Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Friday, May 29, 2009


Your Megan McArdle Moment for the day:
HL Mencken once defined Fundamentalism as "the terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun".

First, the period should be before the quotation mark. I understand that the British don't punctuate the same way we do, but we are not in Britain and The Atlantic is not a British magazine. I guess this is like her use of "chaps"--a feeble attempt to sound British and therefore more elite than she really is. Thank god she's not actually British, or we'd have to listen to a fake Royal accent too.

Second, the quote is inaccurate. She could take the four seconds I took to look it up, but I guess that would be above and beyond the call of duty.
If you don't believe [prejudice against minorities exists], ask yourself why repeated studies show that resumes with identifiably black names get fewer interview offers than identical white resumes. Being identifiably black hurts your chances worse than having a felony conviction. Even if you want to argue that an identifiably black name is a socio-economic marker for a certain kind of parenting, an argument I find pretty dubious, are you really willing to argue that black kids should be permanently barred from employment because their parents have dubious taste in names?

I'd think twice before I said people named, oh, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates, have parents with "dubious taste in names."
Making race, or racial politics, the central complaint [regarding Sonia Sotomayor], makes it seem like your biggest policy priority is making sure that not one minority in the land gets anything they don't deserve. But hey, we all get things we don't deserve. I'll go further: almost all of us get something we don't deserve as a result of our race, including white people. Perhaps even especially white people.

"Perhaps"? That's quite generous of her, to say that perhaps it's to one's advantage to be one of the majority. Indeed, the entire post is generous to minorities, saying that it's quite possible that some people actually do experience prejudice. It's very nice to see McArdle appreciate the difficulties of being a minority, especially after she has stated that she just doesn't see enough evidence that they suffer from economic discrimination. But we know McArdle is the practical type, and realizes that when people of a certain political ideology have alienated approximately 80% of the country, it might be to their advantage to complain a little less about all the unfair perks given to minorities in our society.

American Exceptionalism

Digby discusses Obama's refusal to release Abu Ghraib photos.
The administration needs to realize that it can't avoid this issue even if it wants to and it's not useful to try to finesse it or kick the issue down the road. There are simply too many lies under the bridge --- it's impossible to take the government at its word. If sexual assaults beyond those which we already know about and saw evidence of (and which were prosecuted) happened,then it will come out. The only question is whether it will be a drip, drip,drip of toxic revelations and speculations that will continue to poison this country and its relationship to the world or whether it will be an official,transparent accounting of what happened. Either way, there's no running away from it.

They aren't running away from it, they are presenting an alternative official accounting so people can choose whom to believe. It's muddying the waters so they can continue to believe that American don't torture and rape. We do and we always have. And we won't stop until we admit it.

"I Want To Believe"

Megan McArdle vlogs with Glen Reynolds and some woman from the Heritage Foundation while on vacation in North Carolina.* (Wasn't she telling us that she had to cut back on spending a little while ago? Oh, never mind, that's her business.) UnFortunately there is a technical problem, and all we hear from McArdle is that Medicare has problems so National Health won't work, and the government should reduce spending. We know McArdle knows that austerity is how the depression of the '30s became the Depression and we are the only advanced Western nation without National Health, but never mind that as well.

The Big Picture quotes an article on Bill Clinton.

Then there are the derivatives. There, Clinton pleads guilty. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, opposed regulation of derivatives as they came to the fore in the 1990s, and Clinton agreed. “They argued that nobody’s going to buy these derivatives, we’ll do it without transparency, they’ll get the information they need,” he recalled. “And it turned out to be just wrong; it just wasn’t true.” He said others share blame, including credit-rating agencies that underestimated the risk. But he accepts responsibility as well.

McArdle keeps saying that one man can't ruin the system, but if one man doesn't believe in safeguards for ideological reasons, he can sure help a lot of other people ruin the system. How long can people deny reality? Forever, I guess.

Case in point: one Mr. John Dugan.

their collapse, there haven't been many people outside these beleaguered
institutions willing to speak up for them.

first place.



the orgy of risky activity going on right under their noses.

more leverage.

still comptroller of the currency.

It amazes me at this late date that people like McArdle want to play Renfield to the banks' Count Dracula, but some people aren't happy unless they worship power and authority and debase themselves propping up the blood-sucking leeches.

*h/t to Anonymous in the FMM comments.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Paying The Piper

A while ago Seymour Hersch said that he had seen photos of the abuse at Abu Ghraib and it was much worse than was being described at that time. Now that "much worse" is out, at least in part. It is perfectly obvious that if people were abusing the prisoners in sexual ways (the lightsticks, the humiliation), they were most certainly sexually abusing the prisoners as well. Any attempts to deny physical evidence will just be pathetically self-serving, so the right will probably waver between trying to ignore it and trying to forget it . But the rest of the world is not made of Americans accustomed to forgiving themselves and giving themselves the benefit of the doubt.

I don't believe in forgiveness and repentance anyway. It leaves too much damage behind, damage people would rather ignore. It's easy to focus on God's joyful gift of convenient amnesia and absolution of guilt. It's a lot harder to clean up the mess you made and deal with the consequences. Sure, we didn't torture anyone--we didn't even vote for someone who ordered torture. But we benefited from these actions, at least for a while. And now, after hundreds of years of making other people pay for our mistakes, we are finally starting to feel the effects as well. I only hope we are half as strong as we think we are.

