The News

I've come to the realization that my bugaboo is the press. I think it's a good bugaboo to have, though, because it is critically important to the functioning of a democracy, and our press is falling to pieces on multiple fronts.

First, they are entirely unable to reign in their bias. In fact it seems to be getting worse. This last election was a rapid acceleration of the press' plunge into untrustworthiness.

Second, when they're not being biased, they're wasting your time. I assume you're aware of this case with the little girl named Caylee who was, presumably, killed by her own mother. It's a tragic case, but you know what? It has nothing to do with me. It is not news. News is something that is of importance to you on some level. This story is not of any importance to me, period. I don't know these people, I don't live in their town, I don't live within 2,000 miles of them. Whatever happens here has no bearing on me, at all, so it is not news. This story's newsworthiness is limited at best to the city that they live in. Probably not even that.

But it is national story. That doesn't sound right, does it? But I can't call it news. So maybe we need a new word. This is national storypulp. There, that's better. That's my word for "news" that is not fit to be called news.

I could call it entertainment, but it's not entertaining at all, it's a God damned tragedy. So here, I need yet a new word, which brings me to my point. What do you call a story like this, that is not news and is not entertainment?

This is the dissemination of tragedy to people to fulfill some sick inner desire to share in the misery of people that are otherwise of no importance or meaning to us. It has no socially redeeming value. No benefit is made when people are attracted, for whatever sad and pathetic reason, to follow this story. It is porn without the sex, but with the tragedy. What do you call that? How about:

Tragedy Porn.

Fighting Back in the Culture Wars

My question today is, when are conservatives going to actually, you know, put up a fight?

As you probably know, dating site eharmony.com has now been forced to create a gay dating site, because apparently offering a site that does straight dating and not gay dating services is discriminatory.

So, conservatives, what are you doing? You're sitting around on your ass. You're whining and moaning and complaining, and doing nothing else. That's why you're going to lose.

There are many, many gay dating sites that do not provide straight dating services. Just look up "gay dating" on any search engine. Why are they not all being sued today?

Why is conservative America refusing to fight? I don't understand it. You're going to lose over and over, year after year, and what you value and love will all be destroyed by your enemies, and you will be sitting around miserably whining about it, and yet doing nothing.

Sue these sites. They are discriminating. Throw the ridiculous arguments right back at them, only tenfold, a hundredfold. Sue every gay dating site in the country for discrimination.

Start fighting, for God's sake. I'm not a lawyer, but if someone wants to tell me how to go about it, I'll do it myself.

How the Stock Market Works

Originally posted at the Brew Board, for the benefit of the miscreants therein. Or thereon.

It's the first day of a week off, and so I have a bit of spare time. About a week, to be exact. So I will be annoying the Green Board in new and exciting ways. Someone a while back asked to be explained what the stock market is, so I thought I'd give that a go. Please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times.

Say BrewBasser has a company, it's gotten pretty big, and it is doing well. He makes, let's say, assault rifles (his new model, the "Lonnie Mac10" is very popular). He's selling the guns in the local Chico California area and everyone loves them, but he wants to branch out with new gun stores (Crazy BrewBasser's Guns fer Killin'). But he just doesn't have the money and the bank doesn't want to loan him any.

So what he does is go public. First, he divides the company up by a certain number, let's say one million. Each of these is called a share. He can't really divide the company by a million, picking a brick for one share and a drill bit for another share, so he basically says that each share gives ownership of one millionth of everything in company. A millionth of the drill bit, a millionth of each brick, and a millionth of the painting of Orudis and 80Schilling in the hallway, named "The Fox and Hound in Repose", painted by famous painter LeDis.

He makes up some fancy looking documents called stock certificates, and when a person buys them, they have bought a tiny part of the company. They don't actually have to hold the certificates any more, but they used to.

He can sell these shares to his friends and neighbors, he doesn't have to make them publicly available, or he can sell on the open market to just anybody. That's what BrewBasser does. He goes to a stock market, which is just like any market, but instead of selling apples or LeDis paintings, it just sells shares of stock in a lot of companies.

