Hurt Me, Baby - Make Me Write Bad Checks

Megan McArdle on cold logic and hot punishment.

Comments

[Charlie (Colorado)]

I just put up a post using Megan's and some other things.

You know, this "altruistic punishment" explains a lot.

[Jim Ryan]

By the way, is anyone shrieking "it's socialism!" about the buyout plan making any sense? Do any of them have big foreheads when it comes to economics? Do any of them offer a clearly competitive alternative? Do any of them offer any evidence that depression isn't in the offing if we do nothing?

[bad]

Nice Trojan TM

[glasater]

The U.S. Senate just voted down a second stimulus bill.

[steveaz]

Is this Sabotage?

My sister gave me a collection of Alfred Hitchcock movies for Christmas last year. Yesterday I watched a couple of them. “Sabotage,” Hitchcock’s movie about a terrorist living in hiding in London while he sabotages the city’s infrastructure made me stop in my tracks. The parallels to the financial crisis we’re all reeling from today were uncanny.

Layers of deniability, late-to-the-game detectives, innocent pawns, and multiple provocateurs with no humane sense of responsibility caught my attention. Mr. Verloc and his nameless contact are foreigners bent on making England hurt. Mrs. Verloc rounds out the innocent, naive front that her husband hides behind. Her clumsy son, Stevey, perhaps resembling Bill Clinton, carries a terrible package to its target not knowing its contents. The pet-store owner who brewed the bomb looks wholly like Barney Frank. And the handsome Scotland Yard detective who sniffs trouble early on plays the role of those politicians who warned the Democrats of the impending disaster.

The movie begins with a close-up of a dictionary definition of the word, “sabotage.” And the definition fits the Democrat’s meddling in our credit markets perfectly. Sabotage, public alarm, disruption of essential services, antagonists smugly confident that the ends justify their means…it’s all there in today’s crisis.

Hitchcock was brilliant.

[Thomas Jackson]

It seems the Atlantic's attitude is that charity begins with other people's money.

Anyone who can accept the logic of having the architects of this disaster, Frank and Dodd, acting as the democrat party's point men for the remedy clearly demonstrates why our system is broken and no longer wworthy of our trust or confidence. Two reasons to oppose this travesty, funding La Raza and Acorn.

Does anyone remember when the world stood still when TWA, Eastern, Republic Steel, Nash, Rambler, Penn Central collapsed? Neither do I. Let these financial firms burn and leave the taxpayer out of it.

Otherwise I am waiting for my bailout of my kid's college tuition.

[Topsecretk9]

my OCD, from the transcript

MCCAIN: ... I supported Nunn-Lugar back in the early 1990s when a lot of my colleagues didn't. That was the key legislation at the time and put us on the road to eliminating this issue of nuclear waste and the nuclear fuel that has to be taken care of.

OBAMA: I -- I just have to correct the record here. I have never said that I object to nuclear waste. What I've said is that we have to store it safely.

and even in context he makes NO sense.

1. he was not in the senate in 1990s

and

2. McCain never said Obama was against nuclear Waste so I'm unsure why Obama had to 'correct the record"

and

3. It would be a flipping bizarre thing, since I don't know anyone on the planet who loves waste and in the form of nuclear.

[sophy]

I do not know how to use the flyff gold ; my friend tells me how to use.