You've Got To Be Kidding

I just have a minute, but I have to say WTF? Megan McArdle is using as a source now? And articles that quote RedState? And this is acceptable professional behavior to her?

What a joke she is. "Gee, those auto bankruptcies I said had to happen have affected Republicans!! Oh noes, it must be an Obama plot! Oh my goodness this doesn't look good for Obama and those liberal haters! Oh, if we only had Mr. Bush and Mr. Greenspan back to tell us how to survive these rough times that they had absolutely nothing to do with!

Mercy me, whatever shall we do? I know! Let's go out for drinks! Oh, rats, I can't afford that anymore because of Obama!"

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin and Gateway Pundit are on the case as well! Now we'll find out the truth about Obama's Secret Plot!

Wednesday, May 27, 2009


Megan McArdle is going on "vacation." That'll give me time to work on The League of Extraordinary Bloggers: The Cruise To Nowhere.

Phew. I needed the break.

Less Analyzed Megan


Shorter Megan McArdle: It's not Greenspan's fault.

Encapsulated Megan McArdle:

grateful that it isn't the case.


Brava, McArdle.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Ross Douthat Is A Sexist Moron

Ross Douthat does what Ross Douthat does--tell women to keep their legs closed because they do not have his permission to have sex. The rest of his words are just blabber.

Way to go, The New York Times. That's quite the little thinker you have there. Was the guy who spies on women sunbathing in the park not available?

Monday, May 25, 2009

Busy, Back Soon

Heh, this isn't the first time Megan McArdle has scampered off on "vacation" after setting off a firestorm. I'd link but today is busy, so I'll hunt for those instances later. McArdle shouldn't worry. The right is full of people who love to discuss minutia instead of the larger, uglier picture: Our ruling class has gutted our economy, and Republicans and their enablers cheered them on the entire time. People like Megan McArdle want you to be angry at Andrews so you will not be angry with them.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Not So Fast

Before some of us get too carried away with the joy of trashing one's fellow creatures, perhaps we should remember two things: The middle class has barely begun to feel the effects of the recession, and it is in some people's best interest to steer middle class people's anger towards each other instead of the wealthy.

Most of us have had or will have money difficulties at some time of our life and hesitate to judge others' problems without mercy. Also, it is a given that thanks to Wall Street's gluttony, many of us will be much poorer than before, and the road downhill might be very rocky. I prefer to follow the words of wisdom of Megan McArdle, who reminded us that America's financial system was the best in the world when foolish people started talking about regulating it.


who cares?

It's surprising how often everyone in the debate over bankruptcy loses
person or corporation cannot meet their obligations. It doesn't matter whether
Just normal kinds of stupidity, venality, and unlucky accident.

That's nearly the opposite of what McArdle is advocating now, and further proof that McArdle's goal is to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. If she can advocate forgiveness one minute (as she does in this excerpt and her first post on Andrews) and then start digging up dirt on his wife a day or two later, one starts to wonder about McArdle's motives as well.

Friday, May 22, 2009

The World We Have Made


So McArdle will do it for him.






[yip yip]









Thursday, May 21, 2009

Less Spiritual Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle: I have completely bought into the corporation-based point of view, to the point that I see a threat to my credit as worse than a threat to my life. I cannot even imagine a world based on human dignity, and instead crouch fearfully in a world based on how much money people can make off of me.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Double Standards



[yappity yap yap]

government will backstop humanitarian programs and very possibly all state and
place by enabling the lunatics in Sacramento to pretend they can have




Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Ross Douthat Is A Gullible Hack

The movie version of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons is out, and Ross Douthat can't control his loathing for the entire enterprise. The mass market paperback thriller and summer Tom Hanks vehicle, which have made millions of dollars, exist to push an agenda, says Douthat, practically vibrating with indignation.


swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized



These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination

Douthat's proof of this attempt to take Christianity away from him and give it to the immoral masses is an interview with Brown that reveals his purported "didacticism."

Q: You've written novels about a classified intelligence agency and an
ultra-secretive brotherhood. Are secrets something that interest you?

Secrets interest us all, I think. For me, writing about clandestine material
keeps me engaged in the project. Because a novel can take upwards of a year to
write, I need to be constantly learning as I write, or I lose interest.
Researching and writing about secretive topics helps remind me how fun it is to
"spy" into unseen worlds, and it motivates me to try to give the reader that
same experience. Lots of people wrote me after Digital Fortress amazed that the
National Security Agency is for real. I've already started getting similar mail
from Angels & Demons--people shocked to learn about the Illuminati
brotherhood, antimatter technology, or the inner workings of the Vatican
election. My goal is always to make the character's and plot be so engaging that
readers don't realize how much they are learning along the way.


[A]: I imagine some controversy is unavoidable, yes, although it's
important to remember that Angels & Demons is primarily a thriller--a chase
and a love story. It's certainly not an anti-Catholic book. It's not even a
religious book.

Brown explicitly states that the book delves into arcane Vatican matters to get the reader's interest. Most mystery and thriller writers do the same thing. The most entertaining mysteries teach you something new, or immerse you into a new world for a couple of brief hours. The mystery alone is usually not enough; it takes entertaining settings and characters as well. Brown's schtick is the Vatican, and there really should not be any confusion between a beach novel and religious dogma. Douthat manages to dredge up an unbelievable amount of indignation over a couple of popular novels.



