liberal” meant somebody who defended the individual citizen against government violation of individual rights. With you “spread the wealth around” shitwads, the term has done a solid one-eighty and been rammed right up your own collective (collectivist?) asshole.
And, yeah, I was able to find textbooks teaching the political economic orthodoxies of the fascist 1930s. That’s what they stuffed down the throats of the “greatest generation” guys when they came home from the Great Patriotic War.
So have you ever read *any* textbooks, jerkwad? No indication thereof provided in anything you’ve posted.
But, hey, let’s keep a reasonable standard of expectations here.
If you weren’t utterly illiterate, totally unlettered, completely stupid, you wouldn’t be a “Liberal,” would you?
=====
“The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
bago: “For a doctor who can’t be asked to learn how to quote… yeah. What’s with the auto-quote sig thingy? Who honestly thinks it’s cool to sign off their post with someone else’s name every single time?”
What “auto-quote sig thingy,” dick-drizzle? I use follow-up quotes when, where, and how I think they’ll piss people like you off the most.
What, you’re not literate enough to remember what you’ve read?
Shit, sonny. That’s nobody’s fault but your own.
=====
“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”
– Pericles
SayItWithWookies: Winz!
That little blurb by P.J. O’Rourke or Pericles or whoever else is in your sig file you fantastically incompetent and ignorant fuck-nozzle. That douchey thing of the cunt-twisting end of every shit-stain of a post you make. That choice of words that is actually almost coherent whenever you click post.
Twat-rocket.
Also.
bago: “That little blurb by P.J. O’Rourke or Pericles or whoever else is in your sig file…”
What “sig file,” putz? I’m on the Internet. If I want the precise wording and attribution of anything I want to quote, I just use a search engine to pull it up from a reliably brandid source and further verify it if I think it necessary. It’s like citing information for a scientific publication. You’ve never done such work?
Well, no. I guess you haven’t. If you were used to hewing to that kind of standard in maintaining the factual and intellectual integrity of your posts, you wouldn’t be a fucking “Liberal,” now, would you?
=====
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
– C.S. Lewis
“I’m watching “Goya” on Netflix it’s more interesting. It’s Saturday night go out or something. Hitler.”
-C.S. Lewis
Who let the Paultard out of his cage? Weird how it’s never the guy trying to feed a family of 4 on $10/hour who espouses Ayn Rand comic book theories. Whatever ol’ SJ Doc is going on about is just another version of “I’ve got mine, fuck everyone else.” Same shit, different pile.
Libertarians want goverment out of our lives. Seems that same philosophy applied to the financial markets brought us our current depression. Man left to his own devices would become like chimpanzees in the wild. They/we are violent, merciless beasts.
Good luck to you in Bizarro World, SJ Doc. Thank you for sharing your pathologies with us.
Hey SJ clown, I see that you were trying to make friends here as well:
http://www.rightpundits.com/?p=2969&cpage=2
You need some new material, and you need to get laid. I’m sure they have some nice escort services in the San Jose area.
And we get it, your IQ is twice as high as ours
SJ Doc: socialists? hahahahahhahhahahhahah Please, you do not know the meaning of that word.
Taxes under Reagan were higher.
He created conditions for the Savings and Loan failures-another huge banking failure tax payers had to bail out.
Lets see a ‘medic’ discover nanotechnology all by himself in his garage.
Fucking liberals get shit done. The dirty fucking hippies were right.
If you love the robber barons so much, build a time machine and go back to those splendid days of glory.
Oh, I forgot, we just went through 8 years of fascist robbers rule.
hobospacejungle: Hope he is a ‘doc’- ‘medic’ in South Jersey, San Juan, or Stupid Jerkoff town.
Anywhere but someplace I may end up needing medical care.
Dear Jim,
Please marry me. As I am a lesbian with Maddow-like hair, I will have to insist that I get the “top bunk”, so to speak. I trust this will not be an issue.
Forever yours until I get bored,
Clittle
SJ Doc:
The Free Market advocated by your Lord, Ludwig von Mises, is a far cry from the boundless corruption and sense of entitlement exhibited by Wall Street, particularly in the last 40 years.
The current economic situation is not akin to a failed enterprise that can be simply liquidated or absorbed by a larger interest. It is the result of unregulated titans of finance and industry gambling the accumulated wealth and retirement savings of MILLIONS of hard-working and law-abiding people. People who put their fidelity in banks and investors to make sound financial decisions.
What was the return on their investment of the Free Market?
What makes you, or your republican or libertarian associates, assume that the voting public wants to continue down that disasterous path? Your beloved Free Market has wrecked the economy on a GLOBAL scale! Now is the time to discard the failed theories of von Mises.
“We won’t be fooled again.”
I believe that your anti-socialist attitude is just cause for you and your family to forfeit any and all unemployment and social security benefits.
hobospacejungle: “Libertarians want goverment out of our lives. Seems that same philosophy applied to the financial markets brought us our current depression.”
Tsk. Government goons get hold of the currency (what we once thought of as “money”) and they “regulate” the value thereof to the status of wastepaper. This dislocates all economic functions (including not only “the financial markets” but also savings, earnings, prices, and the whole division-of-labor megillah), and you government-sucking simpletons blame DE-regulation and the function of the never-fucking-EVER-was-free-of-government-pilferage-and-profligacy substitute for a marketplace.
Wotta buncha fucking cement-heads. And now you shitwads want even MORE bureaucratic and political meddling - which will have no purpose whatsoever but to preserve the politically-connected practitioners of fraud from the consequences of their own criminality - in some sort of idiot assumption that Officer Friendly and Bureaucrat Babbit and your Punahau School Pseudoschvoogie is gonna keep you all safe and warm and “supported.”
People with any sense at all “want goverment out of our lives.” Apart from stealing valuta, breaking things, and killing people, what the hell do they do that private citizens can’t do better?
Jeez, haven’t you noticed that whenever you NEED Officer Friendly - like in the middle of a riot, when a bunch of the “underprivileged” are dragging people out of their vehicles and smashing their heads repeatedly with cinder blocks - your government goes:
“Whups! Not my responsibility! Seen them ‘hold harmless’ clauses all through the statute books?”
Can you sue your government for malpractice, doofus? Are any of the Boot-On-Your-Neck Party bastards liable for the losses you and millions of other Americans have suffered as the result of their regulatory/”de-regulatory” actions? Do the people bilked by Bernie Madoff get satisfaction from damages assessed against the personal assets of the S.E.C. schmucks who refused to so much as audit that friggin’ mamzer?
And you want GOVERNMENT to cure your ills, eh?
What a brain-fucked “Liberal.”
=====
“One consequence of confusing order and chaos is a static market and its aftermath, a frustration of man’s nature, the free market being but the extension or manifestation of free men. Damage cannot be done to the free market without an equal damage to man’s nature. When men are compelled to look to a one-source decision instead of to the individual decisions of men, man is robbed of his wholeness. Self-responsibility, the corollary of self-decision, and the wellspring of man’s growth, gives way to cheap politics, mass plunder, pressure grouping, protectionism. Any time a society is organized in such a manner that a premium is put on the obeisance paid to political know-it-alls and when little, if any, reward attends integrity and self-reliance, the members of that society will tend more to rot than to hatch.”
– Leonard E. Read
SJ Doc: People that learn economics from a shitty OB/GYN make so much sense!
Servo: “The Free Market advocated by your Lord, Ludwig von Mises, is a far cry from the boundless corruption and sense of entitlement exhibited by Wall Street, particularly in the last 40 years. … Now is the time to discard the failed theories of von Mises.”
Might be worth discussing, schmucklet, if you had any fucking idea of what the “theories of von Mises” actually are.
You don’t.
As for the “sense of entitlement” business, see what you get when you let Republicans get hold of all those tasy regulatory mechanisms you dead-from-the-neck-up socialist motherfuckers put into place?
Be careful what powers you allow (or encourage) your government jackbooted thugs to usurp, dickbreath. You and your predecessors gave delicious incentive for other bands of thieving shits to slime past you in the popularity contests and get their hands on that machinery to fuck over your fellow citizens.
Jeez, don’tcha know that EVERY government “regulation” ever written was created chiefly at the behest and with the “guidance” of the well-established, competition-suppressing, hand-over-fist-grabbing “leaders of industry” in precisely those market segments you stupid socialist tools squeal for “regulation”?
We’ve all heard Stalin’s “useful idiots” comment about you blockheads, but are you really *SO* spectacularly stupid as to fail of appreciating how con-men like Skilling and Keating and Madoff relied upon YOUR fatuity to set up the environments in which they ran their swindles?
Hell, if it weren’t for you and your ilk, they’d've been nothing but *small-time* crooks.
Congratulations. You helped make ‘em, and with your support for the Kenyan Crioulo, you’ll be making many, many more before you’re done.
=====
“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the sources of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
ISJ Doc: Doctor Paul…now, are we off our meds again? Why don’t you climb back in bed and we will get you a nice cup of warm thorazine…
El Pinche: Aw, he’s just a lonely multiculturalist like I thought. They hate him over there too.The movie “Goya” was terrific btw, there was lots of exquisite torture just like Dr. Lonely’s long long OT posts but in Spain.Maybe we should keep him for awhile. He has three grandchildren who live with him.Why? He claims to be a doctor but he wants us to die. I think he will write script for us if we make nice and show our birth certificates.
102415: He’s boring loser taking a lot space filled with horseshit.
Yeah, I heard good things about Goya. I should check it out. Is your avatar a picture of a Divine christmas ornament?
Swampwitch: “People that learn economics from a shitty OB/GYN make so much sense!”
Never met the guy before 1988, and haven’t spoken with him since that time. He found his way into sound economic theory by way of von Mises, I started with Henry Hazlitt’s *The Conquest of Poverty* (1973). That we came to the same conclusions is no more remarkable than that we should both have employed Williams’ *Obstetrics* as our baseline OB textbook in medical school.
Robust and reliable theory in any field tends to be discovered by the honest inquirer, regardless of the route of approach employed thereby.
It’s just that to be a “Liberal,” honest and rational inquiry must be foresworn, because there’s nothing whatsoever in reality to support a socialist political philosophy. Every time it’s been tried, it’s failed. Where polities wedded to socialist theory limp along today, they survive only on the incorporation of market mechanisms which are effective only to the extent that political policymakers do NOT guide (or otherwise impair) them.
See Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” as an example of how socialists unbend - pragmatically - and leave behind their collectivist policies as a simple matter of avoiding the sorts of uprisings that get good socialists dangling from lamp posts up and down the boulevards.
And how is Dr. Paul conceived to be “a shitty OB/GYN,” anyway? You got any figures on his M&M assessments at the hospitals where he’s practiced?
=====
“Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.”
– Thomas Jefferson
102415: “He claims to be a doctor but he wants us to die. He claims to be a doctor but he wants us to die.”
Hey, everybody dies, lumpy. People who want Officer Friendly to go forth and rob their neighbors for them wouldn’t be missed were they to get snuffed.
=====
“A thief is shot in the night. Whose hand is on the bow?”
– Shoshone proverb
sati demise: “Fucking liberals get shit done.”
Ooh, you betcha! Shit and more shit and endless avalanches of shit, none of it subject to composting and therefore utility as manure, but shit most certainly.
Witness the present economic dislocation. Call it socialist, call it “progressive,” call it “Liberal,” that shit could not have happened without oodles and oodles of government fucking-around with the marketplace, and ESPECIALLY government fucking around with the U.S. dollar.
=====
“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”
– V.I. Lenin
El Pinche: “I see that you were trying to make friends here as well…”
And he gives a Web link to the “social” pseudoconservative RightPundit site, missing out on reading sufficiently to realize that I came here FROM there.
And I don’t “make friends” with those religous/traditionist/in-your-grill “morality at gunpoint” asswipes, either. If there’s anybody more completely shit-for-brains than a “Liberal,” it’s one of these “God’s On My Side!” sons of bitches.
From a “Keep Your Fucking Hands Off” perspective, there’s not a debauched post-1963 dime’s worth of difference between you and them.
=====
“Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.”
– Isaac Asimov
SJ Doc: Yawn
Von Mises? How come nobody’s bragging on Milton Friedman any more?
I reckon we should let him stay, at least on weekends. Otherwise everybody would just be talking about how much we love/hate/want-to-be Peggy Noonan and it gets a bit tiresome. Welcome, SJ Pinata. You can be our right wing abuse monkey.
Hey, at least he can spell.
imissopus: “Write what you know.”
(Yes, I’m late to the party. Sorry. I’ve had a productive weekend. Won’t happen again.)
SJ Doc: Sweet Jesus’ testicles, are you still hanging around here? I’d've thought you’d been bored a long time ago. After reading a good number of your posts though, I’m actually feeling a twinge of sadness — not that liberal sympathy you so disparage, mind you, but more the “Oh, Bartleby — oh, humanity” kind. The world must be a pee-stained Slim Jim of a meal for someone who tries to hang his hat on the untested fairy tales of libertarianism (if you don’t count such shimmering examples as Afghanistan 1989-2001 and present-day Somalia), the tendentious rich-boy free-marketer O’Rourke and the puerile condescending Christianity of that petty fraud C.S. Lewis.