The main one in the US is the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), but there are stock markets around the world. Australia has one called the ASE (Australian Stock Exchange), Japan has one called the Nikkei, etc. etc.

They give you a nice, easy to remember series of letters, this is your ticker symbol to represent your company. The ticker symbol for Bank of America, for example, is BAC. The symbol for Google is GOOG. This is from the days when stock traders got all their info across an early precursor to the internet called the stock ticker, which printed out stock symbols and prices on tape in some broker's office, from the stock market. They had to be short because thousands of companies were being sent around on this ticker tape machine, and they wanted the names to be really short because tape costs money. This was how you found out what your stock was selling for. You sat around staring at a freaking tape coming out of a machine, waiting for your symbol to come up.

The NYSE gives BrewBasser's company the symbol GUNZ. Now people can find out what his company is selling for by entering the symbol at a site like Yahoo Finance.

Let's say The Stain, in his first foray into the stock market, buys 100 shares. The stock price is $12, so this cost The Stain $1200, which he had to sell his car for, and now he rides a bike to work and his neighbors laugh at him. Ah, but they won't be laughing for long. Or, they'll be laughing even harder. It all depends on how things go.

To add insult to injury, the people who arrange for the stock to be sold (brokers) charge The Stain $10.95 for the transaction. Nothing is free, especially in the stock market. The Stain creates a post on his favorite bulletin board to decry this injustice.

So BrewBasser sells the shares, and keeps 51% of them for himself, because if anyone, or any group, gets more than 50% of that stock, he no longer has control of the company and they can throw him out. When you sell shares, you're selling parts of the company, and anyone who owns more than half controls the company, no matter who started it or who works there. This happened to the founders of Cisco - they sold more than half the company and got fired. They still owned whatever shares they owned, but they no longer had a job at the company they founded.

So, BrewBasser opens five new stores with the $12 million dollars he raised in his Initial Public Offering (IPO, basically the initial sale of the stock.) The new stores do great, because everyone loves how BrewBasser has somehow skirted California law and made them all fully automatic. Woohoo!

When a company that is publicly trades does well, then the stock price goes up, because the company is worth more. It does not necessarily go up by the exact amount of how the value has changed, though. Valuation of stocks is insanely complicated, and also can be driven by emotion.

Why is Bank of America (BAC) worth $20 a share, then a week later worth $11 a share? This is a question I would like the answer to myself. Very much. The value of the company did not decrease by almost half, but people got scared, and thought that because of the economy, it probably wouldn't make much money in the future. The stock price reflects what people think the company is worth, and is going to be worth in the future.

But people love BrewBasser's company and see a big future for it, so the stock price goes up like a rocket. $15, $39, $100, $230, finally today it is at $295. At this point, BrewBasser decides to split the stock, because he wants the stock price to be affordable. So he splits the stock 3 to 1. The Stain's stock is now worth 1/3rd of what it was before, but he has 3 shares for every 1 share he used to have, so now he has 300 shares, and they're worth $98.33 each. His stock is worth $29,500 now.

You don't have to split stock, by the way. Berkeshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet's investment company, has never split, and one share now costs $90,000. It used to be $147,000. Warren Buffet doesn't give a crap whether you can afford his stock or not.

Also, some stocks pay dividends. This is basically taking the profit that the company has and splitting it up by one million, and paying each share that amount. So every quarter, The Stain gets on average 25 cents per share. With the new 300 shares he has, he's making $75, and let's say since he's just turning around and buying new stocks every time that happens.

By the way, people have gotten rich on small numbers of shares over a long time. Early investors in Wal Mart who owned only a small amount, who held their shares did very well. Stocks can go up an unlimited amount.

The Stain decides he doesn't want to be exposed to just one stock, because what if the California Legislature closes that loophole that lets BrewBasser sell automatic weapons? The company will probably be severely affected and the stock price will crash. So The Stain sells 2/3rds of his holdings and spends 1/3rd on another stock (a company called "Folsom Example Stories, Inc.", ticker symbol WTF). He also decides that even having money in two stocks is too limiting, so he invests in what is called a mutual fund.