For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the
tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension

Douthat should unclench his fingers from around his Bible; nobody's trying to take Jesus away from him. Or trying to deny "Catholicism’s truth claims." They're making a buck and probably increasing Vatican tourist revenues. But Douthat feels "targeted" and "demonized," and calls Brown anti-Catholic twice. He grossly overreacts, defending his Faith from the scourge of popular fiction and summer blockbusters. How dare anyone say that his religion is not the one true religion?

I'm having a hard time seeing why Douthat is in the Times. The Villagers usually prefer their that moral scolding is a little more entertaining, a little more secular. Sex scandals or Democratic witch-hunts, not fundamentalist rants against heathen Hollywood. That's what Big Hollywoood is for, and I fail to see why the Times would use the imploding world of wingnut welfare journalism as a business plan.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Problem? What Problem?

Megan McArdle points us to a New York Times article that says mortgage brokers went from refusing loans to minorities to steering them into sub-prime loans, even when they were qualified for better ones. Oddly, McArdle came to a different conclusion.

The New York Times suggests that the problem is the mortgage brokers; immigrants
and African Americans don't trust banks for a variety of reasons. And they did
trust mortgage brokers who were members of their communities, and steered them
to expensive loans that earned fat commissions.

I don't say that this
isn't the problem--I'm sure it's a least some part of it. But there's a problem
with this sort of analysis. There are a number of different metrics that go into
loan quality, and therefore what a buyer should pay for their loan:

Expenses, especially outstanding debt

Loan-to-value ratio
Most of the studies I've seen
indicating that minorities are steered into pricier loans look at just one, or
at most two, of these factors. But they all matter, particularly the size of the

This isn't the first time McArdle has brought up this subject; it's at least the third. "It is not plausible to argue that the banks knew the loans would go bad . . . and nonetheless jammed billions of them into their portfolios, McArdle sniffed in December 2007, in response to "Nobel-prize-winning economist Gary Becker"'s assertion. "So far I've seen little evidence that, taking these things into account, banks are discriminating against minority borrowers," she insisted after a New York Times article about loan discrimination in January 2008. And in July 2008 she still didn't see a problem after another blogger discussed a similar credit bias situation.

If the companies were statistically discriminating against African Americans,
giving them worse loan terms than they really qualify for, they should be paying
off those loans at higher rates than whites.
They're not. Most of the aggregate research I've seen fails to reject the null
hypothesis that there is no discrimination in loan markets, which means that if
there is discrimination, it is not catching huge numbers of people who are more
likely than their loan terms would suggest to pay their bills on time. Just to
be clear, we're not talking about research that says that blacks who get a
higher interest rate don't pay off at the same rate as whites who get a lower
one--you can't blame the default rate on the higher interest rate. We're talking
about the fact that minorities do not outperform their own loan class. If loan
companies really were discriminating, issuing sub-prime mortgages and car loans
to credit-worthy minorities should be a license to print money.

What a mess. "Most of the aggregate research." "Reject the null hypothesis." "Sub-prime mortgages to minorities should be a license to print money." "There's a problem with this sort of analysis." "Most of the studies I've seen indicating that minorities are steered into pricier loans look at just one, or at most two, of these factors. But they all matter, particularly the size of the loan." Weasel words, free of fact and analysis. McArdle doesn't refute facts, she hen-pecks at the methods used to gather information. That way she doesn't actually have to prove anything, she just casts enough aspersions on the data to confuse the issue. When source after source after source after source brings up a problem, dismissing it out of hand begins to look like bigotry and callous indifference instead of honest disagreement.

She was corrected then and she might be corrected again, but facts don't matter. In the Free Market Fantasyland in McArdle's head, a company will never do anything short-sighted or underhanded because the Free Market Fairy will punish it. Reality is unimportant--the fantasy must live on.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

More Assumptions



Friday, May 15, 2009

From Persuasion by Jane Austen

Such were Elizabeth Elliot's sentiments and sensations; such the cares
the prosperity and the nothingness of her scene of life;
such the feelings to give interest to a long, uneventful residence

added to these. Her father was growing distressed for money.
the heavy bills of his tradespeople, and the unwelcome hints of
but not equal to Sir Walter's apprehension of the state required
he had been constantly exceeding it. It had not been possible
some unnecessary charities, and to refrain from new furnishing
the drawing-room; to which expedients she afterwards added
the happy thought of their taking no present down to Anne,
as had been the usual yearly custom. But these measures,
however good in themselves, were insufficient for the real extent
to confess to her soon afterwards. Elizabeth had nothing to propose
any means of lessening their expenses without compromising their dignity,
or relinquishing their comforts in a way not to be borne.

his name so far. The Kellynch estate should be transmitted whole
and entire, as he had received it.

Their two confidential friends, Mr Shepherd, who lived in
and both father and daughter seemed to expect that something should be
struck out by one or the other to remove their embarrassments
and reduce their expenditure, without involving the loss of
any indulgence of taste or pride.

I Told You So

A good, Christian woman would applaud Megan McArdle's post about the hardships of being a writer, especially in the age of recession. Fortunately I am only one of those things.

Point the first: I told you so. I told you you'd suffer from this disaster, which you and your fellow elite wanna-bes cheered on. Good. Now maybe you'll learn to be less callous towards those in genuine need, though I doubt it.

