mycatharsis.com

Is this about stopping the terrorists, or terrorizing the populace?  Why are police that are ostensibly working to detect hidden bombs as opposed to directly confronting the ‘bad guys’,  manning the transporation checkpoints with submachine guns and body armor? Why do they need such arms? They’ve already determined the citizenry never have a need for automatic weapons with their federal machine gun ban, so why do they feel the need to traverse the subways with them, especially when they’re tasked with finding devices, not direct confrontation.

As the presumptive Republican nominee last month, McCain bumped up his fundraising and raised $15 million.  Ron Paul never broke out of the 6% range in the primaries, but he did raise $20 million in December! And was the only Republican to generate any excitement.

A Bob Barr - Ron Paul ticked would seriously get my consideration even if Obama is the Democratic nominee.  Frankly, an Obama, McCain, and Paul three way scrum would be just about a dream for me.  Not so much for the result, but just the fact that we have the three most decent and seemingly competent of the candidates running.  When you think last year at this time,  Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton were essentially being written in by the media as the nominees, we’ve come a heckuva long way, and my faith in the intelligence of the electorate to make smart, individual, choices has been renewed somewhat. With the economy doing what it’s doing, I still think he’d be one of the best stewards of our economy, even if he can be a little unyielding at times in terms of principle vs reality.  As to what ails us, his explanations make the most sense to me and haven’t really been refuted to my mind in any major way …

Barney Frank introduces a bill to decriminalize marijuana and in the process describes my feelings about drug legalization almost perfectly …

To those who say that the government should not be encouraging the smoking of marijuana, my response is that I completely agree. But it is a great mistake to divide all human activity into two categories: those that are criminally prohibited, and those that are encouraged. In a free society, there must be a very considerable zone of activity between those two poles in which people are allowed to make their own choices as long as they are not impinging on the rights, freedom, or property of others. I believe it is important with regard to tobacco, marijuana and alcohol, among other things, that we strictly regulate the age at which people may use these substances. And, enforcement of age restrictions should be firm. But, criminalizing choices that adults make because we think they are unwise ones, when the choices involved have no negative effect on the rights of others, is not appropriate in a free society.

Mark Giemen has a helluva interesting (and scary) story on Slate on why the mortgage crisis may just be getting started.  There are many choice quotes in it, but the point basically boils down to this: as home prices continue to fall, even non sub-prime borrowers are going to find it entirely in their interest to walk away from mortgages that actually cost more than the value of their homes.

I like the point he makes about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plea to homeowners that they should ‘honor’ their mortgage applications.

The problem with finger-wagging on what you “should” or “ought” to do is that, when it comes to money, you’re usually given the lecture only when it’s in your interest to do the opposite.

Bingo. When the government is pleading with people to do the right thing, the incentive in the existing market to NOT do it must be strong indeed.

I looked at buying a house back in 2005. I remember being pushed hard to look at ARM’s, but I remember having some trepidation about a loan where I didn’t even have to make the interest payments for the first year or two.  Nonetheless, I can’t blame those who did bite on that offer for being greedy.  After all, the lenders sign dozens or hundreds of these loans, while the borrowers may only sign one or two of them in their lifetime.  It seems to me there’s plenty of blame to go around. The lenders took the quick commission, forgoing future stability for the quick buck, and the borrowers jumped at a deal that seemed too good to be true.

That famous curse seems to apply nowadays …

Found a great blog post from FoxBusiness on Ron Paul and how his message relates to our current economic crisis.  His common sense ideas about sound money seem to be the only cure for what ails us, but no one (with enough votes, at least) is willing to do anything about it.

http://emac.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/03/26/time-to-listen-to-ron-paul/

And another one from the Wall Street Journal on how dramatic the Fed’s actions were, and how they signaled a real paradigm shift.  I found it surprising that these lenders have borrowed almost $100 billion from the fed in the three days they’ve made the funds available!  As comparison, our entire Pell grant aid program for the entire YEAR last year was only 12 billion.  That’s almost the cost of the Iraq war for a full year (see below)!  Unless I’m missing something, it seems the risks keep shifting from these lenders to the Fed and, by proxy, to us, the taxpayers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120657397294066915.html?mod=hps_us_pageone

And after all of that, I think the scariest thing I read today is the 50 TRILLION in social security obligations coming down the pike.  Our entire U.S. economy,  is only 14 trillion.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/26/beck.deficit/index.html

Is it just me, or does it seem like we’re hemorrhaging money, and our current policy is to keep giving the patient blood transfusions, but allowing the massive bleeding to just continue?

And Joe Queenan explains why a movie as god-awful as this one sounds, is yet not the worst movie of all time … I think it’s hard to find something more entertaining to read than a review of a really bad movie.  Money quote …

But to make a movie that destroys a studio, wrecks careers, bankrupts investors, and turns everyone connected with it into a laughing stock requires a level of moxie, self-involvement, lack of taste, obliviousness to reality and general contempt for mankind that the average director, producer and movie star can only dream of attaining.

I think Showgirls would be way up there on my list.  A movie bad enough for a college freshman and his buddies to turn off a half-hour in, well before any of the promised nudity and sexual situations.  Some things just aren’t worth the cost.  And sorry, I just didn’t like Independence Day much either, despite it perhaps not dropping to a Showgirls level. Maybe it’s because they’re both such huge masturbatory fantasies. Any movie that features BOTH alien ships that apparently run Microsoft Windows, being brought down by a run of the mill computer virus, and the President of the United States personally flying the lead plane that brings the United States Air Force to victory, deserves a spot in the list.

Two spirals that could be twins apparently interacting, in the rectangle of this shot …

zoomed into full resolution … .

That does it.  I have to admit that for awhile I’ve been torn about whether to vote for Clinton or McCain if a general election came down to those two.  No more.  McCain clearly has more class than the Clinton’s or the sycophants the Clinton’s have always surrounded themselves with.  The Clinton campaign leaking the photo of Obama in Somali (and Muslim looking, that’s why they did it) dress was distateful enough, appealing to all the basest instincts of voters, instinct they claim to abhore, but exploit time and time again.  For Clintons campaign manager to then come out and say Obama should be ashamed about this whole episode, god, these people have no class and treat all of us like idiots.  They got away with it from 1992-2000, and they think it will work for them again.    This time though, I have serious doubts.  If it was anyone other than Hillary Clinton in her position, she’d have been written off from this race a long time ago.

At least they’re reminding us of the TRUE legacy of the Clinton years.   Time had sorta dulled those memories, their increasingly shameful (and that’s saying something for these pieces of work)  win at all costs mentality brings it all back.

A “crusader against evil doers around the world”, Windows Vista Sensei is trained in “trained in the ancient art of combat, security and connectivity”. What an action figure! Unfortunately it will also ask you at least three times before doing anything, and then will do it roughly half as fast as Windows XP Sensei.

The linux admin’s equivalent of surgically removing body parts at random and seeing what happens.