A mutual fund is simply a collection of other stocks. There is a huge and frightening array of mutual funds. Some mutual funds only buy tech stocks like Google, Apple and Microsoft. Some only buy industrials like GE, Kraft Foods and Chevron. Others only invest in big companies, or small companies, or any combination anyone wants to invent.

So then, one day, things start to go to hell. How do we know its going to hell? We can't watch individual prices, they're too volatile and tell us too little about the economy as a whole, or the sector we are interested in. Some nice people make a list of stocks, and they call that an index.

One of the most popular and influential indexes is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. When people say "The Dow went down 400 points today", this is what they mean. The Dow is not a stock or a fund, it's just a list of companies and their stock prices. There are 30 companies on the Dow right now, all very large companies that are thought to represent big companies as a whole pretty well. These companies include GM, AT&T, Walt Disney Company and McDonald's.

So basically, when the Dow starts to fall, the biggest, most stable companies in the country are making less money and becoming less valuable. This is a good indicator of the stock market as a whole, and the future economy.

There are other indexes too, like the NASDAQ (which is tech companies) and the S&P 500, which tracks 500 companies.

We could talk about the myriad of other securities and how to trade them, but you're probably bored and stopped reading five paragraphs ago. But just as an example, you don't have to buy stocks thinking they're going to go up (which is called "buying long" or "going long"). If you think they're going to go down, you can sell them short, which is basically selling stocks you don't own and buying them later, hopefully at a lower price. But if the stock actually goes up, you lose money, and since it can go up an unlimited amount, you can lose an unlimited amount. Short selling was stopped when the market was really tanking, but now you can do it again.

So the Dow is going down, and The Stain interprets this as a sign of a coming economic downturn. He thinks agricultural companies are going to do ok because no matter what happens, people gotta eat (this is a popular strategy today actually). So he finds a mutual fund that invests in agriculture stocks. He chooses DBA.

Now he owns stock in many companies by owning the fund.

Then things go right to hell. Companies are laying off, people are spending less, and the economy is in the crapper. Worse, California elected Gavin Newsom to be governor and he closed that gun loophole. But The Stain is a very clever individual. He is friends with the secretary in Newsom's office, and she tells him that the new law is going to happen. The Stain, seeing the BrewBasser's company is going to be ruined, sells all of his stock in the company. The next day, the law goes through and BrewBasser's stock goes down 90%.

If you know something that the general public does not, and you buy or sell a stock based on that info, that is called insider trading, and it is thoroughly illegal. Martha Stewart went to prison for this. The Stain only had 100 shares of stock in GUNZ though, so his sale doesn't look out of the ordinary. If it had been 100,000 shares, the SEC would soon be knocking on his door and asking all kinds of uncomfortable questions. Damn do-gooders.

The agriculture stocks do ok, as expected. Unfortunately, Folsom Example Stories, Inc. goes out of business because there's just no money in writing example stories. That stock plunges and The Stain loses all of that investment, but since he diversified, he's still doing ok.

BrewBasser goes on to start a new company, Full Auto Beer, but it just isn't the same. He falls into a vat at the brewery, and stays there for a week.

Famous painter LeDis ended up in a huge controversy in the art world: It turned out that he worked for the military and contributed money to the McCain campaign. This was intolerable, and he was hounded out. He eventually made a living analyzing the migratory movement of African Swallows, which is not good work because as we all know, African Swallows are non-migratory.

Finally, The Stain returns to his neighborhood, triumphant. He takes the money he got from selling GUNZ and buys a custom Ford F-150, black, totally sweet ride. He drives down the street now with pride as he surveys the wrecked lives of his neighbors, most of whom are now unemployed, alcoholic and involved in prostitution in some way.

"Revenge is a dish best served cold, ****ers" he cackles under his breath.

Just something

It occurred to me a bit ago that the news business has fundamentally changed, and that change is this: They are no longer news reporters, they are storytellers. As a result, the primary objective is no longer getting the news right, it is presenting an interesting story. It is the fundamental difference between the documentarian and the fiction writer. But I'll get back to this.

If I'm ignoring you, this is probably why

1. You've committed one of the well-known logical fallacies. There are lots of fallacies and I don't know them all, but I know most of these, and so should you.