And yes, it’s inexplicable that people would want a failed system such as socialism to prevail. Since we have the horrible examples of France, Denmark, Sweden, England and Canada to serve as warnings, it’s a wonder people aren’t flocking to Ron Paul’s Mad Max America.
Oh, but that’s right — big government is always bad. Bad, bad, bad. How could I forget? Well dear SJLPN, I hate to bother you with reality, but we’re on a fucking 18-wheeler, and your grousing about how you wish it was a bicycle aren’t really going to do much good at this point, are they? My only suggestion is to find some nice little ranch off the grid, dig your own well, build your own car (’cause you know all dem gubmint regulations went into anything on the road today), get rid of that fancy booklearnin’ you got at some degree of public expense, stay off the roads The Man built with his meddlesome hands, don’t listen to those do-gooders who keep broadcasting the Federal weather report (’cause you know they’re failing to report the chemtrails, which is part o’the conspiracy), collect your own solar, and if by some chance your molasses-powered Wangenstein generator catches fire, pray for rain.
SJ Doc: Yeah man, I hate various “political ideologies” too! Let’s be friends!
Also, Marxism-Leninism=Liberalism (totally! obviously!), etc., etc.
=====
“Lennox Lewis, I’m coming for you man. My style is impetuous. My defense is impregnable, and I’m just ferocious. I want your heart. I want to eat his children. Praise be to Allah!”
-Mike Tyson
gurukalehuru: “How come nobody’s bragging on Milton Friedman any more?”
Who the hell d’you think came up with the idea of “withholding tax” during World War II in order to disguise the inflationary effects of all that funny-money the Fed was sluicing out?
I don’t disagree with everything he’d written, but when you have a choice between a monetarist and an honest economist, why go with the monetarist?
=====
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
– Milton Friedman
SJ Doc: It’s just that to be a “Liberal,” honest and rational inquiry must be foresworn, because there’s nothing whatsoever in reality to support a socialist political philosophy. Every time it’s been tried, it’s failed. Where polities wedded to socialist theory limp along today, they survive only on the incorporation of market mechanisms which are effective only to the extent that political policymakers do NOT guide (or otherwise impair) them.
Hmm, or maybe that the Austrian School itself would not exist were it not for the previous existence of (yes, classical) liberalism. Or maybe that it is completely moronic to confuse socialism and (contemporary American) liberalism, considering their differences far outweigh their similarities. Or perhaps that socialism has and can achieve various socio-economic goals under various circumstances. Or perhaps it is that the usage of “technical terminology” (e.g. polity, et al.) doesn’t count for crap if you use these terms with no relation to their meaning in the relevant field (e.g. sociology, political science, etc.). There are just so many ways to call bullshit on what you have to say here!
And yes, this is coming from someone who has read von Hayek, von Mises, and von Böhm-Bawerk…
=====
“Lakes are a compromise between a river and a sea, and I don’t like compromises.”
-Benito Mussolini
SayItWithWookies: “I hate to bother you with reality, but we’re on a fucking 18-wheeler, and your grousing about how you wish it was a bicycle aren’t really going to do much good at this point, are they?”
On the contrary. First principles are essential to successful remedy. Any basic life support (BLS) training? If so, remember the constant admonition to keep repeating the “ABC’s.”
Not only do you open the airway (A), you KEEP it open. Forget, and all you’re doing otherwise amounte to nothing more than abusing a corpse.
What’s being done in the case of Hussein the Hubshi and his merry little band of clueless cunts is gadarene government intervention along precisely the same lines of attack that got the nation into the present butt-fuck.
And why all the fucking haste, anyway? Could it be that our Immigrant Usurper-in-Chief understands only too goddam well that unless he rams his Viagra’d schlong all the way up the nation’s collective ass REAL fast, the PDE-5 inhibitor is gonna wear off and all he’s going to have left is a permanently limp dick in his thieving hands?
You want “reality,” kid? Here’s reality.
When having done the wrong damned things for decades - counterfeiting the currency into Weimar Republic style hyperinflation, “regulating” the economy for the purpose of political advantage, raping the taxpayers, sodomizing the capital markets, and murdering people left, right, and center, your good and glorious government wants to address the damages done by that “fucking 18-wheeler” by doing a doughnut and running that “fucking 18-wheeler” even more squarely and viciously over you bleeding body.
The government is the DISEASE, son. You want ‘em to provide the cure?
Shit, might as well ask a jailhouse rapist - pretty please - for a tube of Preparation H after he gets done fucking you up the ass.
Let’s get practical. Officer Friendly is NOT your friend, and if he takes you by your lost-little-child hand while you’re sobbing on the street corner, it’s only with the intention of luring you into a blind alley and beating the shit out of you.
That’s how government works.
=====
“Money is different from all other commodities: other things being equal, more shoes, or more discoveries of oil or copper benefit society, since they help alleviate natural scarcity. But once a commodity is established as a money on the market, no more money at all is needed. Since the only use of money is for exchange and reckoning, more dollars or pounds or marks in circulation cannot confer a social benefit: they will simply dilute the exchange value of every existing dollar or pound or mark. So it is a great boon that gold or silver are scarce and are costly to increase in supply.
“But if government manages to establish paper tickets or bank credit as money, as equivalent to gold grams or ounces, then the government, as dominant money-supplier, becomes free to create money costlessly and at will. As a result, this ‘inflation’ of the money supply destroys the value of the dollar or pound, drives up prices, cripples economic calculation, and hobbles and seriously damages the workings of the market economy.”
– Murray Rothbard
…and judging Milton Friedman by the results, he really, really sucked.
Neon Trotsky: “Hmm, or maybe that the Austrian School itself would not exist were it not for the previous existence of (yes, classical) liberalism. Or maybe that it is completely moronic to confuse socialism and (contemporary American) liberalism, considering their differences far outweigh their similarities. Or perhaps that socialism has and can achieve various socio-economic goals under various circumstances.”
And classical liberalism is related to modern “Liberalism” precisely…how? Does the modern American “Liberal” defend individual rights, or is he more concerned with the “collective rights” of rent-seeking factions? Analysis of the precepts and principles of socialism finds them identical with the characteristics of today’s “Liberal” (or is it “progressive” this week?) movement.
Do you believe in the individual’s right to property? Or do you conceive of “society” as some kind of supraorganism with “rights” superior to those of the individual, and lawfully empowered to rob, enslave, and murder said individual “for the common good”?
Does Kelo v. New London make your blood boil?
If not, you’re a socialist.
And pillage, rapine and murder are the “various socio-economic goals” upon which socialism is bent.
Collectivism (call it however you will) is a wonderful way of operating for hive-dwelling insects.
Much as you’d like ‘em to be, human beings are not hive-dwelling insects.
The best you can achieve is chattel slavery - ownership of the people as property of the state. Is that your purpose?
=====
“Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
SJ Doc: Aw man, yr boring.
SJ Doc: Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the current mess we find our economy in is not due to hyperinflation and over-regulation. But since you’re such an economist, what would be the libertarian course of action, had one taken office last January 20th? I’m sure it’s an appealing one, and involves bands of roaming thugs eating human flesh over burning oil drums — but I’ll let you explain why that would be to my advantage.
You look up and format those quotes by hand? On a Saturday night? Dude.
SJ Doc: SJ Doc on a Saturday night: “blah blah blah” fap fap fap “blah blah blah” fap fap fap “blah blah blah” fap fap fap “blah blah blah” fap fap fap “blah blah blah” fap fap fap
SayItWithWookies: “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the current mess we find our economy in is not due to hyperinflation and over-regulation. But since you’re such an economist, what would be the libertarian course of action, had one taken office last January 20th?”
Yeah, there’s definite hyperinflation. Don’t look at the government’s prevaricatively self-serving stated rates of inflation but rather at the M3 (which, interestingly enough, the Fed ceased to articulate in 2005; wonder why?). The best analogy I can draw is with intra- and extracellular potassium levels in the human body. The latter is quite small, while the former is very high. If there is a sudden large shift of potassium from the intracellular volume to the bloodstream (as in rhabdomyolysis as the result of massive musculoskeletal trauma), the potassium levels get high enough to precipitate cardiac arrhythmias, and without aggressive intervention the patient is dead.
Counterfeit currency uttered by the Federal Reserve is precisely like that. As long as it is kept away from circulation in markets in these United States - in foreign bank deposits, in circulation in foreign countries as a more reliable medium of exchange than the even-more-inflated domestic currencies, stuffed into mattresses, etc. - it is not “free in the bloodstream” to begin bidding up prices for goods and services.
When the total money supply “surfaces” (as inflationary expectations will push, because nobody wants to be holding onto Federal Reserve Notes when the issuing institution is ramping up the counterfeiting machinery to devalue these pseudodollars)
And, yes, there is over-regulation. Any regulation beyond that designed to punish (and therefore deter) fraud and other forms of theft is, by definition, over-regulation. As I’ve previously observed, government regulation is almost invariably sought by the establish actors in any market segment where regulation is being contemplated. It is valued by these rent-seeking malefactors in order to raise the cost threshold for entering competitors (helping to preserve oligopolies and molopolies) and for gulling customers, vendors, and even employees into delusions of corporate responsibility and reliability that are without foundation in fact.
Government regulation is treasured by the corporate “suits.” It’s precisely what they make all those “contributions” to the politicians to get.
As for proposed libertarian courses of action, there are many. My personal choices include the immediate abdication (by executive degree) of the “War on Drugs,” together with complete abdication of the unconstitutional unapportioned federal taxes levied on wages, salaries, commissions, tips, and the like. The capital gains tax goes, too, and all of these tax abolition measures need to be made permanent and without reservation.
There are a number of means by which the Federal Reserve System can be dissolved and a commodities-based currency re-established. It would require acknowledging the inflationary devaluation of the U.S. dollar perpetrated since 1913.
(( Did you realize that the “toxic assets” taken on by the Federal Reserve gives that institution a body of REAL assets it had never hitherto held? The “assets” backing the Federal Reserve Notes presently in circulation are nothing but instruments of debt uttered by the U.S. Treasury. In other words, there is nothing backing those Federal Reserve Notes legal-tendering in your wallet by U.S. government I.O.U.s. Your government has turned its debt into the money you are - by law - required to use in all your transactions. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and secure? ))
There are other libertarian solutions to be applied, but I think that the cost savings involved in getting rid of the DEA (as well as the state and municipal narcs) and the IRS would not only prove significantly valuable as well as providing a real morale boost to all honest Americans.
Of course, it might be similar in immediate effect to what happened when Saddam Hussein’s Revolutionry Guard divisions were demobilized, but we have gun control in these United States, and all those instantly unemployed agents of the IRS and the DEA would have to surrender their weapons before being cast out among their friendly, welcoming neighbors.
And the sales of shovels and quicklime in New Jersey will skyrocket.
=====
“Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.”
– L. Neil Smith
SJ Doc: Right — and good luck re-instituting the Articles of Confederation. I’m sur most of America dreams of the day they have to show their passport and exchange currency every time they cross a state border, with no Federal standards for food safety, building safety or workers’ rights (or at least meaningless ones, since the Fed will have to go begging for every dollar it spends on enforcement). Yeah, if the corporate robber barons have too much control now, everyone’s going to love the day that the CEO of Exxon has more power than any state or federal official or agency in the country. That sounds like a great answer to the centralization of power.
SayItWithWookies: “…everyone’s going to love the day that the CEO of Exxon has more power than any state or federal official or agency in the country.”
Like the alternative - federal and state bureaucrats and politicians who have more power over everybody than does the CEO of Exxon is somehow supposed to be comforting?
The time when Americans will “have to show their passport and exchange currency every time they cross a state border” - or try to buy groceries - is more likely to come when the battered and debauched U.S. dollar becomes no longer acceptable for such transactions.
While the re-institution of the Articles of Confederation would certainly be preferrable to the continuation of “Hamilton’s Blessing,” I’ve said nothing about abolishing the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, I’d like to see it enforced.
It’s not being enforced today.
Or do you conjure somehow that it is?
And what’s this neurotic fixation on “corporate robber barons” among you assholes, anyway? Except to the extent that wealthy people bribe government officers into violently tresspassing against the individual rights of other private citizens, none of the “robber barons” of yore had any real power to do harm at all.
It was only through the criminal collusion of government thugs that they breached the public peace WHEN they did so, and though the examples are well-scored and made deliberately gaudy by “progressive” and other socialist historians, for bloodshed and pillage they are as Cub Scouts compared to the goons of government.
And if “the Fed [I'm assuming you mean the federal government] will have to go begging for every dollar it spends on enforcement,” then it would do well if the officers of the federal government confine their enforcement efforts to duties explicitly prescribed in the Constitution, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t take them more than about five percent of what they’re spending right now to violate that Constitution, would it?
=====
“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”
– George Washington
Good luck solving problems that don’t exist. I’ll settle for a big government — with appropriate checks and balances, hopefully restored after the evisceration of the past eight years — over having faith in various corporations’ love of humanity. Inexplicable, I know. Good night.