Point the second: You are being paid to write, making you one of the most fortunate creatures on the planet. I write or read research material every day for free. Stop whining and man up and thank your parents for buying you an education that purchased admiration and respect and jobs.

Point the third: If you are so shallow and insecure that you must live up to someone else's spending, too bad. Learn to go without like all the poor people whom you blame for all their own problems. Hey, maybe if you were a better person you'd be richer!

You call your credit score a sign of a life well-lived. You have no idea. You are not going to enjoy this depression, and I told you that as well.


My thanks to Ken Houghton, who pointed out this post of Megan McArdle's.

McArdle posts that the government is inferior to the free market because the free market is checked by "countervailing market discipline" and the government is not. Her reasons are not very persuasive and are based on her assumption that the government is always worse than free market capitalism, as Larry Kudlow would say. Because of this assumption, McArdle misreads and misinterprets the information she used to give an example of government malfeasance in action.


The spirochete that causes Lyme is hard to detect, so treatment
the spirochete might cause symptoms other than a rash.

[yap yap]

[Pam] Weintraub makes a compelling case that these sorts of
hard-and-fast diagnostic rules [at the CDC] have, at the very least, left some
Scientific Revolutions
. But those revolutions happen because there are
multiple possible centers of power. The government has the ability to
potentially shut the revolutionary centers down.


Most unfortunately, McArdle did not read the book carefully and took away from the events in the book what she wanted to take. Because of her assumptions and prejudices, McArdle makes several embarrassing mistakes.

McArdle assumes the government will make errors that are never corrected and lazily followed without thought.

probably follow, even if they are wrong, because it's:

Easier than doing their own analysis
A lot easier than getting sued
Possibly cheaper than the more effective treatment.

Because of these assumptions, McArdle thinks the CDC's rigid standards hinder the diagnosis of Lyme disease.
[Pam] Weintraub makes a compelling case that these sorts of hard-and-fast
diagnostic rules [at the CDC] have, at the very least, left some indisputable

But McArdle also assumes that, to put it into terms McArdle would understand, protesters are fools interfering with the natural order of the free market. So McArdle suspects all interest groups as well, a fancier way of hating the dirty hippies who want equality and have no respect for their betters.
more impact than a dozen private company reports saying the same.

This disdain leads her to say several very unfortunate things.

[from comments, to Weintraub herself] [...S]ometimes disease advocates are right--but as you undoubtedly also know, sometimes they're crazy. Indeed, sometimes they are both crazy and right.

Stupid, callous, and unkind. But McArdle isn't evil, she's ideological. She doesn't think beyond her comfortable, self-flattering assumptions. She doesn't think about the people who suffer for her ideals. She writes her little posts and flits off, to the next pet peeve or favorite concept. Oddly, they all end up supportive of those in power.

In the comments we see how far afield McArdle's prejudices have taken her. Ms. Weintraub, with some agitation, attempts to correct McArdle's mistakes. She tells McArdle that her son did not have Chronic Lyme disease and the issue was "that the FIGHT over chronic Lyme disease has caused doctors in the community to pull back from diagnosing even classic Lyme disease, creating a large population of late stage patients who are harder to treat." McArdle completely missed this point. Ms. Weintraub also says:

I am not an advocate. I am a very longtime national science journalist and senior editor at Discover Magazine, and tried to present a balanced view in my book even while relating my own experience for full and honest disclosure.

I have traveled around the country interviewing mainstream scientists not involved in the political fight over Lyme but working with the organism and its pathogenesis at the lab bench at major academic institutions. The interviews with these scientists are in the book.

They have given me a very different view than that put forth by the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

I hope we are not at the point where a journalist must either spout the chapter and verse of a single but powerful body or be called an advocate.

McArdle's response is insultingly dismissive:

I'm sorry if I sounded like I was dismissing you; I'm not. First of all, sometimes disease advocates are right--but as you undoubtedly also know, sometimes they're crazy. Indeed, sometimes they are both crazy and right.

But more broadly, I've read one book on the topic, yours. I'm sure we all have had the experience of reading a powerful book, being completely persuaded--then reading another book arguing the opposite, and being completely persuaded by that. I know it's frustrating for you--I've felt the same way many times--but I can't jump to the conclusion you're right without reading other works on the topic. As I say, you're persuasive. And what you describe is certainly behavior that has been described of doctors in other contexts--Semmelweiss, the 48 human chromosomes.

There are a lot of very important discussions to be had regarding the many facets of the health care system in the US. Thanks to McArdle's ideological blindness, this is not one of them.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Get Well Soon

I'm worried about Megan McArdle. She is flooding us with output which is a good thing, especially in an era of lay-offs, but her tone is very troubled. Medicare is bankrupting us, the economy will only get worse, (a new refrain for her) exercise is useless, bartering for goods is increasing, social security is dying, governments are useless. (More about that last post later.) She has a kind word for bankruptcy laws, but otherwise it's all doom-and-gloom under President Obama. Perhaps watching the journalism business contract at the same time Republican economic policies are undercutting the economy is wearing on her nerves.

Less Healthy Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle: Screw the environment and the rest of you, I want my aerosol inhaler.

Bonus Giggle:
My asthma is terrible, and I'm stuck with one of the new inhalers, which is about as effective as waving one of those magnetic copper bracelets you buy off late night tv in front of my chest.

I often shop late at night in front of Megan's chest.

Second Bonus Giggle:

Either McArdle's a bad writer or her chest is too much exposed. First tv shoppers, now all of DC? Where is your shame, girl??

