Of Canaries

I've worked hard all my life. Went to school, studied hard, kept my nose clean.

I've been laid off twice in the last 8 years. Typical response? Go back to school. Re-train yourself to the "new economy". Outsourcing is the new reality. Get used to it. The economy's fine.

So please tell me why the hell I should get so worked up when dozens of $100M plus types fuck themselves and the rest of us out of all our money? Don't I understand the importance of this bailout?

Look Johnny-come-latelies, I've been at this for *years* and not a single one of you fuck managed to give a shit. Everybody was fine with our jobs being shipped to India. Everybody was fine that we were becoming a "service (servant?) economy".

Welcome to my world everyone. I screamed for years that this economy was going into the shitter and nobody cared.

Pardon the hell out of me if Wall St. sliced its own throat. What does it take to get you people's attention anyway? You elected this president *twice*? Once... everyone makes mistakes... but twice?

I've got an idea. Why don't we just outsource Wall St.? It worked for everyone else's jobs. I'm sure there's someone in India that will be willing to lose billions of dollars for a measly $100M paycheck.

Let Wall St. go back to school and re-train themselves.

Halloween Ice Cream

I've heard of people making Liquid Nitrogen (LN2) Ice Cream. Since ice cream creaminess is a function of ice crystal size and ice crystal size is a function of how fast a liquid freezes, LN2 ice cream is theoretically about the pinnacle of ice-cream...um... creaminess.


So it's 8 p.m. tonight and the family and I are on our way back from running errands. Zacky had ice-cream for dessert and we got... to watch him eat it. (It came with his kid's meal for free and at the time we weren't interested enough to pay for it ourselves. At least until we watched him almost literally wallow in vanilla ice cream for nearly 10 minutes. It really is incredible the amount of pleasure a child can get out of ice cream.

Aaaannnnyhooo, so we're driving home and the thought of ice cream is popping into my head repeatedly. Of course any sane person would say, "Hey hon, let's drop by the store on the way home and pick up a quart of Bryers" and call it a night.

But the rest of us aren't satisfied with something so simple and want to "make it from scratch" because we know it will be "better". That's when I get an idea.

Like the rest of us, when I "get an idea" it is usually best kept to myself, as admitting I have an idea is akin to the proverbial redneck bellow, "Hey ya'll, watch this!"

Not so much out of intelligence or cunning, but more out of being afraid that the missus will be smart enough to put the kibosh on it immediately, I don't say, "I have an idea" but rather, "Would you like me to make some ice cream tonight?". She replies, "Isn't it kind of late?", to which I reply "don't worry". I can tell she's immediately starting to worry. Smart woman.

So liquid nitrogen is not exactly readily available near us, nor do I know where to find it unreadily available at 8 p.m. on a Friday night. I *do* recall, however, the local foodstore carrying dry ice. Frozen nitrogen, frozen carbon dioxide, what's the difference?

I'll skip to the chase. When you decide to make ice cream, there are two long waits: The first is waiting for the hot custard to cool enough to be put into the ice-cream machine. The second is the wait for the final ice-cream to harden in the freezer. We're talking *hours*. Dry ice should shorten both of those enough -- methinks -- to enjoy ice cream before bedtime!

I get the custard made and it's just hit 170F. Normally I would put it in an ice bath to cool enough before porting over to the fridge. I'm impatient, so I decide to pound the dry ice into bits (suprisingly easy, but don't do this while the kid's sleeping ... FYI) before pouring it into the hot custard.

Did I mention that one should not attempt this if the pot is over half full? Surely most of you would know better than that, so I didn't need to tell you. What I can pass along is that pouring a bunch of dry ice into an almost full pot at 170F is the equivalent of putting a jet engine under a pot of silly putty and turning it up to '11'.

The pot immediately starts boiling like crazy and sputtering (ok, spraying) hot custard all over the cooktop, the counter tops, the floors and the cook. Rather than resting on its laurels, the new devil custard then decides to deplay some sort of cloaking device in the form of gaseous CO2. The stove is immediately so full of fog I can't even see the custard boiling over and filling up the burners, which I had luckily already turned off. Turning off the flame (again) to lower the violence quotient has no effect as the cooktop has long since stopped putting energy into this little dynamo. No "off" button available there.

Eeek! Quickly, I think to pour the custard/dry ice combo out of the hot pot and into the ice cream mixer (which has been in the freezer overnight) and will be much cooler than the hot pan the custard's currently occupying. Mission accomplished. The demented custard calms down quickly.

Ok, everything's cool now (almost literally) and I decide to go ahead and put the beater in and start mixing. Everything's fine until some of the dry ice starts getting agitated again and now the custard is boiling over in the stand mixer. The little beater is blowing a steady column of smoke that circles the pot as the paddle spins. Think Thomas the Train Engine meets the Dementers from Harry Potter. The mix then solidifies enough to start climbing up the beater paddle. Somehow this iniquitous liquid is managing to take over the *top* of my mixer just as fast as the bottom. What the hell is this, some sort of superfluid?

After a while it calms down a bit and I build up the courage to approach it, using a spoon for defense. Take my word for it, having ice cream *hiss* at you like some pissed-off jungle lizard is not a pleasant experience. I screw up my nerve and take a spoonfull.

All I can say is "wierd". It has a built-in effervesence very similar in feeling and taste to a root beer float... only no root beer. The only good experience so far tonight.

Rather than lose what little soft-serve progress I have made, I dismantle the mixer and scoop what I can into a tupperware bowl. The beater itself has frozen into a solid mass and has to be chiseled off.

Ten seconds after popping the lid onto the tupperware, the possesed ice-cream pops it back off. Great, it's still trying to escape. It dawns on me that the escaping gas is pressurizing the contain enough to blow the lid. Fine. Whatever. Who needs a lid? I put it in the freezer, slam the door shut and retreat.