In other news, there was a huge catfight in the line for auditions at America’s Top Model. People rushed to hospital, arrests made, high heeled shoes littering the sidewalk.
What’s SJDoc got to say about that?
DanJoaquinOz:
“I suspect Noonan’s elephantine drug stash is only rivalled by her contact list of anonymous ‘friends’, ‘professionals’ and ‘experts’. Conveniently enough this chattering, nameless horde invariably amplifies her views, while speaking in voices that uncannily resemble her own! For this column alone she’s consulted an un-named “perceptive writer”, an Ecclisiastes quoting “attorney in a Park Avenue firm”, a “Wall St. titan”, an evangelical “friend”, a “friend” looking for failed farms, another “friend” looking for Atticus Finch-land and a “Manhattan based psychiatrist” who diagnoses the American malaise in startlingly Noonan-ian terms: “a psychological pandemic of fear”, he gravely intones, confirming that great minds think, and more remarkably, speak, exactly alike. A more sceptical reader might suspect that Ms Noonan, like Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair and Judith Miller, is simply “inventing” multiple sources to pad out the flimsiness of her lament, and the utter predictability of her insights. I remained convinced, however, that Peggy genuinely believes in the existence of all her imaginary friends and consults them in perfectly good faith.”
So all you’re saying is that she’s a female Tom Friedman?
Wow, this is one bilious thread.
Inquiring minds want to know why.
SJ Doc: Dude. I’m the resident libertarian and have been for years. But you’re nuts.
Corporations are also self-indulgent bureaucracies, no? And in this last bit of crisis, they’re the ones who fucked up.
And as much as turning back the clock to a social state wherein individuals make the rules might appeal, they don’t. And they never will in a complex socioeconomic society. Just get over it; it doesn’t work that way without a catastrophic collapse — but I have to believe you don’t want that.
Right now it’s a game of pick your poison. There are too many people who can influence too many people — and I genuinely believe none of them have the individual’s best interest in mind — to ravenously side with the faction who you think is more responsible with money but has been objectively proven to still have their own interests at the top and are willing to fuck anyone who mysteriously continues to trust them.
And no, government is no better.
But seriously, you’re still clinging to the idea that somehow, in abstraction, investment bankers are just trying to do the best for everyone else and not fucking with everything to advance themselves personally? Maybe it’s you who should go back to Austrian economics after all.
Self interest involves conflict. When conflict involves significant risk that can be transferred effectively to external holders, motivations get all out of whack. And so we’re fucked if we do and fucked if we don’t, because the only people seeking and gaining power in this system — both inside the government and inside the powerful industrial complex — would rather transfer risk to someone other than themselves in order to maximize personal gain. Touting a system wherein investment bankers actually look out for their consumers at this point is somewhere beyond naive and getting into the downright retarded area.
Both government regulation and corporate responsibility depend on a magnanimity that isn’t there. Get over it and get over yourself.
Also.
DC Spring:
Meh, it’s open mic night for a Randroid.
=====
Now, this is a story all about how
My life got flipped-turned upside down
And I liked to take a minute
Just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air
In west Philadelphia born and raised
On the playground was where I spent most of my days
Chillin’ out maxin’ relaxin’ all cool
And all shootin some b-ball outside of the school
When a couple of guys
Who were up to no good
Startin making trouble in my neighborhood
I got in one little fight and my mom got scared
She said ‘You’re movin’ with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air’
I begged and pleaded with her day after day
But she packed my suite case and send me on my way
She gave me a kiss and then she gave me my ticket.
I put my walkman on and said, ‘I might as well kick it’.
First class, yo this is bad
Drinking orange juice out of a champagne glass.
Is this what the people of Bel-Air Living like?
Hmmmmm this might be alright.
But wait I hear there’re prissy, wine all that
Is Bel-Air the type of place they send this cool cat?
I don’t think sow
I’ll see when I get there
I hope they’re prepared for the prince of Bel-Air
Well, the plane landed and when I came out
There was a dude who looked like a cop standing there with my name out
I ain’t trying to get arrested
I just got here
I sprang with the quickness like lightening, disappeared
I whistled for a cab and when it came near
The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror
If anything I can say this cab is rare
But I thought ‘Now forget it’ - ‘Yo homes to Bel Air’
I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8
And I yelled to the cabbie ‘Yo homes smell ya later’
I looked at my kingdom
I was finally there
To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air
-Fresh Prince
Is SJDoc in real life a recently unemployed Jim Cramer on an all night coke binge?
Randroid!? LOL.
Atlas punked.
SJ Doc: Doc, please. Before you tout the uber-individualistic nonsense that is libertarianism, take a look at how people REALLY make decisions. Learn about game theory, for example, and its intersection with macro-economics.
Oh, and Truck Nutz, ass-fucking, and also. That is, to turn this thread back into Wonkette.
SJ Doc: Oh, fuck me! I just read this nonsense about how “robber barons” didn’t have any power except to the extent they colluded with the government. You stupid fuck.
Have you ever heard of the coal camps? Pinkertons? Fucking Coal Creek Wars? Those were PRIVATE individuals and corporations that violently put down individuals who were trying to protect and stand up for themselves. You know why? Because the government got out of the way and let them!
You stupid, stupid man. You really think that government is the only entity with the power to use force to impose its will? Ever heard of the Medellin Cartel? La Cosa Nostra? Jeebus fucking wept, you act like government is all “bad” and shit because it uses force to enforce the rules, but ignore the fact that government at least gives fucking lip service to the idea that it is acting in the public interest. Or, I should say, until the fucking republicans — i.e., libertarians who claim not to smoke dope or buy hookers — got in charge and decided government should become the same rape fest that business always admitted it was. Gawd.
jbd:
Meth is a terrible drug. Get some sleep.
“Quantity not quality”
Some idiot who designed parts for nuclear power plants.
Quit being an idiot.
Bring back teh funneh!
Srsly, guys.
Guys, srsly.
TGY: It’s O.K. I think he’s gone now. We can go back to Buttnutz and Truckfucking.
jbd asks: “So all you’re saying is that she’s a female Tom Friedman?”
Kinda. Source-wise, Peg’s certainly in the same wasteland of journalistic integrity. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that Porn-stache definitely knows he’s just making shit up, like those Lebanese cabdrivers and Mumbai entrepreneurs. On the other hand, I suspect the Marquessa de Nooningtan possibly believes in the echoing personas that people her careening drunken solitude.
Plus, Peggy is unintentionally hilarious, whereas Friedman I just want to kick in the nuts.
Jeeze, did that lunatic finally go to bed? And just when I was going to try to convince him that his face was “the tree of Liberty” and my urine was “the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
SJ Doc:
Like the alternative - federal and state bureaucrats and politicians who have more power over everybody than does the CEO of Exxon is somehow supposed to be comforting?
I don’t remember voting for the CEO of Exxon or the guy who appointed him.
Seriously, America has a lot of problems, but CEOs not having enough power over us relative to the power of government officials is absolutely not one of them. Hell, in may ways they do have more power over us, given that the US Government is basically a plutocracy that largely answers to their whims until they manage to collapse the economy. And spare me the “government regulation collapsed the economy” bullshit. It’s just as absurd as the “there’s this guys who’s famous in obscure libertarian circles who demolished Keynes” claim.
I say we should file for a class action lawsuit against Wonkette for allowing SJ the self-proclaimed doctor to bore us to fucking death.
That’s aiight though. As a recovery, I’m reading up the Radiohead/Miley Cypress Hill controversy right now.
El Pinche: I love Thom Yorke. I wouldn’t agree to meet with that twit, either.
“These drugs are over-prescribed, putting, in the public’s mind, the people who actually need them in the same category as the bored housewife with “social anxiety disorder” which was solely created to sell more SSRIs.”
I actually agree with SJ Doc on this point.
SJ Doc: Up all night? Don’t you have a wife to fuck? Or is this Alaska calling? Still, what’s with all the at home grandchildren? See you next weekend unless one of us is dead.
“Parent fail or are you the head of a little cult?”
-Ann Landers
You guys are a big pack of fun on an otherwise dull weekend…
“My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”
– Harry S. Truman (circa 1962)
windupbird: Me too. I love his solo stuff on warprecords, too.
disney slag: “I’m gonna ruin them, I’m gonna tell everyone.”
She certainly can by doing a cover song .
Serolf Divad: word.
How out of touch with reality does one have to be to not understand unregulated mega corporations caused a global monetary crisis? Ideology over facts reminds me of teh Bushies.
sheesh
“I have to go out and poop.”
-Moche, the Xolo
DC Spring: Jesus Christ, I walk away from teh Wonkettes for a day and it turns into half an Ayn Rand novel, except duller and with less wit.
SJ Doc: SJ Doc: SJ Doc: SJ Doc: SJ Doc:, et al.:
TL;DR
SayItWithWookies: “Good luck solving problems that don’t exist. I’ll settle for a big government — with appropriate checks and balances….”
This presupposes that the idea of “checks and balances” - three branches of one hydra-headed monster supposedly limiting each other’s efforts to violate the Constitution - could ever have possibly worked. Again and again and again - in Jackson’s Indian removals as one of the gaudiest, earliest examples - this has proven impracticable.
Moreover, it presumes that any of the three branches have any real INTEREST in checking the aggrandizement and over-reach of the other branches’ powers beyond the limitations of the Constitution when, in fact, they are themselves (and their respective constituencies) the collateral beneficiaries of those aggrandizements.
If you think one part of the federal government is to be relied upon to protect the citizenry against the criminal machinations of its colleagues, then you must also believe that there’s a real difference between the Republicans and the Democrats (beyond the difference between, say, cholera and bowel cancer).
How’ya doin’ with your belief in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny?
Moreover, you claim to live in some kind of fantasy where you are ALLOWED to “settle for a big government.”
You - and the rest of us - have been given a choice?
What we’re presently suffering is the result of the “big government” for which you say you’d settle. How else was it caused? What machinery ran over us? What machinery is *still* running over us?
Are you settling for “big government” - and willingly inflicting it upon your neighbors, your family, your progeny - without even a whimper of protest, much less a cogent analysis of what it is that your “big government” is doing, how it is doing it, and why it is being done to you?
Seems a bit “Liberal,” doesn’t it?
=====
“The root of the evil… lay not in corruption but in the system which bred it, the alliance between industrialists and politicians which produced benefits in the form of tariffs, public lands, and federal subsidies.”
– Samuel P. Hays
El Pinche:
“If someone, like, said that, like, ‘I would cry if I met them. I really want to meet them,’ I would freaking, like, run and, like, give them the biggest hug in the world because that’s cool, you know? But they were like, ‘We don’t really do that.’ I had already texted all my friends! They don’t meet one little kid who would cry and make their life? That’s the reason you do this! The reason that I’m in the business is because I like making people happy and it’s, like, I don’t get people like [Radiohead].”
- Miley Cyrus, 3/6/09 NEVAR, like, 4GET!!1
jbd: “But seriously, you’re still clinging to the idea that somehow, in abstraction, investment bankers are just trying to do the best for everyone else and not fucking with everything to advance themselves personally?”
Oh, hell, no!
Hm. You claim to be a libertarian. Read much on the history of money and banking?
=====
“…every instance of catastrophic government interference with the economy was carried out by bought-and-paid-for politicians, at the behest of some corrupt corporate interest they felt they needed to please.
“These corporate interests didn’t aspire to compete for your dollars by producing the best goods and services they could at the lowest possible prices (a quaint little system called ‘capitalism’), but used the government as a bludgeon in the marketplace to preclude or destroy competition and force you to buy their products whether you want to or not. This system is called ‘mercantilism’ and it’s exactly what Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations to complain about in 1776.
“A panic or depression starts years before most people notice, when government creates money out of thin air, either by printing it — one of the 19th century’s worst turndowns was brought on by phony dollars whipped up to pay for the War Between the States — or by generating credit.
“Today’s mess began when the Carter Administration forced lending institutions to offer people loans for homes they couldn’t actually afford. (This seems to be an obsession with Jimmy the Peanut, whose ‘habitats for humanity’ are currently in the process of derezzing, but this isn’t an article on psychopathology, so we’ll leave the subject for another day.) The Clinton gang took Carter’s program and expanded it.
“To make things worse — but to win over the lending institutions — government gives them the magical power of ‘fractional reserve banking’. That is, they’re allowed — encouraged — to commit fraud, by lending out many times the money they actually have. Non-existent currency is transferred to would-be homeowners, who bestow it upon whoever they’re buying their house from, who transfers it to another, — or even the same—bank. It’s all on paper; nothing real ever changes hands, and it’s all based on a fervent hope that not everyone on the job will be like the cranky old framing carpenter who takes his paycheck to the bank at the end of every week and swaps it out for cash.
“Of course if they do, the government will just print more. Paper currency is worth even less than imaginary capital: I think it was Ludwig von Mises who said only government can take two valuable commodities, paper and ink, and combine them to make something utterly worthless.”