"We're Special"

Poor, krazy Katheryn Jean Lopez says aloud what everyone else is thinking but is too canny to actually emphesize.

For twenty years, the people left behind by the rest of the country have been absorbing Rush's messages that Americans are better than everyone else, which means that everyone else is inferior to us. Whatever we do is the right and moral thing to do, and everyone else, no matter what they do, is less right and less moral. By now the vast majority of people in the country assume that American are superior, both as a people and as a nation. If they weren't told this by Rush they were told this by their parents, by their schoolbooks, by their political leaders, and by their religious leaders. We have the arrogance to routinely demand that God bless America, and have little doubt but that he does. It doesn't occur to most us that our government actually committed acts that resulted in consequences favorable to us. We simply assume that we deserve our special status.

President Obama believes in American exceptionalism as well.




It's sad to see someone brag about our "core set of values" when the entire world plainly sees us destroy economies and murder fellow human beings to achieve and maintain this global domination. Obama has stymied attempts to punish those who ordered torture, probably because he does not want to examine what we have done. His stated reason is that the photos will inflame anti-Americanism and put our troops in danger. I think that ship has already sailed, but I don't believe in American exceptionalism. The White House:
Spokesman Robert Gibbs said release of photos from the cases would merely "provide, in some ways, a sensationalistic portion of that investigation."


Still, he said he had made it newly clear: "Any abuse of detainees is unacceptable. It is against our values. It endangers our security. It will not be tolerated."

The effort to keep the photos from becoming public represented a sharp reversal from Obama's repeated pledges for open government, and in particular from his promise to be forthcoming with information that courts have ruled should be publicly available.

Obama had to go against all of his inherent, superior core values to go back on his word to his supporters. Perhaps he really wants to protect the men he's left in a war zone. Perhaps his admitted belief in American goodness and superiority won't be challenged by photos of Americans torturing their prisoners. But perhaps it will, and he doesn't want to take that chance.

Juan Cole gives Obama the benefit of the doubt, but knows the attempt at denial is futile.
If this consideration did drive the reversal of position, I think it is unfortunate. The US is more likely to get past the mistakes it made 5 years ago if it comes clean and seeks reconciliation than if it goes on trying to cover up the past even though everyone knows what happened.

One of the reasons Republicans have an approval rating of 21% is because "Dick" Cheney is making it very, very difficult to deny reality. Republicans want to feel proud of their country and party but can't as long as it openly commits immoral acts so blatant that even the right can't deny anymore.



Let us believe we are exceptional once again. Let us feel superior. We need it. We have to believe we're better than everyone else. We have to believe that God is on America's side. We have to believe our parents when they say Americans are different from everyone else, chosen ones like the Children of Israel. Otherwise we're just ordinary people, just like everyone else, and can suffer the vicissitudes of fate like everyone else. We're too afraid to give up our security blanket of superiority. We depend on it to survive and without it we'd have to stop, reexamine our actions, and act on our new knowledge. We have too much to lose to do that--our wealth, our relative safety, our ego. So we grab everything we can get, kill them before they kill us, and never look behind the surface of the facade of superiority we've built.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Less Statistical Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle: Going on Social Security is such a positive experience that people can't wait to quit their jobs and live on whatever is left of their savings and their SS riches.


Why do I doubt the veracity of this statement? Maybe because hell will freeze over before McArdle posts links or data to back up her statements.


Shorter Richard Cohen: Just because Cheney lied about war and silenced his critics doesn't mean that we shouldn't listen to him lie about war and try to silence his critics. That would be unfair.

Shorter Kathryn Jean Lopez: Telling teen girls about their bodies and sexual feelings will turn them into sluts.

Monday, May 11, 2009


Evidently AEI isn't the only one suffering in the free market.

Anyway, why did I think it was awful? For starters, the hotel is under renovation, so the traditional pre-dinner reception in the courtyard was gone this year. This meant that everyone had to congregate indoors which turned the place into a steam bath. Also, neither The Weekly Standard nor NR had a reception this year, which was too bad.

You know you're in rough times when the free drinks dry up.

Poor Jonah Goldberg, forced to watch the Left at play while sober. It must have been hell.

Quick Link

A fascinating interview with a hedge fund manager. (Via) One good part:

The thing is that nobody has enough brain power to question every assumption, to think about every single facet of an investment. There are certain things you need to take for granted. And people would take for granted the idea that, "OK, something that Moody's rates triple-A must be money-good, so I'm going to worry about the other things I'm investing in, but when it comes time to say, ‘Where am I going to put my cash?,' I'll just leave it in triple-A commercial paper, I don't have time to think about everything." It could be the case that, yeah, the power's going to fail in my office, and maybe the water supply is going to fail, and I should plan for that, but you only have so much brain power, so you think about what you think are the relevant factors, the factors that are likely to change. But often some of those assumptions that you make are wrong.

n+1: So the Moody's ratings were like the water running...