So, long story short, don't try to make ice-cream with dry ice unless you make a batch *way* smaller than your equipment can handle. And also do it when the family is out of town and you don't have to explain why the kitchen looks like a science fair project.

Firstly, read the instructions that come with the dry ice. Instruction number 40-something says, "Don't store in a working freezer". It gives no reason.

Great. Maybe the shit takes over freezers too. I'm afraid to go check. Maybe I'll let it have the fridge. We've been wanting a new one anyway.

Taxes are too high! (Diatribe)

Jesus Christ! Will this red herring never die? Lower taxes! Lower
taxes! What do you idiots smoke?

Lowering taxes is no better than raising taxes. Stop the bullshit.

While Republicans have you ninnies running around screaming "lower
taxes" and "Libruls raise taxes" they're raping all of us blind.

If taxes are so Goddamned important, perhaps you should all sit down
and tell us unenlightened WHAT THE FUCKING CORRECT TAX RATE IS. Don't
say, "0" or "there is no level" or "no one knows" or "it depends".
GIVE US A FUCKING NUMBER OR SHUT UP. If you don't know what the
correct level of taxes is, then you can't say they're "too high".

And while all of you are running around parroting this fucking
Republican talking point, you're completely ignoring the idiots that
are in power and WHAT THEY'RE DOING WITH YOUR MONEY.

Don't like "high" taxes? THEN STOP GIVING TAX BREAKS TO OIL
COMPANIES, HALIBURTON, FARMERS WHO GROW NOTHING, DEADBEAT ON WELFARE,
etc. Most importantly, STOP POURING MONEY BILLIONS INTO THE SAND.

Jesus fucking Christ, always with the "lower taxes", "libruls raise
taxes" horseshit while never uttering a peep of "oh, maybe *my*
politician is one of the thousands who are building bridges to
nowhere, paying Congress a huge retirement fund or giving money away
to every croney he can find through outright corruption". Gosh, why
do we need such high taxes to begin with, huh?

If you want to talk about our politicians, what they are doing wrong
and how we can work together to fix it, please share. If you're just
gonna bellyache about how all of our problems are due to some
fictional rival political group, save it for the Rush call-in hour or
sod off.

Coercion Via Mob

These tactics are not limited to the domain of dictators.


The Times Online

On Saturday night the radio sprang to life in the kitchen. It was my father-in-law. “There's a chanting mob outside the pack-house,” he said.

My heart was throbbing already. I pushed the transmit button: “OK. Keep us informed,” I replied.

Laura, my wife, went to try to phone people and get them to pray. Why had our workers not told us about this pungwe, I thought? It must be a mob from outside our area. I could hear them chanting a mile down the road from our house. I wondered, as I had done so many times before, if this was it.

The mob moved on towards us and then past. We were given another night's grace.

Last weekend we had a big pungwe - a political indoctrination meeting - on the farm. It was after Mugabe had come to our little town of Chegutu, southwest of Harare, and addressed the crowd with threats of “war”. A pungwe starts when the shadows lengthen and the sun goes down and darkness falls over the land. It does not stop till after the sun has risen again.

All our workers had to go, as well as all their wives with babies and any children over the age of 12. Some of them didn't go; so the mob sent little bands of chanting youth militia with sticks to fetch the absentees, drag them out of their houses and beat them for non-attendance. Through the night we heard the chanting and the slogans and the re-education speeches ringing out into the cold darkness for hour after hour after hour. On and on it went, striking fear into my heart. I got up and paced around in the cold night, listening.

When the first birds began to sing, I thought: “How can these birds sing after such a night as this?” Then the birdsong was drowned out. There was a terrible noise like a swarm of bees. I knew the beatings had begun again and I listened helpless, tormented, in fear but praying fervently.

I spoke to our workers later. “Mount Carmel workers were all made to stand to one side,” Amon said. “We were shaking because we were so afraid of what was to happen to us. Those that had been polling agents for MDC had water poured over them.”

It was a frosty morning. “The major [Major Tauye, brought in from the Army to run pungwes in Chegutu district] was waving his gun around everywhere,” he went on.

I learnt that the MDC polling agents were made to put their forehead on the ground and lift their whole bodies up on their toes and then hold the position as they shook in the cold. After some time they were given sticks and had to beat each other.

The Major then said: “You say we beat you! We don't beat you! You are the ones that beat!”

“Will the people vote?” I asked.

“We are in pain but we cannot speak because we do not know who will tell. Even if we make a report the police will not help,” Amon said.

I had seen the hope for a better future draining out of him. He had been kicked off one farm already and I sensed he was worried we would throw in the towel too.

“I will not leave,” I said. “They must shoot me if they want me off.”

I remembered another friend whose workers were sobbing when she was forced to pack up a couple of weeks ago after three generations on the farm. They knew they were on their own then, voiceless in the wilderness.

On Friday morning I went to see James Etheridge. He had been evicted in the darkness earlier in the week by Senator Madzongwe's men and the local hit man, Gilbert Moyo, with a large mob. James was in a borrowed shirt because all his clothes had been stolen. We were trying to see if there was anything that hadn't been looted left in the houses.

We drove through the gate and down the drive. Straight ahead there was a line of large rocks blocking the road. As we got closer, men wielding sticks got up and started coming menacingly towards us. Our presence had the effect of a stone thrown into a hornets' nest. Soon the rocks started to fly in our direction. I saw figures running through the bush to try to get around behind us and cut us off. “OK, let's get out of here,” I said and reversed as fast as I could.

Between the Etheridges and ourselves we have spent nearly 30 hours at the police station this week making reports and failing to get a reaction.

Yesterday we finally saw our first observers. We met them at the police station. Having the observers there worked like magic: police reacted and even moved quickly after we reported that all the Etheridges belongings - the ones that had not yet been stolen - had been dumped on the side of the main road.

When the observers left to come to my house, James's wife Kerry and his brother were ambushed and started getting beaten with sticks. The police stood by because they had not brought bullets for their guns and the senator's men were armed. They had to run for it and managed to get away.