– L. Neil Smith, http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle502-20090118-02.html
windupbird: “These drugs are over-prescribed, putting, in the public’s mind, the people who actually need them in the same category as the bored housewife with “social anxiety disorder” which was solely created to sell more SSRIs.”
I actually agree with SJ Doc on this point.
Hey, I said that! Not that it matters much, but are you agreeing with me or SJ Crank’s response to me? I kind of liked, a little too much, that little sentence of mine, so I must re-claim ownership.
I haven’t read what SJ Doc has been ranting about–but really looks pretty not funny.
Two points:
Servo is right, no benefits for you–you also don’t get to use the roads.
& um, Ken, Jim, somebody, um, I know you don’t work weekends–but I thought I was coming here for 100 hilarious comments–that’s not what I found. We have a hijack situation.
Boojum: “Doc, please. Before you tout the uber-individualistic nonsense that is libertarianism, take a look at how people REALLY make decisions. Learn about game theory, for example, and its intersection with macro-economics.”
Ultimately, all macroeconomics works down into microeconomics. You can speak usefully about aggregate decision-making and send Officer Friendly out to extort actions contrary to the brutalized individuals’ peculiar personal preferences, but ultimately it’s shifting fluids with a fork. Depending on how viscous the solution is, you can move quite a bit of the thickest stuff some of the time, but the “inertia” by which the aggregate is maintained in a macroeconomically manipulable state is inevitably (if not precisely predictably) disposed to change, often with harrowing suddenness.
Look at how economic “bubbles” (and recorded case histories of such “bubbles” go back through the past millenium at the very least) grow and burst.
If macroeconomics were methodologically robust - even in light of the recent addition of game theory to the manipulators’ toolkit - “bubbles” like the present mortgage crisis wouldn’t happen, would they?
What you decry as “uber-individualistic nonsense” is nothing more than a reasoned acknowledgement that each human being *is* an individual, and to embrace a politics that treats the individual as subordinate to (and inferior to) some mythological uber-collective called “society” is not only odious but inescapably pernicious.
But I’m really interested in how you hand-wave “game theory” into an explanation of how the present economic crisis developed and, more importantly, how “game theory” offers guidance to a viable stabilization.
The quality of a scientific theory is tested by proof of its ability to predict. Was your “game theory” calling this *Sheisseschlact* even remotely as accurately as Austrian school theory did?
=====
“Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind.”
– Fredrich August von Hayek
SJ Doc: this whole screed misses the point of the housing bubble/collapse.
Once corporations could turn ‘mortgages’ into unregulated ’securities’, they could not write mortgages fast enough. It had nothing to do with affordable housing…. they did not care if the ‘borrower’ could pay the loan, they did not care because it was a big game of ‘hot potato’. The ratings agencies were complicit in that they were being paid by the banks. Many attempts were made to try and stop mortgage fraud, Elliot Spitzer comes to the fore here but the Bush government shut him down with his ’states have the right to stop predatory lending’.
Glass Stiegall being overturned set this particular ball in motion. Once Gramm removed the protective laws put in place after the last great depression, and enabled these mega banks to turn mortgages into securities, well they needed lots of ‘paper’ anyway they could get it.
Yea, we have a lot of debt. Bush put two ‘wars’ on a credit card and let the people who prosper ignore their public duties. But the debt was bigger during WW11, we will have new sectors in the economy become the next force for wealth and the deterioration of our infrastructure needs to be addressed for the new century. There is no going back to the rugged frontier, all the demographics have changed beyond those old systems.
If you would like a system of pay as you go, I suggest living in Mexico where to buy a house or any capital improvements for a business cash is the only way. There is a big underground economy there, and a war of special interest cartels who are fighting it out on the streets with machine guns. Kidnapping is increasing, it is a great way to bring in needed cash. You would love it.
Crow T. Robot: ” haven’t read what SJ Doc has been ranting about–but really looks pretty not funny.”
You got that right. Is metastatic cancer funny?
The reason I’m writing here (in this wonderfully target-rich environment) is that “Liberal” assholes - still kvelling in their November victory like concentration camp guards gathered to admire Irma Grese’s collection of lampshades - need to have their muzzles rubbed in the shit they’ve done so much to spatter all over the place.
=====
“Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable.”
– John Patrick
SJ Doc: The ‘Liberals’ may have some responsibility for this current mess, but would like you to address the “Conservatives’ massive fraud and trashing of the Constitution of US of A. Fair is fair buddy. Facts matter.
Or are St. Ronnie and G.W. your heroes in your quest, whatever it is…?
SJ Doc: The reason I’m writing here (in this wonderfully target-rich environment) is that “Liberal” assholes - still kvelling in their November victory like concentration camp guards gathered to admire Irma Grese’s collection of lampshades - need to have their muzzles rubbed in the shit they’ve done so much to spatter all over the place.
“Pain make man think. Thought make man wise. Wisdom make life endurable.”
Dear Mr. Kaczynski,
Congratulations on getting internet access in your cell. If you think you are causing anyone pain or rubbing our muzzles (?) in shit then you obviously have not been around here very long. We find your psychotic break amusing. The only reason you are even getting a response is that it’s a weekend & our esteemed editors don’t usually work weekends. Now go get your one hour of exercise and resume masturbating into your own feces while reading Guns ‘n’ Ammo.
Even if it is a weekend…*done feeding troll*
sati demise: “Once corporations could turn ‘mortgages’ into unregulated ’securities’, they could not write mortgages fast enough. It had nothing to do with affordable housing…. they did not care if the ‘borrower’ could pay the loan, they did not care because it was a big game of ‘hot potato’.”
Good pick-up. Sic semper government regulation.
What were politically purported to be government policies meddling in the marketplace to facilitate what that asshole, Dubbya, called an “ownership society” were actually regulatory mechanisms (not “de-regulation”) eagerly sought by the financial corporations to grease the way for their fraudulent schemes by hand-waving promises of federal indemnifications and assurances of federal scrutiny.
“If you would like a system of pay as you go, I suggest living in Mexico where to buy a house or any capital improvements for a business cash is the only way. There is a big underground economy there, and a war of special interest cartels who are fighting it out on the streets with machine guns.”
Please! Machine pistols and assault rifles. Not “machine guns.” Why is it that “Liberals” can’t distinguish among the categories of small arms?
And yes, what’s being seen in Mexico (and in similar “failed” nation-states) is a cash-and-carry system - barter in many places - precisely because civil government in Mexico has repeatedly raped and pillaged the financial institutions, to the point at which they cannot function as marketplace savings depositories and capital investment brokers, which are legitimate and productive functions.
But we don’t need to go to Mexico. Your Mocha Messiah and his cadre are doing their best to bring Mexico right here to River City.
=====
“Haz patria! Mata un chilango!”
– Graffito seen on highway overpasses throughout Mexico.
O Ken, our Most Benevolent Overlord, we beseech you to withdraw your mighty Ban Hammer from its scabbard and wield it on SJ Doc with all deliberate speed.
/Snarkety-snark big sale on Truck Nutz!
I have to agree w/ SJ Doc: gooberment has no obligation to its citizens as individuals not even the police. Never mind the corporations and their “don’t buy our shit/services if you don’t like it” mentality. The Big Three were held over a barrel about their racing programs if they were going to get Gooberment bailouts, so they stopped sponsoring stuff like NASCAR. These bankers have no accountability, since its blamed on ‘Market Risk’–then go to Uncle Sam for a corporate welfare handout and still give executive bonuses away.
Here is some examples of beaurucratic idiocy…with regards to the indvidual–
(Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 [D.C.App. 1981]), not even the police. The opinion of the court was “The court held that official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for a failure to provide adequate police protection.”
Mind you that was after a few phone calls to the police were made when some women heard their roomate being attacked by intruders. Assuming that the police arrived, they went downstairs to check on their friend–and all three were raped for 14 hours…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
“Law enforcement agencies and personnel have no duty to protect individuals from the criminal acts of others; instead their duty is to preserve the peace and arrest law breakers for the protection of the general public.”
Lynch v. N.C. Dept. of Justice, 376 S.E. 2nd 247 (N.C. App. 1989)
I have cited these cases, so this isn’t made up.
Hope you live in a ritzy neighborhood–the cops showed up more quickly in uptown (ie: wealthy, white) Portland than NoPo or the east side…(and I lived in all three places in Portland).
Or you sold loans to underqualified people at Countrywide for bonuses, and still have your job.
Same difference.
hobospacejungle: Can I haz flying flecks of spittle?
sati demise: “The ‘Liberals’ may have some responsibility for this current mess, but would like you to address the ‘Conservatives’ massive fraud and trashing of the Constitution of US of A. Fair is fair buddy. Facts matter.
“Or are St. Ronnie and G.W. your heroes in your quest, whatever it is…?”
Sure. The nominal “conservatives” (like the nominal “Liberals”) are, if anything, even more guilty of creating this fuck-up.
But, then, the Republican Party has ALWAYS been the author and advocate of inflation, political pork, and butt-fucking the individual American consumer for the sake of their “big business” buddies.
Didn’tcha know that already? The Republicans (the party of “St. Ronnie” and that dipshit, Dubbya) were the sons of bitches who controlled the first “Peacetime Billion-Dollar Congress” - the 51st, back in 1889-91, when a billion dollars was a throat-clutchingly horrible amount - and enacted the legislation required to precipitate the “Silver Panic” of 1893. Look it up. It’s a fascinating example of how just a *little* bit of fucking with the money supply can hammer the living shit out of a national economy.
And every lovin’ little bit of it was wrought by the Republicans.
And you thought American history was dull….
=====
“Apparently millions continue to harbor the strange delusion that the Republican party is the party of free enterprise, and, at least since the New Deal, the party of conservatism. In fact, the party is and always has been the party of state capitalism. That, along with the powers and perks it provides its leaders, is the whole reason for its creation and continued existence. By state capitalism I mean a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government. The Republican party has never, ever opposed any government interference in the free market or any government expenditure except those that might favour labour unions or threaten Big Business. Consider that for a long time it was the party of high tariffs – when high tariffs benefited Northern big capital and oppressed the South and most of the population. Now it is the party of so-called ‘free trade’ – because that is the policy that benefits Northern big capital, whatever it might cost the rest of us. In succession, Republicans presented opposite policies idealistically as good for America, while carefully avoiding discussion of exactly who it was good for.”
– Clyde Wilson, http://www.lewrockwell.com/wilson/wilson20.html
SJ Doc: You don’t happen to have a website or blog where you post this unique point of view do you? So we can all go to there?
“This is fucked up,fucked up”
-Thom Yorke
El Pinche: President Beeblebrox: I love Black Swan and that whole album. I played it during my hospital stay and treatments and it kept me sane.I’ve loved RadioHead too,forever,it seems.
Miley’s got a hard job for a kid though. SO JST LEAVE HR ALKONE!!1
“And the sales of shovels and quicklime in New Jersey will skyrocket.”
-SJ Doc
sati demise: “How out of touch with reality does one have to be to not understand unregulated mega corporations caused a global monetary crisis?”
Aw, denise! What agency in our society (indeed, in any polity anywhere) utters the currency and therefore “regulates” the value thereof?
Your “global monetary crisis” is caused by government action.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
You just keep sucking at that government teat (or is it “cock”?), denise. Suck *REALLY* hard.
=====
“Government is the only institution that can take a perfectly good piece of paper, print some noble words on it, and make it perfectly worthless.”
– Ludwig von Mises
I’m still waiting to hear the Doc’s alternatives. I think he/she has a Thetan infestation.
Stop helping the “Doc” with boner maintenance.
SJ Doc: You assume too much, medic.
But now you can go over to littlegreenfootballs and post the same crap.
You have no real answers for modern America.
It is easy to criticize and insult people on-line.
But as you are obviously incapable of humor or civil discourse, you are posting in the wrong intertubes.
“I like to lick my balls”
-Moche, the Xolo
Still waiting to see Doc’s alternatives, other than “Because libertarians say that your system is horseshit”.
Sounds an awful lot like Scientology.
Patience, Wonketeers, patience. In due time, the party (cult) of our loud-mouthed nuisance will fade like Ross Perot.
SJ Doc: demise, buddy, not denise.
I suggest you take a dip in some lithium hot springs out west.
This may help you.
But I can fix your sentence
“Your “global monetary crisis” is caused by government inaction.”
Too little and too late-so the pendulum swings the other way for awhile.
You may try to surgically attach a sense of humor with a bit of dental floss.
You know what I like best? When the Paultards have their convention they all go to the Sound of Music and sing along to “I am sixteen, going on seventeen”.
Yes and then Christopher Plummer smiles at the Trilateral Commission. I swoon every time Julie Andrews sings about fiat currency too.
sati demise: “You have no real answers for modern America. It is easy to criticize and insult people on-line.”
Sure, it’s “easy to insult people on-line.” Fun, too. Isn’t that what Wonkette is all about?
As for “no real answers,” how do you come to that conclusion?
I’ve proposed (just for a start) abolishing the “War on Drugs,” shutting down the DEA and the IRS, permanently ending federal “income” and capital gains taxes to improve the amount of “liquidity” in the hands of the private citizenry, and replacing the Federal Reserve System’s translation of Treasury Department debt into circulating currency with a mechanism to back the presently worthless U.S. dollar with some sort of commodity lawful money.