HFM: Exactly. Triple-A is triple-A. But there were people who made a ton of money in the sub-prime crisis because they looked at the collateral that underlay a lot of these CDOs [collateralized debt obligations] and commercial paper programs that were highly rated and they said, "Wait a second. What's underlying this are loans that have been made to people who really shouldn't own houses—they're not financially prepared to own houses. The underwriting standards are materially worse than they've been in previous years; the amount of construction that's going on in particular markets is just totally out of proportion with the sort of household formation that's going on; the rating agencies are kind of asleep at the switch, they're not changing their assumptions and therefore, OK, notwithstanding something may be rated triple-A, I can come up with what I think is a realistic scenario where those securities are impaired." And pricing on triple-A CDO paper was very, very rich. Spreads were very, very tight, and these guys said, "You know what? These assumptions that triple-A is money-good, or the assumptions that underlay Moody's ratings..."

n+1: Money-good?

HFM: In other words, if you buy a bond, you're going to get back your principle. It's money-good. You're going to get a hundred cents on the dollar back.

But in reality this was wrong, and people were able to short triple-A securities very cheaply. They weren't paying a lot to be short and they made huge money on triple-A securities and triple-A CDO paper that now trades at fifty cents on the dollar. I mean that is like the water's not running today, right? The sun didn't rise. But if you were trained in finance, you probably are more likely to take for granted that, "The rating agencies have a very sound process, credit analysis, the same process that I've been trained in, all the assumptions that I use are kind of the same as the assumptions they use." In the same fashion, if you assess the attractiveness of a trade based on historical data from a time when people weren't really actively doing that trade, and then suddenly everybody's doing that trade, the behavior of the trade will be different. And if you're trained the same way as everybody else, in general you're all going to behave the same. And when everyone behaves the same, that makes trades a lot riskier: everybody's buying at the same time, you get bubbles, everybody's selling at the same time, you get crashes.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Dear Megan

Dearest Megan,

If you start pushing school vouchers again I will clean your clock with the facts you are omitting. You will look like the clueless shill that you are, and by the time I'm done you'll be wishing you avoided this conversation. This will take up a tremendous amount of my time to do the research*, and I am not being paid to work 16-hour days like you are. So I will be very cranky.

Hugs and Kisses,


*Ask your friends what that word means.

P.S. Don't forget that you first got my attention by attacking teachers. How many posts have I written just for that reason? Hundreds. But go ahead, make me angry. Again.

I Just Don't See It





Miss McArdle:

regulations that accomplished this marvelous feat, or even an extraordinary risk
snivelling bankers through sheer force of moral righteousness. But more
very hard even though they have very different bank regulators.

The difference is night and day.

We Need An Authority

Like most conservatives, Jonah Goldberg is authoritarian. He believes in following the strongest leader and obeying him. He doesn't bother thinking beyond obedience; if the boss says jump, he starts writing how high everyone should jump. So naturally he thinks that if conservatives could just come up with a good, popular leader, they would win elections.
Gone are the days when a great but uncharismatic president like Calvin Coolidge could get elected because he promised to do as little as possible. (“Perhaps,” he observed, “one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”)

But Goldberg doesn't really want a government that does little or nothing.
I would love it if the GOP dedicated itself to cutting government by two-thirds, leaving only a minimal social safety net, a big honking military, and a few other bells and whistles for promoting the general welfare. My ideal ticket in 2008 would have been Cheney-Gramm. That’s right, Dick Cheney and Phil Gramm: two old white guys who would crush our enemies and liberate our economy while shouting, “You kids get off my lawn!” at the filthy hippies who would inevitably accumulate outside the White House like so much bathroom fungus.

If only we had Dick Cheney designing our military strategy, and Phil Gramm designing our economic strategy. Except we did, and it brought us to this sorry-yet-happily-conservative-free state. Reality doesn't matter to an authoritarian, however. Maintaining the illusion of a protective Daddy who takes care of you is what really counts.
Liberals bristled at — but didn’t really deny — the suggestion that voters preferred Bush because they’d rather “have a beer with him.” What they fail to fully appreciate is that many voters preferred Obama because they’d rather have a chardonnay with him than with that cranky John McCain. Obama’s winning personality and a widespread yearning for ill-defined “change” were probably more essential to Obama’s victory than his campaign proposals.

Liberals are less authoritarian than conservatives because less authoritarian people are more attracted to liberalism than they are the stratified and closed world of conservatism. Goldberg's method of dealing with disagreement is to write "I know you are but what am I," and this is just another example. Obama won because the Bush Team sent the economy into the crapper. Period. It took a major financial meltdown to overcome the popular Republican platform of telling people their taxes will be cut and that they are superior to the rest of humanity.
So what does this mean for conservatives? Well, it doesn’t mean that we should stop debating ideas. But it also probably means that we won’t have a chance to implement those ideas until the GOP finds a winning salesman or vessel for them, and that person doesn’t seem to exist right now. Again, I’m speaking to my fears, not my hopes.

Again, Goldberg ignores the past eight years in which conservative ideas finally were able to run their natural course without any governmental mitigation. He also ignores the fact that popular Bush became unpopular Bush due to the failure of his policies. It's not the policies, it's the person, he says, so all they need is a new authority to follow and they'll be winners once again.

Watching the right blame Obama for our economic troubles is a surreal experience, but reality doesn't go away just because you ignore it. Republicans will find some other drooling moron with money and a familiar name and immediately hold him up as a paragon, just like they did with Bush. The only question is if there will be anyone left in Jonah's camp when they do.

Authoritarian Parenting


I'm sure the usual cynics will harangue me for being a silly old fool as usual for not recognizing what a torturing society this is long before now. And I would have to admit there's a kernel of truth in the fact that this is not something I probably wanted to know. However, this current debate has made it impossible to ignore any longer: the United States of America tortures its own children. It tortures prisoners. It tortures average citizens whom any policeman believes is failing to smartly comply with his orders and it tortures suspected terrorists. We just call it (in true Orwellian fashion) "Tough Love."