While I was on the way back to my family with the observers, our workers were rounded up by youths with sticks going to the pungwe. They started demanding that Laura come out of the house and they beat one of our dogs with a stick at the gate. Then before I got there they headed off again, running across the veldt like a pack of wild dogs seeking their next prey.

The observers didn't know about pungwes; and they have been advised not to go out after dark, so I suppose they will never see them. Almost all Mugabe's campaigning goes on after dark. The pungwes have spread like a great cancer even to town.

Owen, one of our workers in Chegutu, said he has had to go to all-night pungwes for the past three nights.

“Will you be an MDC polling agent again?” I said to Lorence, another worker, this morning.

“Ah no.” he said. “We are too afraid for that. We need to get out of here before the pungwe tonight because they are going to beat us.”I got them into town and gave them fifteen billion dollars each for their bus fares to a “safe” house 80km away.

As I went around town I talked to people. It was tense. They were full of fear and terrible stories about atrocities taking place; but we were together. I could sense a strong undercurrent of solidarity in the common load of suffering that we are all bearing.

None of us knows what will happen next. Dictators like Mugabe do not step down. Like Hitler, they go on till their country is in ruins and their people are in rags. World leaders tut-tut as the crimes against humanity go on unhindered; but their perpetrators live on and travel the world with impunity.

A Species Immersed in Fantasy

Homo sapiens is a bizarre literary ape - one that, outside of working and sleeping, may well spend most of its remaining hours lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has never been a society in which people don't devote great gobs of time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions - from folktales to film, from theater to television. Stories represent our biggest and most preciously varied repository of information about human nature. Without a robust study of literature there can be no adequate reckoning of the human condition - no full understanding of art, culture, psychology, or even of biology. As Binghamton University biologist David Sloan Wilson says, "the natural history of our species" is written in love poems, adventure stories, fables, myths, tales, and novels.
Jonathan Gottschall

I would argue that this is a big reason why humans so often get detracted into (nay, even manytimes demand) forays of folly. It's a species that enrobes itself in fatasy every day, so it is easily duped into believing that the current dubious scheme will magically solve its problems where other (or perhaps even the same one) has failed every time before.

People's Response to the Approach of Great Danger

"With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant."

--Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

Orwell: When a False Belief Bumps Up Against Solid Reality

". . .we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on the battlefield."--George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose

Airlines Closed for Maintenance

Here we have yet another example of how BushCo's "deregulation" has in reality been exposed as simple "you donate to us and we won't enforce any regulation on your industry"-style corruption.

For the fifth(? Really, who counts instances of Bush Admin corruption anymore?) time in less than two weeks, another airline cancels thousands of flight to perform inspections that had been skipped before they were exposed. Reuters: American Airlines cancels over 900 flights
Whistleblowers tell of airlines failing to perform required inspections and when the inspectors attempt to report this up the chain of command, they are threatened with losing their jobs.

John Stewart had an interesting observation:

"It’s all sort of ironic, when you think about it. When you fly, you are inspected quite thoroughly. Whereas the plane itself is perhaps occasionally vacuumed. See, with this administration, if a passenger blows up a plane, it’s a failure on the War on Terror. But if a plane just blows up on its own, eh, that’s the market self-regulating."

Derivatives Not Worth Re-Possessing?

The Big Picture posits an interesting question: What if the amount of money required to determine the value of all these derivatives makes it to expensive and thus not worthwhile to do? Will they just be discarded as unsaleable?

There is an elephant in the room that I haven't yet seen discussed: The UnTradeables.

In our discussion last week on SFAS 157, there was a subtext not articulated: The broad category of items that are actually too illiquid to trade. These include "one offs" such as Dry Cleaning stores, non-chain restaurants, Mom & Pop shops.

They are untradeable because the amount of research into each item, relative to their market cap/size, makes it too inefficient. No one will spend $100k for the due diligence on a $200k store.

For a while, Pez candy dispensers were an UnTradeable -- until eBay created a market where these can be effectively bought and sold. However, the total value of all the Pez dispensers in the world wasn't measured in the trillions, or even 100s of billions. Even tho they are relatively illiquid, their small capitalization makes it viable. And don't forget, there is no leverage involved in any of the eBay items. Hence, no margin calls.

Now consider the size of the derivative marketplace based upon mortgages: Everything from RMBS to CDOs to CDC. It runs into the trillions.

If they cannot be effectively priced, are these products essentially untradeable?

Consider these factors:

• The price relative to the requisite cost of research/due diligence;

• The size of the market relative to the overall regular and ongoing demand for that investment product;

• The buyers and sellers with an expertise and knowledge of this paper.

This may be the crux of the issue with subprime/derivative problem: The paper is, or at least should be, Untradeable . . .

Presidency 2008 As Political Cartoon

Geez, I wish I had drawing skills. I don't, so I will have to rely on the 1,000 words.

The following scene came to me this weekend as I attempted to go back to sleep between bouts of cramps from a stomach flu. (I'm sure that had no bearing on the subject.)


Imagine that you are adrift in the ocean.

Rescue Option 1: USS Obama - US Coast Guard-ish vessel, moving slowly at first, but more swiftly by the minute. As she gets closer, you see that she's an old girl, with lots of recent battle wounds, but her decks are manned by your countrymen. They work steadily and eagerly to repaint the hull and decks, to repair battle damage, neglected parts and replacing outmoded equipement. As she nears you, a well-organized crew hurls a life-preserver your way. You're hauled aboard, given medical treatment and returned to shore swiftly.

Rescue Option 2: USS Clinton - The same vessel as above, but not much repair is taking place. Actually, most of the crew that's not involved in bickering, backstabbing or outright fistfights have relegated themselves to opposite sides of the vessel. On a bright note, there is one attractive deckhand that seems above the fray. It's the Chief Officer, Bill! He's expressing his desire to help you, but somehow gets distracted by a female deckhand and fails to do anything to help you as the vessel lumbers by.