How are any of these not practicable, or not manifestly beneficial?
Got any “real answers” on that?
=====
“The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”
– Milton Friedman
sati demise: ‘demise, buddy, not denise.”
Yeah, I noticed. Sorry ’bout that. It was inadvertent.
=====
“Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
– Ambrose Bierce
I think the good Doktor needs a Super Power Rundown. That’ll help clear those body thetans real quick.
So, it looks like another Sunday morning of reasoned debate between Wonketeers (or at least two of them). Oh, how I love it.
Meanwhile, we’ve become dependent on big government. The coasts can argue all they want about libertarianism vs. what we have now. The great middle of the country cares not a whit. Still it’s fun to read.
shorter SJ Doc:
WAKE UP AMERRIKA, MOCHA NOBAMA IS A SOCIALIST COMMIE FROM KENYA. EVERYONES A CROOK. NO GOVERNMENT IS GOOD. ACORNS AND REZKO BAD. ALSO GUNS. FUCK YOU “LIBERALS” .
“Mocha”….just say n*gger and get it over with. By the way, you have any hot granddaughters?
SJ Doc: Successful troll is successful!
Servo: “Still waiting to see Doc’s alternatives….”
Vide supra. Let’s add opening the federal prisons (and encouraging the states to do likewise) in order to release all those convicted of non-violent crimes related to the sale or consumption of “controlled” psychoactive substances.
I’ve no precise estimate on the cost savings to be got thereby, but given America’s obscenely high prison population, it’s gotta be a bunch.
There’s a whole lot that the federal government could be forbidden to do (or to continue) which would simultaneously reduce the burden imposed on the average American citizen and improve social comity, civil order, and the discipline under which Officer Friendly ought to be - but is not - ranged.
This isn’t complicated. When you see a person being strangled by a mugger, do you jump in and perform a tracheotomy on the victim, or just shove the blade up underneath the mugger’s 12th rib and go for his aorta?
=====
“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom.
“But the tumult soon subsides.”
– Thomas Paine, *Common Sense* (1776)
El Pinche: “By the way, you have any hot granddaughters?”
The oldest just turned 18. I won’t give you her e-mail, but if you’re really interested, I can forward yours to her.
She’s a 3rd-dan black belt in karate, so I’m not much worried if she decides to contact you.
I just keep telling her: “Try to keep the blood off the ceiling.”
=====
“I wasn’t used to children and they were getting on my nerves. Worse, it appeared that I was a child, too. I hadn’t known that before; I thought I was just short.”
– Florence King (on her first day in Kindergarten)
SJ Doc: you miss the point of wonkette by being singularly boring. but;
I am with you about the war on drugs. There are real conversations taking place about marijuana legalization now, and I expect that prohibition will eventually end. All good.
I do not agree with you about capital gains, this would give the market manipulators of the ‘free market’ way too much accumulated power-ie hedge fund managers being taxed at 15% never made any sense.
With no tax money or IRS, we become a failed state. How many modern technologies have come out of government programs? This internet you use to spread your ideology is one example. Protecting the ‘commons’ would be impossible-rivers in Ohio would still be catching on fire if not for government intervention to protect common resources needed for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The degradation of all systems common for life would be degraded very fast without government protection. The law of the jungle does not serve humanity the way you think it would.
Government investment can and has created great wealth in this country, we have led the world in technology and standard of living precisely because of government investments in science and education (NASA, et al). The past 8 years of low to no taxes and trickle down economics have hurt our standing in the world and our economy.
If the dollar is worthless, then all other currencies are more so. Our wealth is in our technological advances and science based tech, including medical advances (funded by government mostly, minus the 18% of private capital). Too bad the Republicans and the Paultards ignore this.
SJ Doc:
Aw, denise! What agency in our society (indeed, in any polity anywhere) utters the currency and therefore “regulates” the value thereof?
Your “global monetary crisis” is caused by government action.
The current crisis was not created by the government, and it certainly wasn’t caused by the Fed printing money. The Federal government could have done more to stop it, but it wasn’t the government’s idea to write un-repayable loans non-credit worthy individuals, then package those loans as investment vehicles, slap a AAA rating on them and sell them to investors throughout the globe. Nor would a gold standard have done anything to prevent the bubble. Bubbles have developed in gold backed economies, too. The problem is that we’ve had for too long in this nation an attitude that Wall Street and the markets can do no wrong and are as near perfectly rational entities as are bound to be found in an economic system. The government’s culpability lies in holding to this view, and not stepping in more aggressively to regulate economic exchange. Instead of heeding the warnings of those who saw the sub-prime market as dangerously unsustainable and rife with fraud we had guys like Alan Greenspan encouraging these exotic loans under the theory that if the market came up with it, surely the market must know what it’s doing.
sati demise: “I do not agree with you about capital gains….”
Really? Your explanation above (”too much accumulated power” in the hands of hedge fund managers and similarly odious private citizens) is not robust. If a profit is generated, it represents “accumulated power,” true. If it is then taxed into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, is it not *still* to be put to purposes that can only be considered abusive?
Apart from simple, straightforward government thievery, what’s the purpose of a capital gains tax, anyway? Isn’t it axiomatic that “what you tax, you get less of”? And so government policy has been set to PUNISH successful investment by predation upon profits gained thereby?
Jeez, but doesn’t that constitute a discouragement of capital investment, which is the engine by which a division-of-labor economy survives, much less grows to produce material improvements in peoples’ standard of living?
sati demise: “With no tax money or IRS, we become a failed state. How many modern technologies have come out of government programs?”
The revenues of the federal government run far beyond the relatively small (but terribly pernicious) unconstitutionality of the personal “income” tax and the pathological tax upon capital gains. With no IRS, the national government still has massive support through tariffs and other excises; more than enough to support its operations within the confines of the strictly constitutional duties defined in the charter of government under which these politicians and bureaucrats claim the risible semblance of legitimacy for their present malfeasances.
sati demise: “Government investment can and has created great wealth in this country….”
Weath? More like waste. Investment? Say, rather, malinvestment. One of the most hateful characteristics of the “Liberal” is his tendency to call government spending “investment.” This is a perversion of the word.
Investment is spending to gain a return. This is done only by the productive (i.e., private) sector of society. All government spending is consumer spending; even “infrastructure spending.”
Think about it. The TVA (the “Liberal” fascists’ poster child for government crushing the guts out of America’s poorest and thus most easily abused folk) is an utter abomination. Even the Interstate highway system - America’s version of the Nazi Autobahn - was designed and built as a system of *military* highways, for the purposes of facilitating strategic and tactical movement of war-waging resources. That’s how the spending was legitimatized back in the ’50s.
Military spending is most definitely consumer spending. It is certainly not capital investment.
If there is a secondary utilization of the resources conjured up through government spending - as is the case in the Internet - it is inadvertent, purely accidental. Indeed, if the officers of the federal government knew that their decentralized, “nuke-proof” expansion of ARPANET was going to be used as the Internet is currently used, they would’ve killed it a-borning.
This is not “investment” for the deliberate purpose of facilitating either particular or general economic prosperity. No matter how deeply the politicians may shove their tongues into your ear, they’re pushing purest bullshit. Just another manifest of the Whig/Republican “American System” pork-&-perq packaging we’ve known since the days of Henry Clay.
Beyond that, there’s always Bastiat’s “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen.”
What you’re focusing on is the politician’s hand-wave. What you’re failing to see is the potential benefits obliterated by his thievery and “investment.”
sati demise: “If the dollar is worthless, then all other currencies are more so.”
True. Look up the Bretton Woods conference, and the system arising therefrom. Governments had debauched their currencies to fund (among other things) the slaughter and squander of the Second World War, and a world-wide scheme of fraud was instituted through that system. You should look into it. Further degradations of the various nations’ fiat currencies (of which the Euro is a spectacular example) have proceeded since.
And, again, “government investment” is an illusion. Might as well advocate “fucking for virginity.”
=====
“Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have
plenty of government and nothing of anything else.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
SJ Doc: Equal parts Rawls, von Mises, Hayek, Nietzsche, and actually thinking for myself. Trust me, I come by my libertarian claims honestly. The fact that you’ve devolved into the “well, I guess we could stop the war on drugs” stage of argumentation is pretty hilarious. What’s the last time you read a Federal budget?
And honestly, like most of your ilk, you understand the role of the Federal Reserve not a whit. And it’s kind of amusing.
DanJoaquinOz: Believe it or not, I wrote that with a small amount of scotch and a rather larger amount of vodka in my system. I was just avoiding things that I have to do….
It’s now slept off. Don’t expect another such rant until at least after 7.
SJ Doc:
I think that you’ll find an overwhelming amount of support for the cessation of the “War on Drugs” and the unjust imprisonment of people that need to occasionally numb themselves from reality. The cost is staggering and the benefit is miniscule, all to please old church people and pharmaceuticals.
However, that common point has just now become apparent to you after many hours of profane ranting and finger-pointing. Grow up.
Respect begets respect.
SJ Doc: I’d like to point out a couple of things to you, doc, since you seem to be spending the greater part of your weekend here.
First, you may have noticed that most peoples’ posts are short, like 5 or 6 lines on average. Yours are long enough that you can’t see the end from the top of the post. I stop reading before I even start.
Second, where you use a lot of words like “macroeconomics” and “aggregate decision making process”, everybody else uses words like “douchenozzle” and “twatwaffle.” When you visit a foreign country, you must at least pretend to want to learn the language.
Third, everybody here, or at any rate, me, hates you. I don’t mean we respectfully disagree with your opinions. You’ve expended enough verbiage here that we’ve got a pretty good idea what kind of person you are, and we really, really hate you. I suspect that your family, oolleagues and neighbors hate you as well.
I am serious.
Well, at least SJ Doc has provided us with a textbook example of a proof by verbosity, a logical fallacy. We can learn from this how not to engage in an intellectual discussion.
=====
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.”
-W.C. Fields
SJ Doc: well, well, well….no answer to the real benefits you received as a result of government investment in research and development in the medical field. Or government investment in the education of citizens. Government investment in technology that has created world markets of goods and services that have created wealth.
Any system will have people who abuse the system. Thats why we have approx. 1.8 trillion of hidden US wealth stashed in Swiss bank accounts of the estimated 7 trillion of private wealth there…and that is a modest estimate.
“The devastation being caused by the global economic crisis to the lives and livelyhoods of hundreds of millions of people around the world is not merely the result of bad practices by certain mega financial service firms, but the foreseeable outcome of one system of global economic governance-or more accurately anti-governance-that has been put into place and now must be replaced.”
-Lori Wallach
Yea, its a crooked system skewed to the advantage of the rich. This, like the war on drugs, can be changed.
“No one with the name PJ should be taken seriously, unless they are a furry.”
-Moche, the Xolo
DemmeFatale:Oh he’s a lonely old man locked away somewheres hiding from his naked needy killer grand kids and he probably has cancer. Only burying him with a brick in his mouth can shut him up. He lives on forever sucking the life out of everyone he encounters.
I think I am right though about him writing script for meds. Let’s keep him until we figure out where he hid the bags of gold.
“Zzz”
-102415
jbd: “And honestly, like most of your ilk, you understand the role of the Federal Reserve not a whit. And it’s kind of amusing.”
Oh? Share the amusement. How am I wrong?
To extend the CPR analogy, always drop back on first principles, and NEVER abdicate the responsibility to keep those principles in mind. What was “the Creature From Jeckyll Island” created to do, what has it done, and what is it doing?
If we want to get an understanding of “the nature of the Federal Reserve,” and you think my conception thereof erroneous, aren’t you obliged to point out where and how I’ve made misperception?
As for putting an end to the “War on Drugs,” how is any such beneficial measure to be denigrated? Consider not only that it will reduce the costs of incarceration (and return hundreds of thousands of Americans to potentially productive roles in society) but it will also instantly unemploy tens of thousands of highly-paid bureaucratic parasites presently feeding on the body politic.
Downsizing the government in such a manner isn’t a good thing, in and of itself?
Beyond that, consider that the hemp industry - growing, harvesting, and producing goods manufactured from the farming of cannabis sativa for purposes other than obtaining smokable THC - was valued at over a billion dollars in the 1930s (before seventy-odd years of Federal Reserve System debauchment of those dollars), the restoration of a legitimate commerce in ditchweed-derived fiber, pulp, oil, and seed residue (excellent livestock feed) will also redound to the common good, especially in “flyover country” where once it had flourished.
Many other valuable suggestions have been made by other writers on this subject. My advocacies are only suggestive of what can easily, painlessly, and productively be done literally in an instant.
=====
“Stroke of the pen. Law of the Land. Kinda cool.”
– Paul Begala
gurukalehuru: ditto. We hate you ‘medic’, because.102415: you suck the life out of everyone and everything you touch. zzz, indeed, 102415, but think this one is a young pup.
I work daily with the gold and currency markets… every single day in my job.