If we could stop abusing our children we could save the world.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

The Truth Hurts

McArdle--We don't care what you think you know about Glenn Greenwald. You have proof of sock-puppetry, besides his admission that a friend of his (boyfriend?) posted repeated praise of him without telling his connection to Greenwald? If not, drop dead.

You keep your mouth shut when it comes to answering his fact-based criticisms of you, except by making the most passive-aggressive, glancing responses possible. But you don't mind a little dig here, a little libel there. You don't have the brains, courage, or self-respect to challenge him openly, so you throw a little red meat to your more slimy commenters, in the hopes that they'll chew on it for a while and fling a lot of blood around.

[pejorative removed-she's not worth it]

Progressive Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Gas Chambers To Pogroms

This Megan McArdle post has been dissected already, but I just can't pass it by altogether. There's just so much wrongness that I'll have to skim through it quickly. Tempus fugit, as Megan would no doubt say.

Megan quotes Joshua Kurlantzick's article on democracy and capitalism in Thailand. He points out that an elite few prospered, so the poor demanded their elected leaders alleviate the gross income disparity. People are always afraid of those they have wronged so the middle class elite feared such alliances.

Megan is drawn to this article enough to write about it, and interprets it through the elite-colored glasses. The Progressives, she says, "was a backlash against the corrupt hoi polloi."

Rent-seeking populists, backroom-dealing political machines--these were both inimical to classical liberalism, and also the voice of minority-majorities, who used favorable local demographics against members of the national elite.

McArdle makes no mention of the enormously important reformist aspect of the Progressive movement. It's a dishonest attempt to withhold information to make her point, and is one of the many reasons she is called a right-wing hack.

Think of some of the signal accomplisments of the Progressives: Planned Parenthood. Immigration restrictions. Civil service reform. Massive campaigns against the corruption of the urban machines. "Mental hygeine". Spot a trend?

And here is further proof of the deep, deep devotion McArdle bears towards the intellectual scholarship of one Jonah Goldberg, who believes that Progressives were all Mengelesque eugenicists. She means for us to spot a trend of racial/social/political purification by those Nazi Progressives. She's far too delicate to get her hands dirty--that's what the Corner is for--but she's willing to push Goldberg's ideas as long as she can maintain plausible deniability. So reform is really genocide, the most graceless and ungracious explanation possible for the actions of Americans who were trying to live by the supposed ideals of their nation and faith. Yes, many Progressives played with the new scientific knowledge like it was an ant farm, but that doesn't make corrupt the Progressive desire help the less fortunate and increase representation in government.

And then it gets worse.

The poor benefit from the capitalist system, probably more than the rich--compare Pharoah to Bill Gates, then compare a standard Egyptian peasant around 2000 BC to, say, a minimum wage worker in America. But if you don't have the social capital to make it to the top, at any given time, it may look like it pays off to undermine or overthrow the system. Naturally, the middle class, which preserves the system, will be averse to any system that gives them the power to do so.

The poor benefit from democracy more than the rich. They are able to alleviate the misery of their condition by trying to improve equality, in the land of equality and opportunity.(/sarcasm) The poor initially benefitted from science as much as or more than the rich. The rich could flee to the hills during the Black Death and hire physicians and nurses. They could eat healthy food and travel to healthy climates. But science helped heal poor and rich alike. The poor could finally afford some medical attention. Finally, the poor here benefit from being born in one of the richest countries of the world. But the poor don't benefit from capitalism more than the rich, since capitalism merely means that property is privately owned, which might be a problem for the poor, who tend to be without property and other assets. And the funny thing about capitalism is that those with the property tend to be a little, well, forgetful of those without.

Beneath the confusion and bad writing, the theme finally becomes clear. The middle class don't feel solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised. They don't really want to help them, they want to eliminate them. And the poor want to eliminate the elite middle class right back. Thus is always was, thus it ever shall be. So the elite left and intellectual left are really missing the boat on the true situation here, where there is a place for everyone and everyone sits firmly in his place. That's the fundamental truth of conservatism, which wants an elite to kowtow to and a peasantry to kick. And it's also the fundamental truth of libertarianism, with its "I-got-mine-Jack, screw-you" philosophy.

Because this is Megan McArdle, she cannot resist further inflaming class warfare, her only way of looking at those who are not exactly like her.

And if you're sitting there, feeling all superior to those benighted bourgeois, consider all the things you want to take out of the hands of ordinary Americans because otherwise those amoral toads will do the wrong thing. Gay marriage. Or prayer in school. Immigration. Trade. I've no doubt that you have some very compelling reason that these things are entirely different from support for the rule of law or a standard liberal economic order. The point is, no one's really comfortable with letting the majority set all the standards.

That's just ugly. And wrong, of course. McArdle frequently attributes her own attitudes and bigotries to others, which makes her moral lectures especially galling. I want to see the quote from a respectable left writer who calls people amoral toads because they mistakenly think their God wants them to hate others or pray in public constantly. I also want the proof that the left wants to abstain from the rule of law to gain more legal rights for others. It's nonsensical babble.