Rescue Option 3: USS McCain - The hind-most portion of the vessel is a modern ship, but for some reason deckhands from every country seem to be fitting strange, wooden appendages marked "Made in China" all over the ship...they seem to be converting it to an 18th-century British Man O'War...

The few Americans you can see are manning the guns, which are firing madly in all directions while ship changes course erratically, giving a sense of having no clear target in mind. A few of the shells whiz by and you hope out loud that their firing doesn't kill you before they can rescue you.

As the ship occasions closer, you can see that the decks are lined with fat, white businessmen, lounging, telling jokes and smoking cigars. Occasionally, a business man will pick up a flaming $100 bill that has flown from the ship's stacks and uses it to light a new Havana Gold. The businessmen don't seem fazed by either the blasting of the guns or the smouldering mess of burning currency that flies from the stacks and litters the decks.

Large holes keep appearing in the hull. More businessmen, only smaller and thinner than those lounging on deck busily cut holes through the hull and have formed a thriving market of selling the pieces of hull to each other.

The ship's PA alternates between describing the yet invisible land ahead (a paradise to hear him tell it!) and telling you not to worry as God is going to save you.

As the ship draws near, you can that the bridge is lined with pictures of George W. Bush in royal attire. You hear someone mutter a profanity from the rear engine room ("So"?) but the figure disappears before you can make out his identity.

As the ship passes, the deckhands raise what appears to be an anchor, its top portion painted into the shape of a golden cross. They yell something to you, but you can't make it out (Spanish? Chinese?). Before you can deduce their meaning, they drop the anchor on you and the ship continues on.

Credit Crunch Explained

Courtesy Interfluidity

Credit Crisis for Kindergarteners

David Leonhardt notes that it's pretty hard to explain what's going on in the financial world these days (ht Felix). Here's how I'd tell the tale to a child:

Alice, Bob, and Sue have ten marbles between them. Whenever one kid wants another kid to take over a chore, she promises a marble in exchange. Alice doesn't like setting the table, so she promises Bob a marble if he will do it for her. Bob hates mowing the lawn, but Sue will do it for a marble. Sue doesn't like broccoli, but if she says pretty please and promises a marble, Bob will eat it off her plate when Mom isn't looking.

One day, the kids get together to brag about all the marbles they soon will have. It turns out that, between them, they are promised 40 marbles! Now that is pretty exciting. They've each promised to give away some marbles too, but they don't think about that, they can keep their promises later, after they've had time to play with what's coming. For now, each is eager to hold all the marbles they've been promised in their own hands, and to show off their collections to friends.

But then Alice, who is smart and foolish all at the same time, points out a curious fact. There are only 10 marbles! Sue says, "That cannot be. I have earned 20 marbles, and I have only promised to give away three! There must be 17 just for me."

But there are still only 10 marbles.

Suddenly, when Bob doesn't want to mow the lawn, no one will do it for him, even if he promises two marbles for the job. No one will eat Sue's broccoli for her, even though everyone knows she is promised the most marbles of anyone, because no one believes she will ever see those 17 marbles she is always going on about. In fact, dinnertime is mayhem. Spoons are placed where forks should be, and saucers used for dinner plates, because Alice really is hopeless in the kitchen. Mom is cross. Dad is cross. Everyone is cross. "But you promised," is heard over and over among the children, amidst lots of stomping and fighting. Until recently, theirs was such a happy home, but now the lawn is overgrown, broccoli rots on mismatched saucers, and no one trusts anyone at all. It's all a bit mysterious to Dad, who points out that nothing has changed, really, so why on Earth is everything falling apart?

Perhaps Mom and Dad will decide that the best thing to do is just buy some more marbles, so that all the children can make good on their promises. But that would mean giving Alice 19 marbles, because she was laziest and made the most promises she couldn't keep, and that hardly seems like a good lesson. Plus, marbles are expensive, and everyone in the family would have to skip lunch for a week to settle Alice's debt. Perhaps the children could get together and decide that an unmet promise should be worth only a quarter of a marble, so that everyone is able to keep their promises after all. But then Sue, the hardest working, would feel really ripped off, as she ends up with a much more modest collection of marbles than she had expected. Perhaps Bob, the strongest, will simply take all the marbles from Alice and Sue, and make it clear than none will be given in return, and that will be that. Or, perhaps Alice and Bob could do Sue's chores for a while in addition to their own, extinguishing one promise per chore. But that's an awful lot of work, what if they just don't want to, who's gonna force them? What if they'd have to be in servitude to Sue for years?

Almost whatever happens, the trading of chores, so crucial to the family's tidy lawns and pleasant dinners, will be curtailed for some time. Perhaps some trading will occur via exchange of actual marbles, but this will not be common, as even kids see the folly of giving rare glass to people known to welch on their promises. It makes more sense to horde.

A credit crisis arises when many more promises are made than can possibly be kept, and disputes emerge about how and to whom promises will be broken. It's less a matter of SIVs than ABCs.

Mission Accomplished!

The Fed makes $200B in loans to US banks, secured by sub-prime debt: The Big Picture

This effectively transfers $200B (not counting similar loans in the recent past as well as future ones that are undoubtedly on the way) of worthless debt on the shoulders of the US government.

Grover Norquist infamously stated, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

Old Grover must be already printing the next "Mission Accomplished!" banner.

Who knew that he wanted to include world financial markets as well?
BBC: Northern Rock Get Bailout
IHT: IKB Bailout

We Have Arrived

The Republicans have now had complete control of the government (for all practical purposes) for 6 of the past ~8 years and since November have been challenged only by the most Milquetoast of congresses.

Arguably, we now stand ready to receive the full glory promised to us by the blessed Republican theology.

What do we have?

- An economy is shambles and headed further downward quickly.
- An unregulated lending market for housing has resulted in ~20% drops in housing prices with no end in sight. Foreclosures approaching levels from the Great Depression.
- Oil is trading for $104 per barrel and increasing every day.
- The dollar is dropping like a rock with $1000 gold and rising.
- A unnecessary quagmire of incompetence financed by debt. [Which one? Ed.]
We lost Vietnam, but we'll get 'em this time! [Oh, that one. Ed.]
- A former American metropolis still reeling from catastrophic losses.
- A paranoid Decider searching our mail, tapping our phones and smirking endlessly while pushing for the One More Tax Cut that will land us in glory. (Here's $300, go spend it on something nice!)


(Cue Blondie) Raaapture!

Airport "Security"

Agreed in spades. If it so urgent to intercept potential bombs being smuggled onto our aircraft, why do we hire $5/hour TSA agents to do the job rather than highly trained bomb detection and disposal agents? New York Times

December 28, 2007, 6:52 pm
The Airport Security Follies

By Patrick Smith

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. Unfortunately, at concourse checkpoints all across America, the madness of passenger screening continues in plain view. It began with pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects. Then came the mandatory shoe removal, followed in the summer of 2006 by the prohibition of liquids and gels. We can only imagine what is next.

To understand what makes these measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of September 11th, and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box-cutters. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings.

In years past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of “passive resistance.” All of that changed forever the instant American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower. What weapons the 19 men possessed mattered little; the success of their plan relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

For several reasons — particularly the awareness of passengers and crew — just the opposite is true today. Any hijacker would face a planeload of angry and frightened people ready to fight back. Say what you want of terrorists, they cannot afford to waste time and resources on schemes with a high probability of failure. And thus the September 11th template is all but useless to potential hijackers.

No matter that a deadly sharp can be fashioned from virtually anything found on a plane, be it a broken wine bottle or a snapped-off length of plastic, we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.

The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.”

Among first to express serious skepticism about the bombers’ readiness was Thomas C. Greene, whose essay in The Register explored the extreme difficulty of mixing and deploying the types of binary explosives purportedly to be used. Green conferred with Professor Jimmie C. Oxley, an explosives specialist who has closely studied the type of deadly cocktail coveted by the London plotters.

“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene told me during an interview. “A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like ‘24.’ The reality proves disappointing: it’s rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they’re familiar to us: we’ve all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane.”

The threat of liquid explosives does exist, but it cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have devoted most of our resources to keeping away from planes. Certain benign liquids, when combined under highly specific conditions, are indeed dangerous. However, creating those conditions poses enormous challenges for a saboteur.

“I would not hesitate to allow that liquid explosives can pose a danger,” Greene added, recalling Ramzi Yousef’s 1994 detonation of a small nitroglycerine bomb aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434. The explosion was a test run for the so-called “Project Bojinka,” an Al Qaeda scheme to simultaneously destroy a dozen widebody airliners over the Pacific Ocean. “But the idea that confiscating someone’s toothpaste is going to keep us safe is too ridiculous to entertain.”

Yet that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. The three-ounce container rule is silly enough — after all, what’s to stop somebody from carrying several small bottles each full of the same substance — but consider for a moment the hypocrisy of T.S.A.’s confiscation policy. At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? But if so, why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are simply thrown away. The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it’s going to steal them anyway, and either you accept it or you don’t fly.

But of all the contradictions and self-defeating measures T.S.A. has come up with, possibly none is more blatantly ludicrous than the policy decreeing that pilots and flight attendants undergo the same x-ray and metal detector screening as passengers. What makes it ludicrous is that tens of thousands of other airport workers, from baggage loaders and fuelers to cabin cleaners and maintenance personnel, are subject only to occasional random screenings when they come to work.

These are individuals with full access to aircraft, inside and out. Some are airline employees, though a high percentage are contract staff belonging to outside companies. The fact that crew members, many of whom are former military fliers, and all of whom endured rigorous background checks prior to being hired, are required to take out their laptops and surrender their hobby knives, while a caterer or cabin cleaner sidesteps the entire process and walks onto a plane unimpeded, nullifies almost everything our T.S.A. minders have said and done since September 11th, 2001. If there is a more ringing let-me-get-this-straight scenario anywhere in the realm of airport security, I’d like to hear it.

I’m not suggesting that the rules be tightened for non-crew members so much as relaxed for all accredited workers. Which perhaps urges us to reconsider the entire purpose of airport security:

The truth is, regardless of how many pointy tools and shampoo bottles we confiscate, there shall remain an unlimited number of ways to smuggle dangerous items onto a plane. The precise shape, form and substance of those items is irrelevant. We are not fighting materials, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur.

Thus, what most people fail to grasp is that the nuts and bolts of keeping terrorists away from planes is not really the job of airport security at all. Rather, it’s the job of government agencies and law enforcement. It’s not very glamorous, but the grunt work of hunting down terrorists takes place far off stage, relying on the diligent work of cops, spies and intelligence officers. Air crimes need to be stopped at the planning stages. By the time a terrorist gets to the airport, chances are it’s too late.

In the end, I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations, or the average American’s acceptance of them and willingness to be humiliated. These wasteful and tedious protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, with little or no opposition. There ought to be a tide of protest rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbled resignation. The op-ed pages are silent, the pundits have nothing meaningful to say.

The airlines, for their part, are in something of a bind. The willingness of our carriers to allow flying to become an increasingly unpleasant experience suggests a business sense of masochistic capitulation. On the other hand, imagine the outrage among security zealots should airlines be caught lobbying for what is perceived to be a dangerous abrogation of security and responsibility — even if it’s not. Carriers caught plenty of flack, almost all of it unfair, in the aftermath of September 11th. Understandably, they no longer want that liability.

As for Americans themselves, I suppose that it’s less than realistic to expect street protests or airport sit-ins from citizen fliers, and maybe we shouldn’t expect too much from a press and media that have had no trouble letting countless other injustices slip to the wayside. And rather than rethink our policies, the best we’ve come up with is a way to skirt them — for a fee, naturally — via schemes like Registered Traveler. Americans can now pay to have their personal information put on file just to avoid the hassle of airport security. As cynical as George Orwell ever was, I doubt he imagined the idea of citizens offering up money for their own subjugation.

How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear-mongering and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything in the name of “security.” Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little outrage. In that regard, maybe we’ve gotten exactly the system we deserve.

Bankers Trying to Avoid Mortgage Fraud Suits?

Sean Olender in SF Chronicle:

New proposals to ease our great mortgage meltdown keep rolling in. First the Treasury Department urged the creation of a new fund that would buy risky mortgage bonds as a tactic to hide what those bonds were really worth. (Not much.) Then the idea was to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy the risky loans, even if it was clear that U.S. taxpayers would eventually be stuck with the bill. But that plan went south after Fannie suffered a new accounting scandal, and Freddie's existing loan losses shot up more than expected.

Now, just unveiled Thursday, comes the "freeze," the brainchild of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. It sounds good: For five years, mortgage lenders will freeze interest rates on a limited number of "teaser" subprime loans. Other homeowners facing foreclosure will be offered assistance from the Federal Housing Administration.

But unfortunately, the "freeze" is just another fraud - and like the other bailout proposals, it has nothing to do with U.S. house prices, with "working families," keeping people in their homes or any of that nonsense.

The sole goal of the freeze is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value - right now almost 10 times their market worth.

The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.

And, to be sure, fraud is everywhere. It's in the loan application documents, and it's in the appraisals. There are e-mails and memos floating around showing that many people in banks, investment banks and appraisal companies - all the way up to senior management - knew about it.

I can hear the hum of shredders working overtime, and maybe that is the new "hot" industry to invest in. There are lots of people who would like to muzzle subpoena-happy New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to buy time and make this all go away. Cuomo is just inches from getting what he needs to start putting a lot of people in prison. I bet some people are trying right now to make him an offer "he can't refuse."

Despite Thursday's ballyhooed new deal with mortgage lenders, does anyone really think that it can ultimately stop fraud lawsuits by mortgage bond investors, many of them spread out across the globe?

The catastrophic consequences of bond investors forcing originators to buy back loans at face value are beyond the current media discussion. The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest U.S. banks combined, and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest U.S. banks to fail, resulting in massive taxpayer-funded bailouts of Fannie and Freddie, and even FDIC.

The problem isn't just subprime loans. It is the entire mortgage market. As home prices fall, defaults will rise sharply - period. And so will the patience of mortgage bondholders. Different classes of mortgage bonds from various risk pools are owned by different central banks, funds, pensions and investors all over the world. Even your pension or 401(k) might have some of these bonds in it.

Perhaps some U.S. government department can make veiled threats to foreign countries to suggest they will suffer unpleasant consequences if their largest holders (central banks and investment funds) don't go along with the plan, but how could it be possible to strong-arm everyone?

What would be prudent and logical is for the banks that sold this toxic waste to buy it back and for a lot of people to go to prison. If they knew about the fraud, they should have to buy the bonds back. The time to look into this is before the shredders have worked their magic - not five years from now.

Those selling the "freeze" have suggested that mortgage-backed securities investors will benefit because they lose more with rising foreclosures. But with fast-depreciating collateral, the last thing investors in mortgage bonds ought to do is put off foreclosures. Rate freezes are at best a tool for delaying the inevitable foreclosures when even the most optimistic forecasters expect home prices to fall. In October, Goldman Sachs issued a report forecasting an incredible 35 to 40 percent drop in California home prices in the coming few years. To minimize losses, a mortgage bondholder would obviously be better off foreclosing on a home before prices plunge.

The goal of the freeze may be to delay bond investors from suing by putting off the big foreclosure wave for several years. But it may also be to stop bond investors from suing. If the investors agreed to loan modifications with the "real" wage and asset information from refinancing borrowers, mortgage originators and bundlers would have an excuse once the foreclosure occurred. They could say, "Fraud? What fraud?! You knew the borrower's real income and asset information later when he refinanced!"

The key is to refinance borrowers whose current loans involved fraud in the origination process. And I assure you it was a minority of borrowers whose loans didn't involve fraud.

The government is trying to accomplish wide-scale refinancing by tricking bond investors, or by tricking U.S. taxpayers. Guess who will foot the bill now that the FHA is entering the fray?

Ultimately, the people in these secret Paulson meetings were probably less worried about saving the mortgage market than with saving themselves. Some might be looking at prison time.

As chief of Goldman Sachs, Paulson was involved, to degrees as yet unrevealed, in the mortgage securitization process during the halcyon days of mortgage fraud from 2004 to 2006.

Paulson became the U.S. Treasury secretary on July 10, 2006, after the extent of the debacle was coming into focus for those in the know. Goldman Sachs achieved recent accolades in the markets for having bet heavily against the housing market, while Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch and others got hammered for failing to time the end of the credit bubble.

Goldman Sachs is the only major investment bank in the United States that has emerged as yet unscathed from this debacle. The success of its strategy must have resulted from fairly substantial bets against housing, mortgage banking and related industries, which also means that Goldman Sachs saw this coming at the same time they were bundling and selling these loans.

If a mortgage bond investor sues Goldman Sachs to force the institution to buy back loans, could Paulson be forced to testify as to whether Goldman Sachs knew or had reason to know about fraud in the origination process of the loans it was bundling?

It is truly amazing that right now everyone in the country is deferring to Paulson and the heads of Countrywide, JPMorgan, Bank of America and others as the best group to work out a solution to this problem. No one is talking about the fact that these people created the problem and profited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars from it.

I suspect that such a group first sat down and tried to figure out how to protect their financial interests and avoid criminal liability. And then when they agreed on the plan, they decided to sell it as "helping working families stay in their homes." That's why these meetings were secret, and reporters and the public weren't invited.

The next time that Paulson is before the Senate Finance Committee, instead of asking, "How much money do you think we should give your banking buddies?" I'd like to see New York Sen. Chuck Schumer ask him what he knew about this staggering fraud at the time he was chief of Goldman Sachs.

The Goldman report in October suggests that rampant investor demand is to blame for origination fraud - even though these investors were misled by high credit ratings from bond rating agencies being paid billions by the U.S. investment banks, like Goldman, that were selling the bundled mortgages.

This logic is like saying shoppers seeking bargain-priced soup encourage the grocery store owner to steal it. I mean, we're talking about criminal fraud here. We are on the cusp of a mammoth financial crisis, and the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury are trying to limit the liability of their banking friends under the guise of trying to help borrowers. At stake is nothing short of the continued existence of the U.S. banking system.

Sean Olender is a San Mateo attorney. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Insider Insight: Mortgage Crisis

Herb Greenberg:

Even before this mortgage mess started, one person who kept emailing me over and over saying that this is going to get real bad. He kept saying this was beyond sub-prime, beyond low FICO scores, beyond Alt-A and beyond the imagination of most pundits, politicians and the press. When I asked him why somebody from inside the industry would be so emphatically sounding the siren, he said, “Someobody’s got to warn people.”

Since then, I’ve kept up an active dialog with Mark Hanson, a 20-year veteran of the mortgage industry, who has spent most of his career in the wholesale and correspondent residential arena — primarily on the West Coast. He lives in the Bay Area. So far he has been pretty much on target as the situation has unfolded. I should point out that, based on his knowledge of the industry, he has been short a number of mortgage-related stocks.

His current thoughts, which I urge you to read:

The Government and the market are trying to boil this down to a ’sub-prime’ thing, especially with all constant talk of ‘resets’. But sub-prime loans were only a small piece of the mortgage mess. And sub-prime loans are not the only ones with resets. What we are experiencing should be called ‘The Mortgage Meltdown’ because many different exotic loan types are imploding currently belonging to what lenders considered ‘qualified’ or ‘prime’ borrowers. This will continue to worsen over the next few of years. When ‘prime’ loans begin to explode to a degree large enough to catch national attention, the ratings agencies will jump on board and we will have ‘Round 2′. It is not that far away.

Since 2003, when lending first started becoming extremely lax, a small percentage of the loans were true sub-prime fixed or arms. But sub-prime is what is being focused upon to draw attention away from the fact the lenders and Wall Street banks made all loans too easy to attain for everyone. They can explain away the reason sub-prime loans are imploding due to the weakness of the borrower.

How will they explain foreclosures in wealthy cities across the nation involving borrowers with 750 scores when their loan adjusts higher or terms change overnight because they reached their maximum negative potential on a neg-am Pay Option ARM for instance?

Sub-prime aren’t the only kind of loans imploding. Second mortgages, hybrid intermediate-term ARMS, and the soon-to-be infamous Pay Option ARM are also feeling substantial pressure. The latter three loan types mostly were considered ‘prime’ so they are being overlooked, but will haunt the financial markets for years to come. Versions of these loans were made available to sub-prime borrowers of course, but the vast majority were considered ‘prime’ or Alt-A. The caveat is that the differentiation between Prime and ALT-A got smaller and smaller over the years until finally in late 2005/2006 there was virtually no difference in program type or rate.

The bailout we are hearing about for sub-prime borrowers will be the first of many. Sub-prime only represents about 25% of the problem loans out there. What about the second mortgages sitting behind the sub-prime first, for instance? Most have seconds. Why aren’t they bailing those out too? Those rates have risen dramatically over the past few years as the Prime jumped from 4% to 8.25% recently. seconds are primarily based upon the prime rate. One can argue that many sub-prime first mortgages on their own were not a problem for the borrowers but the added burden of the second put on the property many times after-the-fact was too much for the borrower.

Most sub-prime loans in existence are refinances not purchase-money loans. This means that more than likely they pulled cash out of their home, bought things and are now going under. Perhaps the loan they hold now is their third or forth in the past couple years. Why are bad borrowers, who cannot stop going to the home-ATM getting bailed out?

The Government says they are going to use the credit score as one of the determining factors. But we have learned over the past year that credit scores are not a good predictor of future ability to repay. This is because over the past five years you could refi your way into a great score. Every time you were going broke and did not have money to pay bills, you pulled cash out of your home by refinancing your first mortgage or upping your second. You pay all your bills, buy some new clothes, take a vacation and your score goes up!

The ’second mortgage implosion’, ‘Pay-Option implosion’ and ‘Hybrid Intermediate-term ARM implosion’ are all happening simultaneously and about to heat up drastically. Second mortgage liens were done by nearly every large bank in the nation and really heated up in 2005, as first mortgage rates started rising and nobody could benefit from refinancing. This was a way to keep the mortgage money flowing. Second mortgages to 100% of the homes value with no income or asset documentation were among the best sellers at CITI, Wells, WAMU, Chase, National City and Countrywide. We now know these are worthless especially since values have indeed dropped and those who maxed out their liens with a 100% purchase or refi of a second now owe much more than their property is worth.

How are the banks going to get this junk second mortgage paper off their books? Moody’s is expecting a 15% default rate among ‘prime’ second mortgages. Just think the default rate in lower quality such as sub-prime. These assets will need to be sold for pennies on the dollar to free up capacity for new vintage paper or borrowers allowed to pay 50 cents on the dollar, for instance, to buy back their note.

The latter is probably where the ’second mortgage implosion’ will end up going. Why sell the loan for 10 cents on the dollar when you can get 25 to 50 cents from the borrower and lower their total outstanding liens on the property at the same time, getting them ‘right’ in the home again? Wells Fargo recently said they owned $84 billion of this worthless paper. That is a lot of seconds at an average of $100,000 a piece. Already, many lenders are locking up the second lines of credit and not allowing borrowers to pull the remaining open available credit to stop the bleeding. Second mortgages are defaulting at an amazing pace and it is picking up every month.

The ‘Pay-Option ARM implosion’ will carry on for a couple of years. In my opinion, this implosion will dwarf the ’sub-prime implosion’ because it cuts across all borrower types and all home values. Some of the most affluent areas in California contain the most Option ARMs due to the ability to buy a $1 million home with payments of a few thousand dollars per month. Wamu, Countrywide, Wachovia, IndyMac, Downey and Bear Stearns were/are among the largest Option ARM lenders. Option ARMs are literally worthless with no bids found for many months for these assets. These assets are almost guaranteed to blow up. 75% of Option ARM borrowers make the minimum monthly payment. Eighty percent-plus are stated income/asset. Average combined loan-to-value are at or above 90%. The majority done in the past few years have second mortgages behind them.

The clue to who will blow up first is each lenders ‘max neg potential’ allowance, which differs. The higher the allowance, the longer until the borrower gets the letter saying ‘you have reached your 110%, 115%, 125% etc maximum negative of your original loans balance so you cannot accrue any more negative and must pay a minimum of the interest only (or fully indexed payment in some cases). This payment rate could be as much as three times greater. They cannot refinance, of course, because the programs do not exist any longer to any great degree, the borrowers cannot qualify for other more conventional financing or values have dropped too much.

Also, the vast majority have second mortgages behind them putting them in a seriously upside down position in their home. If the first mortgage is at 115%, the second mortgage in many cases is at 100% at the time of origination — and values have dropped 10%-15% in states like California — many home owners could be upside down 20% minimum. This is a prime example of why these loans remain ‘no bid’ and will never have a bid. These also will require a workout. The big difference between these and sub-prime loans is at least with sub-prime loans, outstanding principal balances do not grow at a rate of up to 7% per year. Not considering every Option ARM a sub-prime loan is a mistake.

The 3/1, 5/1, 7/1 and 10/1 hybrid interest-only ARMS will reset in droves beginning now. These are loans that are fixed at a low introductory interest only rate for three, five, seven or 10 years — then turn into a fully indexed payment rate that adjusts annually thereafter. They first got really popular in 2003. Wells Fargo led the pack in these but many people have them. The resets first began with the 3/1 last year.

The 5/1 was the most popular by far, so those start to reset heavily in 2008. These were considered ‘prime’ but Wells and many others would do 95%-100% to $1 million at a 620 score with nearly as low of a rate as if you had a 750 score. No income or asset versions of this loan were available at a negligible bump in fee. This does not sound too ‘prime’ to me. These loans were mostly Jumbo in higher priced states such as California.

Values are down and these are interest only loans, therefore, many are severely underwater even without negative-amortization on this loan type. They were qualified at a 50% debt-to-income ratio, leaving only 50% of a borrower’s income to pay taxes, all other bills and live their lives. These loans put the borrower in the grave the day they signed their loan docs especially without major appreciation. These loans will not perform as poorly overall as sub-prime, seconds or Option ARMs but they are a perfect example of what is still considered ‘prime’ that is at risk. Eighty-eight percent of Thornburg’s portfolio is this very loan type for example.

One final thought. How can any of this get repaired unless home values stabilize? And how will that happen? In Northern California, a household income of $90,000 per year could legitimately pay the minimum monthly payment on an Option ARM on a million home for the past several years. Most Option ARMs allowed zero to 5% down. Therefore, given the average income of the Bay Area, most families could buy that million dollar home. A home seller had a vast pool of available buyers.

Now, with all the exotic programs gone, a household income of $175,000 is needed to buy that same home, which is about 10% of the Bay Area households. And, inventories are up 500%. So, in a nutshell we have 90% fewer qualified buyers for five-times the number of homes. To get housing moving again in Northern California, either all the exotic programs must come back, everyone must get a 100% raise or home prices have to fall 50%. None, except the last sound remotely possible.

What I am telling you is not speculation. I sold BILLIONs of these very loans over the past five years. I saw the borrowers we considered ‘prime’. I always wondered ‘what WILL happen when these things adjust is values don’t go up 10% per year’.

Always Expect the Worst

James May, president of the Air Transport Association is speaking of modern search and seizure at our airports. But it seems to apply to this current administration especially well:

“Always expect the worst,” he said. That way, “you’ll be pleased when you have a great experience.”

But they do so excel at lowering expectations, don't they?

The Definition of Optimism

via The Straight Dope:

Regarding Transcendental Meditation:

The contestants weren't continuously airborne; rather, they proceeded by a series of hops--all this, mind you, in full lotus, the familiar yogic sitting position.

A skeptic might say it's ridiculous to call hopping levitation, but Thom says it's merely the first stage of a three-stage process. Stage two, which apparently no one has achieved yet, is hovering, and stage three is full-scale flying.

(Iraq) War in 100 words or less

Matthew Baldwin on Catch-22 by Heller:

Yossarian is shaping up to be a pretty great antihero. Craven, carnal, self-absorbed, and downright dangerous at times, he often reflects on and epitomizes the ridiculousness of the war. The central problem, of course, is that every character is looking out for himself alone, and therefore butting heads with all the other vain and self-serving characters strewn throughout the book. By getting us to sympathize with one, Heller demonstrates that, individually, everyone is acting sanely, insofar as their only aim to to advance their own interests. It's only when you look at the "Big Picture" that you see that the whole is much, much less than the sum of its parts--a bunch of rational actors to collectively make up the enormous clusterfuck of war..

Columnists Current Role

"You're misunderstanding the role of the [NYT] columnists. You think that they are supposed to inform and provoke. They do that occasionally, but their main role is to comfort and confirm people in their prejudices - by helping readers fit the news into pre-existing narratives. Repetition and familiarity are more important than interesting ideas. Think of the op-ed page as the comics without pictures,"

Commenter at MatthewYglesias