That may be a conundrum for the medic since you assume too much. This is the reason we hate you.
“A bone in the jaws is worth two on the hoof.”
-Moche, the Xolo
Serolf Divad: “The current crisis was not created by the government, and it certainly wasn’t caused by the Fed printing money. The Federal government could have done more to stop it, but it wasn’t the government’s idea to write un-repayable loans non-credit worthy individuals, then package those loans as investment vehicles, slap a AAA rating on them and sell them to investors throughout the globe. Nor would a gold standard have done anything to prevent the bubble. Bubbles have developed in gold backed economies, too. The problem is that we’ve had for too long in this nation an attitude that Wall Street and the markets can do no wrong and are as near perfectly rational entities as are bound to be found in an economic system. The government’s culpability lies in holding to this view, and not stepping in more aggressively to regulate economic exchange. Instead of heeding the warnings of those who saw the sub-prime market as dangerously unsustainable and rife with fraud we had guys like Alan Greenspan encouraging these exotic loans under the theory that if the market came up with it, surely the market must know what it’s doing.”
Oh, but most certainly the present clusterfuck was created by our federal government. In collusion with the politically connected “operators” in the financial industry, certainly, but by no means could the bankers and their ilk have managed to make this mess without the unconstitutional power of their good buddies on Capitol Hill and in the various departments of the executive branch.
As for economic bubbles having “developed in gold backed economies, too,” consider the nature of such bubbles, and their origins in excessive monetary liquidity - too many units of fiat currency chasing a necessarily finite amount of goods and services in the economy - inducing lax or otherwise inappropriate lending standards by the legitimate financial institutions in that economy. A “gold standard” cannot prevent such events, especially when such a “standard” is merely a flimsy disguise for a government’s debauchement of the currency.
Remember, no central bank (and the Federal Reserve System is precisely such a central bank to all intents and purposes) is ever instituted except to facilitate a national government’s debauchment of the currency. See also the histories of the First and especially the Second National Banks of these United States.
Examine even earlier phenomena like the Netherlands’ “Tulip Bubble” of 1637, and Great Britain’s “South Sea Bubble” of 1720.
All to which you refer has its roots in government fucking with the money supply.
Always did, always does, always will.
If noncolluding private sector speculators are led into making unsound allocation of resources as the result of these government malfeasances, they’re “guilty” of complicity in these crimes to precisely the same extent that the victim of a mugging is “guilty” of walking down the street at the time of the criminal’s attack.
=====
“By far the most numerous and most flagrant violations of personal liberty and
individual rights are performed by governments. The major crimes throughout
history, the ones executed on the largest scale, have been committed not by
individuals or bands of individuals but by governments, as a deliberate policy
of those governments, that is, by the official representatives of governments,
acting in their official capacity.”
– John Hospers
Jesus fucking Christ, I remember when the Wonkette comments used to be entertaining.
It’s like these fucking nutballs see “Submit Comment” and think, “now the people in my head will be heard!”
sati demise: “Yea, its a crooked system skewed to the advantage of the rich. This, like the war on drugs, can be changed.”
Only by gutting government like a brook trout.
Unlike the “War on Drugs,” the nature of government itself is such that if there is power to be abused, those who hold that power will be up for bribery.
Let’s pay tribute to Senator McCain. Call it “constituent services.”
Therefore I propose that government be gutted like a brook trout.
=====
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
– P.J. O’Rourke
SJ Doc: “Does Kelo v. New London make your blood boil?
If not, you’re a socialist.”
I oppose that Supreme Court decision and am a socialist. Does that make your brain explode? No? Well, cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing, I hear. This is only one among your many, many false dichotomies, I might add.
And classical liberalism is related to modern “Liberalism” precisely…how? A shared dedication to rationality, science, a belief in progress, pluralism, among other aspects.
Does the modern American “Liberal” defend individual rights, or is he more concerned with the “collective rights” of rent-seeking factions? Yes to both, though rent-seeking will occur under any system to some extent. And if you don’t believe me on the first part, I need only refer you to such liberal organizations as the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and numerous others.
Analysis of the precepts and principles of socialism finds them identical with the characteristics of today’s “Liberal” (or is it “progressive” this week?) movement. No. In fact, by a wide margin “no.” Socialism is concerned with workers’ control of business and governing institutions. Why then does the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress insist on maintaining current corporate cultures and management systems (I don’t see any workers’ co-ops in their plans), avoid at all costs bank nationalization (a primary socialist goal) despite support from figures like Alan Greenspan, propose only a modest revision of health care that maintains its private and competitive framework (as opposed to a socialist or social democratic goal of universal, single-payer, socialized health care)? The list could go on.
Therefore, stop conflating concepts, stop engaging in proof by verbosity, and try to discuss these issues in an intellectually honest way. Otherwise, get out and troll somewhere else.
=====
“…Karl Marx was right.”
-Ronald Reagan
SJ Doc: but this does not address the real problem of a finite money supply when it is not spread out. It turns into “he who has the gold makes the rules”, and that of course can be made with the stroke of a pen, too. The tyranny of the individual is more dangerous than a system of checks and balances. blah blah blah. I do not want to see children begging in the streets more than they are already.
“Kill or be killed, mouse!”
-Moche, the Xolo
gurukalehuru: Oh my God, sooo much hate, my whole family hates the this pissant waterboy.
Neon Trotsky: “I oppose that Supreme Court decision and am a socialist. Does that make your brain explode? No?”
Nope. Even a socialist may have twinges of decency. But on what grounds to you oppose the SCOTUS decision in Kelo v. New London? Has government (at any level) the authority in law to deprive private citizens of their property merely to serve other actors in the private sector for the purpose of increasing said govenment’s tax revenue base? I do not hold so.
Does that same government have the lawful power to similarly dispossess those same private citizens of their homes “for the good of society,” a la Stalin’s policies toward the kulak “class enemies” of Soviet Socialism?
Neon Trotsky: “A shared dedication to rationality, science, a belief in progress, pluralism, among other aspects….”
…are your commonalities between classical 19th Century liberalism and the “Liberalism” of today. No mention of the validity, value, or rights of the individual human being, I notice.
Murder can be conducted scientifically, with wonderful “rationalisty,” and can be pluralistic all to hellangone. It still has nothing to do with the protection of an individual’s rights except in the violation thereof.
Neon Trotsky: “….such liberal organizations as the ACLU, Southern Poverty Law Center, and numerous others….”
…are referenced as modern “Liberal” means whereby individual rights are supported.
How many caucasian clients does the Southern Poverty Law Center serve? And what has been the role of the ACLU in defending the individual citizen’s right to keep and bear arms?
The priorities of the “Liberal” organizations of which you speak (”and numerous others”) are peculiarly specific to concerns in no way consistently - or even predominantly - supportive of individual rights.
Neon Trotsky: “Why then does the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress insist on maintaining current corporate cultures and management systems…?”
Because they are CORRUPT “Liberals.”
What, you expect *honest* politicians?
This does not prevent them from being “Liberal” in their overall policies and overtly articulated objectives, nor from doing horrible damage to these United States in the imposition thereof.
=====
“If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you
will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot,
therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless
and ineffectual.”
– Frank Herbert
The gratuitous use of “ilk.” It smells like this SJ Doc character is a spawn from the darkest of depths of AOL Political Machine. Damn, I was hoping for the lady who called Layne a “word terrorist.” At least she kept her comments well within three inches of text (all caps but it was funny!)
Neon Trotsky: “Well, at least SJ Doc has provided us with a textbook example of a proof by verbosity….”
Oh, hardly. Ever treat a really nasty, haggled, crush-complicated traumatic laceration? Or a high-stage decubitus ulcer?
Most of the job is involved in debridement. Cutting away the dead, devitalized, and otherwise non-viable tissue to enable what’s salvagable to be repaired.
I’m doing debridement on “Liberal” fatuities.
It’s not what you think you know, Neon, but what you “know” that simply ain’t so.
=====
“The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which
complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith
SJ Doc: Gosh, you are a chuckle. I remind you to stop committing logical fallacies and what do you do but in your second paragraph go off on a straw man and irrelevant conclusion (ignoratio elenchi) on Stalin and the kulaks.
I oppose Kelo v. New London because it will (and has been) used to justify corporate welfare and rent seeking. It is a twisting of the notion of the “common good,” unlike other eminent domain cases, such as Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff.
Modern liberalism is individualistic in its orientation and policy goals. Its social liberalism and pluralism is only one expression of this. As for the second straw man on “rational murder”–I would prefer rationality to irrationality, wouldn’t you? Your dismissal of the ACLU is laughable (its position on gun control is solidly Constitutional) and the SPLC has recently been working on counteracting violent tendencies of some Black Hebrew Israelite Churches (see the latest issue of Intelligence Report). These and similar organizations are committed to protecting individual rights as outlined in the U.S. Constitution.
By not responding to my description of the Obama adminstration and Congressional Democrats and their distinctly non-socialist agenda (despite having public opinion at their backs, gaining the likely ability to achieve many socialist goals if they tried) my point stands and your earlier one is refuted. Modern liberalism≠socialism.
I’m afraid my time is valuable (as they say, “time is fiat currency”), so I shan’t waste any more with you. In the future, please do lay off the logical fallacies, ok?
=====
“Life’s a B and then ya D.”
-Shaquille O’Neal
El Pinche: “The gratuitous use of ‘ilk.’”
Gratuitous? Nah. Just the impact of a excessive childhood exposure to James Thurber.
=====
“Discussion in America means dissent.”
– James Thurber
SJ Doc: “Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant for you. Hate. Hate.”
–Harlan Ellison
gurukalehuru: “You’ve expended enough verbiage here that we’ve got a pretty good idea what kind of person you are, and we really, really hate you.”
Aw, that’s nice. And my feelings for you are similar, I’m sure.
=====
“To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one’s fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one’s taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am — a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy as he can be in the United States.”
– H.L. Mencken
Crow T. Robot: quoting Harlan….
Minds me of a remark heard at a science fiction convention some decades ago, when one individual observed a young fan and noted him to be comporting himself like “a young Harlan Ellison.”
To which one of his compatriots responded: “Let’s kill him NOW!”
If you’re in touch with Harlan, would you please ask him where he’s gotten with that third *Dangerous Visions* volume, please?
=====
“They did it wrong, Doc. They made mistakes. And they’ll keep it this way, just because everyone wants to believe it. They don’t want to know the truth, Doc. It’s easier for everyone this way. If enough people believe the fantasy, well, then it becomes the reality. But we know, Doc. We know who belongs where, don’t we?”
– Harlan Ellison
Neon Trotsky: “Your dismissal of the ACLU is laughable (its position on gun control is solidly Constitutional)….”
Er, no. There’s that fatuous focus on the subordinate “a well regulated Militia” line which puts the ACLU squarely in the realm of state-sucking hostility toward the individual right to keep and bear arms. A prevaricative abdication of logical thought on the order of which only a coteries of lawyers could possibly attain.
(( See http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/unabridged.2nd.html ))
Nice to hear that the SPLC is actually engaging in activity to support a tiny number of people not of African descent. Big change for them, isn’t it? Doubtless, it’s something they’re not going to do very much, but then they’re “Liberal.”
As for the Mottled Messiah and his merry band of pillagers, given that socialism goes far beyond your blithe “workers own the means of production” definition, there is hardly a basis in fact for your sustained weaseling about how “Liberalism” does not equal socialism. It is a *species* of socialism, assuredly, as typhus is a type of infectious disease.
What is the opposite of socialism? Does “Liberalism” qualify thereas? Does your “Liberal” political purpose not embrace inevitably socialist malignancies, specifically including government ownership and/or administration and/or “regulation” of the means of production, the provision of services, and the distribution of goods?
How is that NOT socialism?
=====
“The words ‘A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state’ … constitutes a present participle, rather than a clause. It is used as an adjective, modifying ‘militia,’ which is followed by the main clause of the sentence (subject ‘the right’, verb ’shall’). The to keep and bear arms is asserted as an essential for maintaining a militia. …
“The sentence does not restrict the right to keep and bear arms, nor does it state or imply possession of the right elsewhere or by others than the people; it simply makes a positive statement with respect to a right of the people.”
– Roy Copperud
OK, somebody kill me then.
Jesus Christ.
SJ Doc: well, you are a species of ‘wingnut’ as surely as Moche is a breed of Mexican dog.
Boring, bloviating, angry, refusing to answer obvious questions, full of ideology, impractical, cruel, linear thinking on black/white lines, insulting, not funny and a total ass.
How is that NOT wingnuttery?
“A well-regulated supply of dog food is necessary to my constitution.”
-Moche, the Xolo
Why are people even responding to the Paultard?
SJ Doc: TTHE GIRATE DR. RON PAUL HAS SPOKHEN OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT VERY POSITIVELY. HE SPEEKS ALSO OF THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS INNA WAY THAT SAYS WUT YOU ARE SAYING. THISS IS AESSENTIALLY THAT THE CONSTITOOSHIN DOES NOTT SPEEK TO THE INDIVIDOOLS RITE TO BARE ARMS. THISS POOTS A COGG UV COURSE IN THAT IT MEENS THE GUVIRNMINT CAN REGULATE GUN OOWNERSHIP.
RON PAUL/SARAH PALIN 2012.
fishcanoeski: Cuz we’re bored and he’s our weekend jester. We shoot the ground , he dances like a fool.
shortsshortsshorts: amen brother shortsx3.
“They can take my juicy bone away only when they pry it from my cold dead paws”
-Moche, the Xolo
Fetishization of property rights annoys me. Fine for individuals w/in certain limits, but this country started its downward slide when the SCOTUS or whoever decided that a corporation should be treated like a person. Reverse that and we’re halfway back to reason. And teleprompter.
…or ACORN.
hobospacejungle: i bet ACORN USES TELEPROMPTERS. Also.
Don’t worry guys I just sent a secret “LIBERAL” TELEGRAM to our Creole-In-Chief and he is sending Officer Friendly to pick up this guy right now.
COUNTER-RELOVEUTION FTW!
As a public service, here is a shorter, more cogent SJ Doc:
SJ Doc says at 6:05 pm, March 15th, 2009
Liberals want to tie the hands of industry with more environmental legislation. Why must we punish our most productive citizens with an income tax?
====
“Whoops, I forgot to tell a joke!” - Mallard Fillmore
Ok, seriously, this dick-tobacco (put that in your pipe and smoke it) has used up more than ten pages of space with trite bromides of signature quotes. Can’t we free-market him a thai hooker so that he will have something better to do than copy/paste these excessively long and lame (he knows all about long and lame) quotes?
SJ Doc: Holy! Spend a little time playing WOW and I come back to some jerk off who thinks the philosophies he found in bad fiction are true. Heh, I’d rather believe 100 Years of Solitude as truth, cause, well it’s beautiful, not like the Rand bilge. Oye, anyway fuck you and your damned Objectivist Social Darwinism, because 1. it’s a betray of Darwin, and 2. cause of it we lost Steve Ditko. Any thing responsible for taking beauty and artistry out of the world for the fantasy of individualist totality gets a big fucking thumbs down in my book.
“A flow as subtle as a summer’s breeze, with the whispering wind and talking tree. To big to be boxed in it bobs and weaves, it evolves and solves, it gives and receives.” Gnarls Barkley
“Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal. — Printed In Ron Paul’s Newsletter (but not written by him)
“Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.” — Printed In Ron Paul’s Newsletter (but not written by him)
“The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers. On the contrary, our Founders’ political views were strongly informed by their religious beliefs.” — Ron Paul
“The Founding Fathers envisioned a robustly Christian yet religiously tolerant America, with churches serving as vital institutions that would eclipse the state in importance.” — Ron Paul
“Through perverse court decisions and years of cultural indoctrination, the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view. The justification is always that someone, somewhere, might possibly be offended or feel uncomfortable living in the midst of a largely Christian society, so all must yield to the fragile sensibilities of the few. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.” — Ron Paul
http://dmiessler.com/blog/5-ron-paul-quotes-that-scare-me
RON PAUL 4EVA.
rEVOLution!!!!1!~!
sati demise: “…refusing to answer obvious questions…”
Oh? How so? If you’ve got specific questions to ask, specify ‘em. Have I reason to believe that you’re honestly interested in getting answers (and I don’t think you are, but wotthehell), I’ll answer them.
=====
“Is there any reason why the American people should be taxed to guarantee the debts of banks, any more than they should be taxed to guarantee the debts of other institutions, including merchants, the industries, and the mills of the country?”
– Carter Glass
sati demise: “…but this does not address the real problem of a finite money supply when it is not spread out.”
Hm. This sounds *almost* like a question. Almost. Let’s see. What happens when there is an insufficiency of circulating currency?
Nonsensical as that sounds (especially since 1913), it’s certainly possible. British Imperial mercantilist policies in the decades prior to the American Revolution were specifically aimed at depriving the colonies in this hemisphere of specie - money - in order deliberately to hamper American economic development. By choking off the availability of specie, it was intended that commerce within the colonies would be hampered, forcing all transactions to be conducted with politically connected merchants in Great Britain.
Ever wonder why America - so directly and straightforwardly descended politically and culturally from Great Britain - doesn’t denote its currency in pounds, shillings, and pence?
Well, it’s because silver bullion from South America and Mexico was being struck into Spanish “pillar dollar” coins - the old “pieces of eight” from which we get the expression “two bits” for a quarter-dollar - and these began to circulate in the English colonies as money of hand, in defiance of British law.
Money is a useful invention. People find ways of agreeing on commodity money no matter what efforts are made by those who govern to prevent them from doing so. The Constitution didn’t create the silver dollar as the unit of currency in these United States so much as the Founders recognized the fact that the dollar *was* the standard unit of currency.
Should commodity money (as opposed to fiat paper currency) be limited in total amount, it can be expected that the individual unit of currency will appreciate in value (resulting in lower denominated prices, wages, etc.) and “small change” will come into greater use as a medium of exchange.
This is bad…how?
You’ve said that you “…work daily with the gold and currency markets… every single day in my job.”
That’s nice. What do you see with regard to the stability of the global supply of gold and other “monetary” metals? And in the “currency markets,” are you seeing currency in its classic purposes (intermediary commodity, store of value, and standard of value) or rather speculation upon how government policies are going to break at any particular moment?
In other words, are you looking at “gold and currency” as real money, or as commodities the values of which are being purposefully manipulated by political brokers?
I don’t denigrate the job you do IRL, but your job is necessary as a market effort to mitigate the malignancy of government. Without the officers of government committing these malfeasances in office, you could be doing something else entirely.
Firemen do a necessary job, too. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try to suppress arson.
Don’t dive into your navel. Think.
=====
“We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people.”
– Daniel Webster
SJ Doc: Sigh. No. I’m not going to argue about the Federal Reserve on a Sunday afternoon when I have other things to do. But I will offer a handful of other thoughts.
1) It’s practically inconceivable that a Wonkette commenter, especially this deep in a thread, somehow opposes the war on drugs.
2) I’m presumably the only other minarchist in this conversation — even if I do strongly disagree with you — so the good-in-itself of government reduction argument isn’t going to fly.
3) First principles make ideologues and ideologues should never be allowed to create collective policy because they always fuck it up.
hobospacejungle: “Fetishization of property rights annoys me. Fine for individuals w/in certain limits, but this country started its downward slide when the SCOTUS or whoever decided that a corporation should be treated like a person. Reverse that and we’re halfway back to reason.”
“Fetishization”? Yeesh. You’ve really gotta specify those “certain limits.”
As for the limited liability corporation….
Well, you’ve got a lot of support for that position in the libertarian ranks. Said fiction of government, granting privilege and protection to the officers and stockholders of corporations that us mere proprietors do not have seems to be a decoupling of responsibility that makes no sense whatsoever.
There is a certain glittering astonishment to lawyer-speak, as if the glib shyster can warp reality with Merlin-esque words alone, turning lead into platinum and murder into public policy. Scary.
But of your own property rights - and those of your nearest and dearest - what do you cherish as non-”fetish” elements of social interaction? Are you willing to awaken unexpectedly in a bathtub filled with icecubes, your flank aching and your left kidney en route to some millionaire in Singapre who’s just bought your organ on eBay?
Have you a property in your own body? Your clothing? Your furniture and bed linen and car and computer?
=====
“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
– Philip K. Dick
SJ Doc: Douche hack.
Okay let me give you a scenario:
Your wife just left you. You can barely pay the rent so you move into your mother’s basement and have become active on Free Republic or something. You start smoking pot to ease the pain of life, which is bad because you are a republican and that IS NOT A VERY REPUBLICAN THING TO DO. So you justify it. The drugs stop working, so you start typing. And you type and type and type long, boring, sometimes incestuous rants on a satire website, just because your mother keeps asking you if you are finding work on the internet or something. Anyone can understand that it’s a Sunday and you shouldn’t adhere to your mother’s demands on a SUNDAY, but that’s just not enough for her, or you. All of a sudden you lose all hope. You take out your gun (WHICH THE GOBERMINT BETTER NAT TOUCH) and spray bullets all over the place at your local “Outback Steak House” or whatever, or you come onto this website and start typing things onto your keyboard that somehow convey that you still have hope.
Well I am here to tell you that there is no hope. Stop commenting and start shootin’, your founding father’s, uhh, call you to arms and stuff.
Oh and please eat a dick.
SJ Doc: Maybe you and your merry band of Me-firsters and Go-alone ideologues could find a fruitful locale to enact your Bully-Utopia. In fact someone very like you has started such a community. Please join them and continue to feast on the hate you love so much. And thanks for making a special appearance at the end of the video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYiHP5_bgrI
Please let us know how that special “meeting” with the NSA goes. Also.
shortsshortsshorts: Expect about 13 inches of textual drivel from BJ Doc.
“You guys are acting like stupid people. Like a bunch of stupid poor people! Like a bunch of stupid, poor ethnic people! ”
- Andy Dick
SJ Doc: Gold is a finite source. And he who has the gold makes the rules.
This is why your rigid utopian ideals do not work. It is like saying that corporate health care is better than government heath care.
There is no difference except that either the corporation or the government makes the rules.
In a capitalist system, the corporation must make a profit.
The government can opperate without profit, and even without waste if the right regulatory framework is set up.
There is no way we could have public health without collective systems, especially now with trans-ocean flight.
There are always people who would game any system, But
asjbd: ….number 3), medic.
Ideologues should never be allowed to create collective policy because they always fuck it up.
Men have always been collected into groups to accomplish goals.
The successful groups are flexible/pragmatic.
shortsshortsshorts: ShortsCubed, et al:
You people are FOOLS.
I recognized “SJ DOC” immediately.
Welcome Back, SOUL SISTER!
I, for one, MISSED you!
Neilist: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!1111
Personally I thought it was a Ronald Reagan inspired Glenn Beck.
Oh, the time that’s been wasted.
shortsshortsshorts: On Ron Paul’s religiosity and his newletter’s denigratory statements about Afro-Americans….
Hm? Have I said that I agree uniformly and universally with everything written by Dr. Paul, or in Dr. Paul’s name? I don’t. When we met all those years ago, we agreed politely to disagree, and I presume that we continue to disagree in many regards today. I certainly don’t agree with his opposition to elective termination of pregnancy - even if its criminalization is undertaken by state governments instead of by the federal government - but he’s an OB/GYN and I’m a GP, too.
We are by discipline as well as moral philosophy divided in this regard. The pregnant female either owns (and controls) her body or she does not, the physiologic changes of gestation notwithstanding. Abortion is one of those issues upon which the enemies of individual rights count heavily to keep their opposition divided.
(( But I count the religious assholes as much in the “enemies of individual liberty” column as the “Liberals,” and therefore attack them with gusto. Whatever support of “free markets” one finds among these yups is merely rote traditionalism; the genuinely transformative aspects of human action in a context of individual rights free from government meddling scares the living shit out of these fellahin. ))
As for the moolies….
Feh. Subjectively, I can say that I despise what serves them in lieu of culture, including their music and their language, but that’s merely a matter of personal preference. I also despise most French literature, every fiddlin’ little bit of James Joyce, redneck music, Wagner and (being able to understand Italian, though not properly literate therein) almost all other kinds of opera. Gusti son gusti.
Speaking from the perpective of membership in an ethnic group that literally got off the boat in 1900 with three out of four of my grandparents being utterly illiterate and none of them speaking English at all, I’m amenable to the argument that the dinges had had it pretty rough down in the Pellagra Belt. Jeez, just look at what the entire Mediterranean world has done to us Sicilians over the past three thousand years.
But to the greatest extent over the past century or so, their wounds have been overwhelmingly self-inflicted (aided and abetted, of course, through the co-dependent facilitation of the “Liberals”).
=====
Elwood: “What kind of music do you usually have here?”
Claire: “Oh, we got both kinds. We got country *and* western.”
– Dan Ackroyd, John Landis (screenplay) *The Blues Brothers* (1980)
SJ Doc: yea, medic, you are a racist just like Dr. Paul.
You can criticize Hopey all you like on policy but you crossed the line in your writing dude.
Racist= wingnuttery=SJ Doc
simple equation.
sati demise:
“I love all colors, sizes, sexual persuasion and all ages of dogs as long as they wag.”
-Moche, the Xolo
This whole debate would be a lot more entertaining if we had some ads down here. It takes me forever to read this stuff without some pixxx.
Or maybe can all this be summarized in a single powerpoint slide or even better, blingee?
Oh jeebus he pointed at me and started talking. Does anyone else want to read it? I haven’t. But, for the benefit of the doubt:
SJ Doc: No. No no. You can use articulate language (I’ll give you that) to bolster a bullshit opinion, but that doesn’t mean the opinion isn’t bullshit.
And if you were my Doctor, I would run for my fucking life.
I DID read the quote by the way… I’ll give you that.
As for everything else— go away. Like really. Go away.
And if anyone else wishes to correspond with this person, please make sure it is in cyber references.
ALRIGHT, READY DOC, let’s cyber:
“shortsshortsshorts is taking off his shorts.”
“SJ Doc is removing his gardar.”
“shortsshortsshorts is gently kissing SJ Doc’s wife.”
“SJ Doc approves.”
“shortsshortsshorts vomits on SJ Doc.”
“SJ Doc approves.”
“shortshortshorts is eating SJ Doc, as a soul-less liberal would eat a baby.”
“SJ Doc questions this, but talks himself out of it. It’s not like SJ Doc needs logic, but a dick in the ass.”
“shortsshortsshorts approves.”
Back to Sunday’s regularly scheduled wingnuttery.
Neilist: You people are FOOLS.
Indeed. However, it’s Sunday. We’re bored & all the good soccer matches were yesterday.
shortsshortsshorts: Shorts, Old Trout: How could you have been fooled, with prose like this:
“Speaking from the perpective of membership in an ethnic group that literally got off the boat in 1900 with three out of four of my grandparents being utterly illiterate and none of them speaking English at all, I’m amenable to the argument that the dinges had had it pretty rough down in the Pellagra Belt.”
I mean, where does one start?
1. “Got off the boat” is not the same thing as being “jettisoned as garbage.”
2. Stupidity is not an “ethnic group.” Unless you’re Irish, of course. And we’ve made a religion out of that.
3. “Utterly illiterate” apparently does not encompass run-on sentences. Or concluding clauses such as “at all.” Or “had had it.”
4. “Dinge,” I assume, is an Negro dingo. Or should I ask me Ozzie Mum for confirmation? “Let me Abbos go loose, Lou, Let me abbos go loose/They’re of no further use, Lou/So let me abbos go loose.”
shortsshortsshorts: Out of total respect, can you please tell me how you find the time to hold down a job, be a top commenter, have a blog and somehow have somehow figured out how to twitter. I assume sleep and sexytime are out of the equation?
Anyway, keep up the warring. Maybe we can figure out where they come from and go visit them in Pumaland, Paulland, etc.
What the what?
- Liz Lemon
sati demise: “This is why your rigid utopian ideals do not work. It is like saying that corporate health care is better than government heath care.”
Oh, by no means. Ever thought about how “corporate health care” got its start?
As usual, government did it.
Back during World War Two, along with Friedman’s “withholding” of “income” tax from people’s paychecks, employers were required to comply with wartime wage and price controls.
Now, during said war, when the labor market was grievously constricted by the conscription of millions upon millions of skilled and unskilled laborers in the prime of their productive lives, manufacturers and service providers had to find workers whose services were in high demand.
And they weren’t allowed to bid for those services because of government wage controls. So they began offering non-wage perquisites to the compensation packages they offered, including “health insurance” that was really a form of pre-paid medical care. Because this would not instantly expose the levels of inflation that the federal government’s wartime counterfeiting had induced (remember why “withholding” was instituted?), the government goons agreed to let employers do this.
Indeed, the goons even agreed to consider the value of “health insurance” to be a non-taxable form of compensation, making it an even sweeter option for employers.
As in all cases where something is purchased in bulk, the employers strove to pay as little as could be managed for the costs of “health insurance,” and this led to a number of corporate efforts to leverage their bargaining positions. Why not? They even established the sorts of company clinics and hospitals seen in the halcyon days of the coal industry’s “robber barons.” See the present Kaiser-Permanente Health System as a spectacular example.
What started out as a way to elude government wage controls became entrenched as a “workers’ rights” matter, with employees expecting that their compensation packages would include such perqs long after the “temporary emergency” of wartime was past.
Eventually, these “health insurance” schemes proved less and less economically viable. The phenomenon known as “the tragedy of the commons” took effect with a vengeance, and as the work force aged, more demands were placed upon these corporate health care systems, both the “company store” versions and the nominally independent providers for whose services the employers brokered through companies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
Ever read a short story by Christopher Anvil entitled “Positive Feedback” (*Analog*, 1965)? It’s just been collected in a recently published anthology, *Rx for Chaos* (Baen Books), and is wonderfully worth reading if you want a perfect analogy to what was easily predicted about how “health insurance” was bound to run out of control. And Anvil wrote it more than 40 years ago.
Having been obliged to deal with both government and corporate “health care systems” (gotta love the Veterans’ Health Administration as well as the U.S. Public Health Service…), I’m well-prepared to loathe them both. How not?
Is an alternative “utopian,” though? Not at all. End the “income” tax and there is no incentive whatsoever for employers and their employees to continue the fiction that “health insurance benefits” are not part of the compensation package. This will result in health care services providers being decoupled from employers (both large and small) as their real customers, and oblige them to turn directly to the satisfaction of their patients’ desires and needs instead.
And to price their services according to what those patients are able and willing to pay, rather than the price schedules bargained for by third-party payors acting either directly or concatenatively for the benefit of the employers.
Had you been obliged to take one of those History of Medicine courses they settle upon medical students, you might’ve had some exposure to the objections made by some good many American doctors to King-Anderson and like legislation back in the ’60s.
They predicted this “tragedy of the commons” phenomenon, as well as the fact that their more ruthlesly exploitative colleagues would jack up their prices and grow obscenely wealthy upon the government’s diversion of taxpayer dollars into these blatant vote-getting schemes. They condemned it loudly, publicly, vehemently.
Former President Harry S Truman - long an advocate of socialized medicine - was interviewed on the subject of these doctors’ protests.
His response?
“They oughta be clubbed!”
Hey, give ‘em hell, Harry.
=====
“Beware the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry.”
– Thomas Paine
Neilist: golf clap/huzzah
Fuck this! I have better things to do than read Semen Junky Doc’s never-ending copy/paste rantings.
Bruno: Hahaha no sleep, but plenty of secksietime. That is the only solution. And Jack Daniels. Also.
The blog has three people, so I really don’t have to do anything except read e-mails from “TIPS” people and write them up. The job is turn-key, and Wonkette is just fun to fuck around with. It is people like “SJ Doc” that make it so.
Neilist: Oh shit. You are correct (props for that, sir)… take this fine example:
SJ Doc: “Back during World War Two, along with Friedman’s “withholding” of “income” tax from people’s paychecks, employers were required to comply with wartime wage and price controls.”
So back in World War II, Thomas Friedman created the income tax. It was obvious at that point that wage and price controls were unconstitutional— like the Fire Department.
Neilist: “‘Got off the boat’ is not the same thing as being ‘jettisoned as garbage.’”
Hm? You’re saying somehow that the progenitors of today’s African-Americans (not Marxist Marvin, who was born in Kenya of a Kenyan pollinator, but most genuinely American black people) had been “jettisoned as garbage”?
Hardly. They were imported as labor, at a time when chattel slavery was widespread in the Western hemisphere (in the “fever islands” of the Carribbean, mostly they died in droves) to serve as the equivalent of serfs, peons, or coolies. Worldwide practice in those miserable, pre-industrial days.
Pretty much the same thing happened to my ancestors on the Sicilian latifundia of the Roman Empire, and down through the centuries of feudalism, monarchism, and whatever else can be subsumed under Paine’s characterization of “an armed banditti.”
And by “utterly illiterate” I meant - literally - “unable to read or write.” As a boy, I spent a fair amount of time reading to my grandparents letters from their relatives in Italy and Venezuela, and writing for them their responses.
What, you don’t like complex compound sentences? Tough.
As for the use of terms denoting negritude, I’ve decided that since the election to the presidency of our Commie Crioulo-in-Chief - who was nominated (as his second banana, Plagiarist Joe, acknowledged so eloquently) for no reason other than he can fake being “Black” - it’s open season on the schvoogies.
With a simulation of “one of their own” farting into that big, comfortable chair in the Oval Office, we can’t really call ‘em “disadvantaged” any more, now, can we?
=====
“I don’t judge a man by the color of his skin. I judge him according to how well you can see him in the dark when he smiles.”
– Chevy Chase
Moolies, Dingies? Jesus fucking christ, you’re so stool-bendingly racist you can’t even bring yourself to use common epithets, instead showing you are truly a cut above by only using archaic slang. A bit like a George Will without the talent, and that’s not a steep cliff.
SJ Doc: sorry, but even if you decouple health care from the government you still have corporate health care. they will collude-it will not be a free market driven by consumers either-and no one will have real health care at all. health ‘insurance’ is a scam, always will be, health care for all should be the goal.
.shortsshortsshorts: wingnuttery, indeed the medic is back.
Now he turns into the naughty librarian.
He has on his reading glasses, his hair stiffly pulled back into a bun……
“If my food is poisoned in China, the lawsuit afterwards changes nothing.”
-Moche, the Xolo
SJ Doc: Shorter SJ Doc:
Negrii!
shortsshortsshorts: “So back in World War II, Thomas Friedman created the income tax. It was obvious at that point that wage and price controls were unconstitutional— like the Fire Department.”
Milton, not Thomas.
And, yeah, federal operation of your local Fire Department *is* unconstitutional. It’s not a legitimate function of the federal government.
Why the hell do you think that state and county and local governments exist? I mean, apart from graft and waste and rape and pillage undertaken at those levels.
=====
“The historian’s first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods.
They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.”
– Jules Michelet
bago: “Moolies, Dingies? Jesus fucking christ, you’re so stool-bendingly racist….”
Hey, anything to piss you off, sonny. Got that Pavlovian dead-from-the-neck-up “Liberal” response working like the fuze on a Pakistani hand grenade, don’tcha?
And that’s “dinges.” Buncha synonyms out there. Why be trite about it?
Surely the schwartzers have plenty of deprecatory terms in common use for us melanin-disadvantaged folk, don’t they? Fair’s fair.
=====
“The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.”
– H.L. Mencken
SJ Doc: Mencken was an anti-semite as well as a racist, naughty librarian.
“I lift my leg when I piss.”
-Moche, the Xolo
Afro-Americans?
What? *tilts head in amazement*
====
“A variety show? What?” -Jon Stewart
SJ Doc: Thomas, not Milton. I don’t care if Milton Friedman was alive during that time. Thanks for being a fucking idiot. Friedman is Friedman. It was, you know, BULLSHITTING. You fail to understand the beauty of bullshit, and therefore should be banned.
SJ Doc: I can find quotes on the Google, too.
Wow, it got even racister after I reloaded the page!
sati demise: “sorry, but even if you decouple health care from the government you still have corporate health care. they will collude - it will not be a free market driven by consumers either - and no one will have real health care at all. health ‘insurance’ is a scam, always will be, health care for all should be the goal.”
While I’m less conclusively pessimistic on the prospects for restoring health care to the free market (and therefore both economic viability and genuine consumer responsiveness), I have to agre with you about “health insurance,” which is - and always was - an impossibility.
Insurance is a contractual mechanism to share risk in the mitigation of unknown adversities, but EVERYBODY gets sick or injured eventually. Indeed, with genetic tracking of inescapable predisposing factors becoming more and more reliable, not even the term “unforeseen” can be used with regard to some individuals. No matter how it’s done, health care MUST be made more affordable.
Not through government subsidization, or “management,” or spurious “investment,” but by leveraging technologies and skills that can only be accomplished with true efficiency in the free market.
One of the ideas put forth by Milton Friedman with which I heartily agree is his advocacy of the abolition of occupational licensing - explicitly including medical licenses for physicians. This competition-limiting, consumer-screwing, special government privilege for “grandfathered” medical doctors is an obscenity, and always was. Eliminate it, and you the entry of thousands of qualified, well-trained, highly skilled physicians and surgeons will “hit the market” in America tomorrow, and patients will be able to bid *down* the price of medical services from that moment forward.
There is no paradox in my statement of support for this measure. Remember Benjamin Rush? The physician from Philly who signed the Declaration of Independence? That was his position on the matter, too.
=====
“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others. The Constitution of this Republic should make a special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.
– Benjamin Rush, M.D.
shortsshortsshorts: And then there’s passages such as this gem:
“As for the use of terms denoting negritude, I’ve decided that since the election to the presidency of our Commie Crioulo-in-Chief - who was nominated (as his second banana, Plagiarist Joe, acknowledged so eloquently) for no reason other than he can fake being “Black” - it’s open season on the schvoogies.”
Reminds me, in more than one way, of wading through Hitler’s attempts at High German prose in “Mein Kampf.”
Or as SJ Doc (or more accurately, Soul Sister Dedux) would put it: “My Struggle - With Meth!”
sati demise: “Mencken was an anti-semite as well as a racist, naughty librarian.”
Not restrictively so. I think of him as hating every category of human being in general (with a very few specific exceptions, those explicitly including pretty girls, bootleggers, and cigar makers), but only a few individuals in particular. That he was honest enough to make no bones about his prejudices (an honesty no “Liberal,” pale or dusky, has ever shared) is a trait to be praised, not condemned.
And while he was a book reviewer in considerable wise, he was no “librarian.” I’ve been to visit his home on Hollins Street, and he had no room in which to maintain vast numbers of books. He wrote that he disposed of the many review copies he received by donating them to hospitals and like eleemyosynary institutions.
=====
“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant.”
– H.L. Mencken