Corrected for clarity.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Wishin' and Hopin'

Reading Megan McArdle's commenters is getting sickening. So much willful self-delusion and malice is just nauseating. Not that I have anything against malice, but the level of denial and wishful thinking is painful to see, and makes me deeply depressed about our future. When the economy worsens a lot of people are going to get very ugly. I had my doubts about this--who is more self-satisfied and inert than the typical American?--but there is a world of confusion, pain and anger underneath all that Cheetos dust, and it might finally be starting to simmer.

So let's look at some stupid.
James Surowiecki has a very interesting column arguing that this bubble was different because unlike the earlier banking booms, there was no point to the wild spending. The bubble didn't bring us railroads and electrification; it brought us . . . houses. Lots and lots and lots of houses.

I'm of two minds on this.

No, McArdle is of zero minds on this. She is not thinking this through.

What does she mean by banking booms? A banking boom is not a bubble. According to Ronald R.King, Vernon L. Smith, Mark V. van Boening in "The Robustness of Bubbles and Crashes in Experimental Stock Markets" (via wikipedia), the definition of an economic bubble is “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values.” The point of a bubble is that there isn't a valid reason for the price increases.

On the one hand, I think that this is an interesting point.

Why? An explanation would be nice. Also essential for reading comprehension.
On the other hand, of course, the bubble in the 1920s was not limited to electric stocks, or even stocks. Lots of money was wasted on railroads, Florida real estate, mining concerns, and many other unrelated phenomena. And if you look at the history of the 1920s, you see the same thing we see in the 1998-2008 era: markets awash in too much money.

Which means that what we have is a credit boom. Credit was too easy to get and everyone got drunk on it, seeing it as the road to quick wealth. The credit to start the dot.coms, the credit to buy houses and malls and office parks.

So I wonder if there isn't a sort of post-hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning to these "explanations" of the previous booms and busts.

Which explanations are you talking about? Surowiecki says that there's no upside to our most recent bubble. You say maybe, maybe not. You're not discussing the reasons for booms and busts. This is utterly irrelevant.

A market bubbling over with too much credit will end up plowing a lot of money into some technology or industry which ends up being really, really important twenty years later. (The electric revolution continued, surprisingly rapidly, in the 1930s).

And here we have the typical faulty, fairy-tale reasoning of the ideological and self-delusional. Simply stating that something must happen does not mean that it did or will. McArdle doesn't even try to pull something out of her ass as an example. "Some" technology or industry--which? She sounds like the delusional fools who thought that we would win in Iraq because of our "will." Perhaps some new technology or industry will pop up, but anything as sweeping and important as electricity will be funded no matter if we have bubbles or not. In fact it seems the government had a lot to do with the spread of electricity, just like it did with roads and utilities and airplanes. Orville and Wilbur Wright got their first major funding from the US government signal corps, for instance. Even if this new technology is funded, the money stolen by Wall Street is gone forever, the wealth based on debt vanished like the chimera it was, and there is currently absolutely nothing big enough to replace the hole that the housing bubble left when it burst. Which was Surowiecki's point.

All McArdle is trying to do is the same thing she has been doing for a year--try to mitigate and shift blame for the economic disaster from McArdle's fellow ideologues and greedy Wall Street bastards to the powerless. Hey, maybe something good will come out of this disaster after all, like electricity! I can just see the links she'll get from the brain trust at National Review, who use her work to prop up their hatreds and fears in respectable, educated clothing. McArdle's parents paid $38,000 a year for her to grow up into a Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg's parents must be thanking God right now that they never bothered to do anything more expensive than legacy him into journalism school at a girls' college.

We look back and interpret the bubble as having been "about" that technology. But at the time, when it's not obvious what the big winner is going to be, it just looks like a giant mess.

Fear not, little libertarians and right-wingers! Sure, everything looks bad now but sometime in the future for reasons unknown and assuming giant, magical gains in technology, we'll be just fine.

Sure, we may all be dead by then, but at least McArdle won't have to listen to dirty hippy socialists complaining about the New Depression.

UPDATE: (crossposted from Fire Megan McArdle comments):Oh, I finally get it... The only explanation is that she's trying to say that this wasn't a housing bubble, it was too much money in the system. (Her stupid Greenspan-derived theory that too much Asian savings created the bubble, not low interest rates and slice and dice mortgages.)

Monday, May 4, 2009

Taking A Sick Day

I leave you with Megan McArdle's latest opus, a snide tirade that shows little understanding of the big picture: economic disaster.

But this is the person who listened to Warren Buffet say, "“There’s no signs of any real bounce at all in anything to do with housing, retailing, all that sort of thing,” and then wrote about a marriage proposal, executive compensation, and journalists losing jobs. Topics that obviously appealed to her personally, yet don't really constitute economic journalism. How much did it cost to send McArdle on this junket?

Instead of babbling about a market bottom, McArdle should have been listening to people like Buffet and looking at this.

A real look at the shareholder's meeting is here.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Material Possessions Are A Girl's Best Friend

Let's catch up with Megan McArdle:

I just wanted to post a huge picture of a wedding ring.

By the way, some of McArdle's commenters are very ugly towards other people. She should do something about that, but I guess when you are forced to have 16-hour days the little things get lost under the crushing weight of the work load.

Fortunately she does have time to look at wedding ring photos, however. Although she might be advised to look at these rather than these.

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Do Cocktail Parties Count As Work?






Friday, May 1, 2009

Less Tall Megan





Less Short Shorter, IV:

