Bydio

The music of U2 is the soundtrack of cocaine supermodels discussing genocide, with all the lyrical depth, metronomic percussion and bright guitar notes you’d expect of such a score.

I still like a few of their songs, though.

U2 – Bullet The Blue Sky

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U2 – Mysterious Ways

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U2 – The Sweetest Thing

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Bill Quick of Daily Pundit votes for Bob Barr, Libertarian.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that, because he’d been talking about voting for McCain simply because he had a chance to beat Obama. I do understand the tactic, but I think this type of thinking is what’s put us in this political morass we’re experiencing now. People aren’t voting FOR a candidate, they’re voting AGAINST a candidate they don’t like by voting for their closest opponent. In my opinion, this is basically abrogating your responsibility to vote for a candidate who you think will be the best leader for this country.

When I tell people I’m voting for Barr, most say I’m wasting my vote because it takes a vote away from McCain, and McCain is the only man who can beat Obama. It’s just the opposite; I’m using my vote to vote FOR a candidate I’d want to see in office, because I don’t want McCain in office simply because he has a few differences of opinion with Obama. McCain is just as bad as Obama in most respects, and he’s not representing me or my views of how this country could be better run. He’s typical, just as Obama is typical, because they’re politicians without principle — they only know political expedience, not national values.

I am far more Libertarian than Republican or Democrat, and I’m going to vote for the Libertarian candidate because he’s the only candidate I’d want in office. I’m not going to vote for McCain because Obama’s a racist Marxist, and I’m not going to vote for Obama because McCain is a tax-and-spend religious-right lover; Bob Barr is my candidate because he’s running on a platform of priciples with which I mostly agree.

Snot – Snooze Button

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Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture explains:

Nothing in any of these Bush speeches that pushed for more lending to minorities and increased lower income home ownership caused the problem. Neither did any similar Clinton speeches. Nor did related the legislation related to the Bush speeches, nor did the CRA, nor Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Indeed, none of these actions required the sort of reckless lending that we saw from 2002-2007.

Understand this simple fact: In an ultra-low rate environment, where prices are appreciating rapidily, and mortgaes are being securitized, ALL THAT MATTERS IS THAT THE BORROWER NOT DEFAULT IN 90 days (or 6 Months). The goal was to make a loan that did not default in that period of time, it cannot be put back to the originator.

As a mortgage salesman, you only lose your a fee if a borrower defaults within 3 or 6 months. What do you do to maximize your returns? The best way to do that — to put people in houses that would not default in 90 days — was the 2/28 ARM mortgages. Cheap teaser rates for 24 months, then the big reset. By then, it was no longer your problem.

Can you grasp what a monumental change this was? Instead of making sure that borrowers could pay back ALL OF THE 30 YEAR FIXED MORTGAGE, you only had to find people who could afford the teaser rate for a few months. THIS WAS AN ENORMOUS AND UNPRECEDENTED SHIFT IN LENDING.

This is the key to the hosuing boom and bust, anbd ultimately underlies the entire credit freeze. And, it would not have been possible without the Greenspan ultra-low rates, which made the teaser portion (the “2″ of the 2/28) of these mortgages so attractive.

~~~

Those who continue to blame the CRA, Fannie Mae, etc. reveal their fundamental misunderstanding of how credit operates in general, what the financing process was like from 2002-07, and how this situation came to pass. Or worse, they understand it, and choose to lie about it anyway for partisan political purposes.

You either understand these simple facts, or you don’t. If you cannot comprehend this, well, then, I am at a loss as to what that says about your cognitive functioning. But if you understand this, but spit out the nonsense anyway, then you are merely a partisan with no respect for the truth.

And that seems to be the main people blaming the CRA and Fannie/Freddie for the credit/housing crisis — those folks who either can’t think — or wont.

Now I personally think there may be some contribution to our poor economy from such programs, but they didn’t cause the crash — the derivatives are to blame.  Go read Barry’s blog and sign up for his feed; he’s smart and explains things very well.

The Big Picture

Boston – More Than A Feeling

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With all the advances in networking and robotics, I can see a time when a standing army won’t be necessary. All homes will be hooked to the net, or several different “‘nets”, and when called upon we can connect to the army net, harness up, and robot surrogates deployed to any area will take the hits while we fight as if we were in whole-body video games.

Armies of billions of robots will clash while the kids play outside and daddy and mommy fight for freedom… as well as have time to make dinner.

Just a thought.

robot army

Frozen moo-juice is my bitch.

I made a batch yesterday, let it sit in the freezer overnight to harden, and now I’m having some… awwwww shit! It’s like an IHOP in my mouth.

I am a golden god when it comes to ice cream.

What if reports of ghosts are actually attempts at time travel that impose physical temporal anomalies on our time line? Repetitive anomalies, poltergeists, lights and sounds… I think that’d be cool.

No, I don’t believe in ghosts. I’m just bored, thinking about “What If”s for mental calisthenics.

ghosts, time travel, poltergeists

For the McCain video, I hear one guy shout “Terrorist” (12 seconds in):

For the Palin video, I hear people shouting “U.S.A.” (39 seconds in):

I think people are hearing what they want to hear in these videos. Shouting “terrorist” isn’t correct of that supporter, but McCain leads the crowd down that path — I think unintentionally because you see him wince at the audience reaction.

Still, I think Obama’s character is questionable at best, and bringing up people who support him — people he didn’t denounce until he was called to task for his associations with them, and for whom he still makes excuses — is appropriate. But McCain and his speechwriters need to be a bit smarter with how they write and speak if they’re going to go into Obama’s past. Don’t lead people to incorrect conclusions.

McCain, Palin, kill him, lies

Lots of people complain about W being incompetent, yet attribute amazing feats of governmental skill to him as well.

I often wonder WTF he’s thinking when he makes policy. We know Sharia law is anathema to our own values, yet we prop up so many countries with Sharia law as their basis of law that it boggles the mind. Hell, we even promote it, with both of the new governments of Afghanistan and Iraq basing their laws on Sharia. These Sharia examples lead me to wonder if W knows something we don’t know. I mean, how could he be THAT stupid?

Could it be that he knows that people under Sharia will get their asses handed to them and therefore force the populace to turn to another means of governance? Maybe, because it’s so backward, he knows that governments who base their law on Sharia will eventually collapse and will be forced to adopt trade with the West, leading to better ties and understanding and hopefully more eventual cessation of hostilities?

Is W an evil genius on the grand scale of Reagan, a la Phil Hartman on Saturday Night Live? I don’t think so, but one can hope.

Cracked.com is usually right up my narrow alley of funny. An example:

Bullet Ant

Why you must fear it:
It’s a full inch long, it lives in trees and thus can and will fall on you to scare you away from its hive–the one you didn’t know was there, because it’s in a fucking tree. Before it does this, it shrieks at you. This ant, you see, can shriek.

It’s called a Bullet Ant because its ‘unusually severe’ sting feels like getting shot. On the Schmidt Sting Index, Bullet Ants rate as the number one most try-not-to-shit-out-your-spine painful in the entirety of the Kingdom Arthropoda.

Also–and we do feel the need to stress this–they fucking shriek at you before they attack.

My humorous predilections tend toward the crude and the bizarre, and Cracked.com offers up that strange mix of information porn with embarrassingly funny phrasing that tickles my inner evil demon. This is the way I would speak if I was a constantly drunk-off-my-ass Oscar Wilde… without the penis fetish.

I’m sure my mother weeps knowing I find “teh funneh” in such things.

http://www.khow.com/pages/caplisreport.html

Thanks to Snapped Shot

And, of course, showing off his Marxist tendencies:

8. OBAMA SAYS WHITES ARE PHANTOMS TO BE EXPUNGED FROM DREAMS

 

“Questions of competition, decisions forced by a market economy and majoritarian rule; issues of power. It was this unyielding reality-that whites were not only phantoms to be expunged from our dreams but were an active and varied fact of our everyday lives-that finally explained how nationalism could thrive as an emotion and flounder as a program.” Pg 202

It’s that evil competition, market economy and majoritarian rule — a.k.a. free markets and democracy — that makes white people evil and leads to Nationalism.

Seriously, people like this guy? They want him to lead our country with this freakish attitude? WTF?!

Flobots – Handlebars (Obama’s Theme?)

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