1a. Particularly, you have Assumed Facts Not in Evidence (a.k.a. "Loaded Question".)

1b. Particularly, you have a False Premise.

1c. You have committed the detestable Burden of Proof fallacy.

1d. You have committed the unfathomably common Accident fallacy.

2. You've made a statement which is in error, and it would be easy for you to find out it was in error if you did some basic research. Google or Yahoo is a good place to start. I'm not your research assistant.

3. You've posted in an overly dismissive/confrontational manner, and I just don't feel like encouraging your attitude.

4. You're wrong, but it would take too long to explain why.

4a. You're wrong, but I just don't feel like talking to you.

4b. Less commonly, you aren't wrong, but I dislike you so much that I can't bring myself to agree with you.

5. Your post doesn't actually contribute to the discussion, or no debateable point can be deduced from it. Alternately, your posts are just incoherent.

7. Your post has three or more of the above problems.

How do you destroy the press?

I'm looking for ideas here, folks.

The press during this election revealed itself to be even more biased, unfair and incapable of doing its job than it has in previous years, and that's really saying something. But it's one thing when the press has a bias and you know it, and it's another when they're actively campaigning for one candidate. The press absolutely abandoned its traditional (and critical) role of vetting the candidates. As a result, they have never, to this day, pressed Obama on his relationship with a 60's radical terrorist, gave him a pass on an anti-white, anti-American preacher that he acknowledged was a huge influence on his life, and still hasn't looked into Tony Rezko.

But we do know, for example, what political parties Sarah Palin's husband belonged to, and that a plumber in Ohio owes back taxes. The press can dig up that kind of dirt. They had his tax records publicized in only a few days, while questions about Barack Obama went unanswered - in fact unquestioned - for months. Years.

Anyway, the behavior of the press has transcended bias and become utterly dishonest advocacy. Without admitting that they were doing it, they focused like a laser beam on McCain's troubles, and dismissed every Biden gaffe and Obama evasion without even blinking. Whether they actually affected the election is beside the point. Any American who votes primarily on what the Mainstream Media tells them is voting out of almost total ignorance of reality. And that's not how Democracy is supposed to work.

We have some advantages. The press is not as monolithic as it used to be. There are more fair and balanced news organizations out there now. But we need to make a concerted effort to bankrupt the media companies that pretend to be fair and unbiased while actively working for one party.

The culprits are ABC, CNN, NBC, CBS and, as if it even needed to be mentioned, MSNBC. There are newspapers too, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, which actively suppressed video of Obama meeting with advocates and associates of Palestinian terrorists. The Associated Press is absolutely untrustworthy, having been the spearhead in destroying the credibility of Joe the Plumber for having the tenacity to ask Obama a question. Time and Newsweek (now web-only, hopefully the first step in a painful death) are biased.

How do you destroy a media organ? In America, the best way is just to stop watching them, and if you haven't done this yet, I have to ask: Why would you watch news from an organization that is lying to you, and consistently hiding the truth from you? What are you trying to accomplish? You're not getting educated, you're getting indoctrinated. You're not learning the truth, you're just learning dogma. So stop letting them flood you with lies and half-truths. Just turn them off. Look up the news on the web and find organizations you can trust.

If you want a good guide toward bias in the news, check out Newsbusters, and even more, the Media Research Center. These two sites will provide you with all the evidence you could hope for, if you are not yet convinced.

Also, unbiased news sources are few and far between, but I've always found Breitbart.com to be very fair. Reuters is not egregiously biased. The Christian Science Monitor (now web-only) is pretty fair. Fox News leans a little right, but is a paragon of virtue compared to most of them today.

Beyond that, we need to start looking at ways to interfere with the way the media does business. One hard and fast rule is that you should never cooperate with a media organ. Do not talk to them (chances are excellent they will lie about what you said anyway), or if you do, find a way to deceive them. Make up a fairly salacious story - the press loves something juicy. Use a fake name. They probably won't bother to check anyway - in addition to being biased and fairly stupid, most reporters are amazingly lazy.

We had a very interesting case of someone doing this recently. Remember the story about how Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent? Well, it now looks like somebody hoaxed the press completely, and that the person quoted for the story, Martin Eisenstadt, doesn't even exist. Not only does he not exist, but organizations he supposedly works with, the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy and the Eisenstadt Group, don't exist either. But that's the media for you. Like I said, unless they're chasing down Obama's critics or revealing national secrets, they're colossally lazy. Might explain why most of them make little more than minimum wage, but that's another story.

If you can cook up something complex like this, that's great. After you humiliate the media organizations that publish your transparent lies, make sure to forward your success to as many blogs as possible, because of course the media will not talk about it in any depth.

Otherwise, a fake name and a cell phone can get you a long way, and the great part is, if the organization in question isn't totally corrupt, it wouldn't work anyway.

If you see a news crew affiliated with one of the aforementioned networks, you should try to interfere with it in all legal ways possible. When the person starts speaking into the camera, for example, jump forward and get between him or her and the camera. You don't even have to say anything. Don't do anything illegal - don't damage anything or attack anyone. Just interfere. Unplug things when they aren't looking. This is what leftists call "direct action" - you're putting yourself in between the media and the lie they want to tell. Jumping in front of a camera isn't illegal, but when the media has sold your whole country down the river, it is patriotic.

Now is the time to destroy the press

We must gather and create a strategy. The press has subverted democracy, again. We have to ask ourselves how we are going to fight a force that is arrayed against democracy. Yes, we must avoid watching the programs, that is a given, and its working fairly well. Now its time to move to the next level. We must interfere with the press. We must prevent it from doing its dirty deed. When you see a CNN crew, you have to jump in front of the camera, make noise, whatever it takes. Just stop them from disseminating their lies.

They have proven that they cannot be trusted. Now is the time to actively oppose them, and stop their lies before they can be broadcast.

Submit your ideas. Our democracy is on the line.

A piece of Russian history

I received today an unusual acquisition, a Mosin Nagant 1891/30 rifle, released at some point from a Russian arms cache and sold to the Americans. It was $99.95 at a local sporting goods store, cheap for a relatively accurate, high caliber weapon.

I won't bore you with the history of this model, but I will tell you that it was built by the Izhevsk Arsenal in 1942. For those of you who do not know, let me tell you where, and when, this rifle came from.

In 1942, the Soviets were fighting a losing battle against the invading German Wehrmacht. The Germans attacked in June 1941, and throughout 1941 and 1942, the Soviets were in a dire fight for existence. The Germans crushed the Soviet defensive lines and captured enormous numbers of prisoners. Only two things seemed to bode well for the Soviets: The endless Russian Steppe, and the brutal Russian winter. In fact, if Russia were the size of France, it would have been over with in 1941. If it were the size of the United States, it would have been decided in 1942, in the German's favor. But Russia goes on forever. Napoleon knew this, and Hitler was about to learn it. Even after the Germans had penetrated their furthest into Russian territory in 1943, within site of the three primary Russian cities, they had only conquered about 1/4th of Soviet territory.

The Russian defense, such as it could be called, comprised two basic commodities: Russian soldiers and space. When they had the former, they fought for the latter. Otherwise, they gave it up and fell back to another position. A seemingly unending supply of both kept the Soviets in the war, year after year. They created and committed infantry forces as quickly as they could. When the Germans threatened a base of production, they dismantled the factories and moved them further into the Russian interior, and built more weapons and formed more divisions. Many were captured. Some survived. The Germans advanced, and always, always, more Russian infantrymen, and further to go.

"With amazement and disappointment, we discovered in late October and early November that the beaten Russians seemed quite unaware that as a military force they had almost ceased to exist."
Günther Blumentritt, Chief of Operations to German General Gerd von Rundstedt, Army Group South

The primary weapon of the Soviet infantryman at this time was the Mosin Nagant 1891/30 rifle, an example of which I now possess. It is a bolt action rifle chambering the 7.62mm x 54mm round, basic in design and function, easy to manufacture, use and clean. And manufacture they did. Price is decided by supply and demand. My price, $99.95, was decided primarily by a huge supply of rifles coming from some 37 million that were manufactured by the Soviets and their clients during World War I, the interwar years, World War II, and after.

The Russians are famous for building dependable, reliable, simple weapons - and burying them. Who knows how many of these guns were locked away by the Soviets, waiting for the Cold War to turn hot. It never did. Now, apparently recognizing that the Americans are not going to invade, they have emptied their warehouses and are selling the obsolete firearms by the gross. The ammo, too. Surplus ammunition for this rifle from the Eastern Bloc and Russia goes for about 18 cents a round, versus about a dollar a round for new US ammo. I have 440 rounds of it on order now, made in the 1980's, maybe under the order of Andropov.

Sitting around for 30 years... waiting for the war with the capitalists. And this is a rifle that was obsolete even then. This round does not fit in the AK-47 or the AK-74.

I disassembled and cleaned the weapon. It seems to be in fine shape. Everywhere are the signs of corners cut and minor blemishes dismissed. The stock is a little rough, the metal work is not up to American standards, either now or then. But the rifle cocks, fires, and I suspect, does so accurately enough to kill a German soldier at 100 yards. In 1942, that was perfect.

I want to whisper to this gun: "You are in the United States now, and not in the hands of a defender of the Motherland. I bought you for ninety nine American dollars, because communism lost, and I have bought you as the cheapest spoils of victory."

I want to say that. I can't.

I can't sully the victory of the men who carried this rifle from Moscow to Berlin.I can't demean the sacrifice made by men who are no worse than I am. Whether their cause is just or not, it doesn't matter. They died. Their lives stopped in 1942 or '43 or '44. They put everything on the line to defend against tyranny, and some of them, in the end, lost everything. And in the end, won everything. They won it all.

I will never insult their name or their sacrifice. They are better men than me.

So I clean and learn this gun, like the young men who put their lives on the line for their homeland, and when I do...

The rifle speaks to me.

What are the chances that it did not see service? Very low. Made in 1942, it would have had to sit around unused while newer weapons were issued. Not likely.

This weapon was on the back of an infantryman in 1942. I know it. Did the soldier who carried it kill any Germans with it? The possibility is distinct. It was in service for three years of war and survived. It almost certainly fired upon the enemy. It was at the Pripyet marshes, in a column of Russian soldiers, perhaps. It was in Poland, or Lithuania or Kiev... it was held by an 18-year old farmer as he ran in the dust behind a T-34 at Kursk in 1943.

It was held by a boy, a Russian boy, who leveled it against the invading Fascists and died, before he could fire. It was at Karkhov, fighting the soldiers of Hoth, Kempf, Manstein! It defended the motherland in the service of Malinovski, Matutin, or even the great Zhukov himself. Perhaps his guard carried this gun.

Yes, the Communists lie, and sometimes those lies are what is needed, sometimes there is beauty in a lie. Sometimes the lie descends through the ages, in a cheap propaganda poster or a story in Pravda. In the end, victory is the first prerogative. The lie becomes merely a simplistic truth.

It was the son of a desperate and patriotic father from Peryaslav, terrified, and yet after seeing his village burn, wanted nothing but to kill the Nazi oppressor. Maybe it wasn't even a man. A woman held this rifle and fired on the advancing Germans in a trench surrounding Moscow, in the rubble of a building in Stalingrad, cold and sparse and meager, scratching for existence, the gray monotone of sacrifice to the Motherland.

Perhaps.

How the Media Creates the News

It has taken me a long time to realize this, even though my degree is in journalism, and I was a journalist for a time, both in college and afterwards. But there's something everyone should understand about the media in this country: They do not report the news. They make the news.

What you think about anyone famous is largely decided by how the media creates the story. They admit to following the "arc" of a story, or the "running commentary", like that arc is naturally existing and they're just following it. That's not true at all. The media follows the arc that it creates.

Let's try something: Let's come up with names for the story arcs that the media has chosen for the candidates.

We would like to believe that these "stories," the ongoing streams of news about one or a series of events, are merely reflections of reality. We think, for example, that the arc of one story, let's name it "McCain's Terrible Campaign", is merely the reflection of a terrible campaign. And to some degree it is the reflection of McCain's mistakes. But the media gets to decide how it is going to portray any story, and eventually, any story arc. Both candidacies can have difficulties and successes. The media gets to decide whether, and how, and how often, and how long, to cover every success and every failure. This is how this running commentary is created.

Let me be clear that this is not some conspiracy. It's just the result of who reporters are, the kind of people who decide to take a low pay, relatively influential position. They tend to be democrats. That reporters and editors are heavily democrat is beyond debate. When people of a certain outlook report things, they decide what to report and how to report it, and their bias creeps in. Sometimes it is well suppressed, sometimes it is obvious. Someone like Brit Hume or Brian Williams conceals his bias well. Someone like Keith Olbermann, not well at all.

But the trend is clear. A story arc called "McCain's Terrible Campaign" is much more likely to develop than a story arc called "Obama's Terrible Campaign," even if both have the same campaigns, because the former is the one that the reporter finds compelling, and therefore is the one that he is most likely to pursue. Looking closely at his preferred candidates mistakes is uncomfortable. Looking at his opponent's is exhilarating. It's fun to cover the opponent's mistakes, and tempting to find more. It's uncomfortable and unpleasant to cover your candidate's mistakes, and you do not actively pursue them.

To hear the media tell it today, Palin's choice as VP was a catastrophe. Biden's was... well, it was just a choice. Biden literally says ten times as many embarrassing things as Palin. But Palin's story arc is "Totally Unqualified Ditz", and Biden's is "Experienced Statesman who Creates Harmless Gaffes." Palin refuses to answer what newspaper she reads and is portrayed as stupid, uneducated and uninterested in the world. Obama refuses to answer questions about William Ayers and he is not portrayed as secretive, hiding something, untrustworthy - the media simply stops asking the question and ignores it. Palin stumbles through an answer and it gets wide coverage. Biden makes a bizarre claim about an attack on America if Obama is elected, and the running commentary is that it is harmless little screw-up, just another "Bidenism".

Biden is just a harmless klutz. Obama is a great speaker, but private. McCain is "erratic" and "maybe a little senile". Palin is dangerously unqualified. These are the running commentaries.

Note that "unqualified" is not the story arc that Obama got. His story arc could be named "Historic Candidacy." He's as unqualified as Palin, arguably, and he's pursuing a much more important office. But his story arc was never going to be "Dangerously Unqualified" with a friendly media. It has been "Historic Candidacy" from day one.

The Mortgage Meltdown as I See It

OK. This is how I understand it. Sorry I don't sound more pissed off, I wrote it for a non-pissed off venue. I'll throw a few fucks into the mix to spice it up.

There are two issues regarding these bad loans that are causing such trouble to our economy. The question, to me, is twofold: Why were so many loans written that were going to go bad? Don't banks know how to loan money? Secondly, why are companies like Lehman Brothers going under because of bad loans they didn't even make?

There is a secondary market that buys the loans, but it doesn't guarantee them. This secondary market buys loans or parts of loans as securities - basically like stocks. If I'm Fannie Mae, I take 1,000 subprime loans and bundle them together into a set of securities worth, in total, say, 10 million dollars. The securities, let's say there are 10,000 of them, are sold for $1,100 each - $1,000 for the loan, $100 to cover expenses and a profit. You buy one share, and now you own .01 percent of 10 million dollars worth of loans. This is called Securitization.

Normally a bank doesn't write high risk loans unless it can charge a lot of interest for them, to cover expenses as some of the loans fail at a higher than normal rate. This also results in fewer loans being written overall, because most poor people can't afford the higher interest rates that are normally charged. But Fannie Mae will buy these loans from you as a bank, because it has been instructed to do so by Bill Clinton. Clinton does this because he wants poor people to own houses too. This is not sound business, but it is government, that explains why it is not sound business. Fannie Mae is guaranteed as a company (implicitly) by the government precisely because the government makes them buy these loans that otherwise sane companies would never buy.

I'm not aware of anyone who guarantees these loans other than Fannie/Freddie, and as far as I know, they don't even guarantee the loans, they are simply guaranteed as companies. Maybe other companies guarantee these loans, but I don't know of any.

The central problem here as I see it is that loans were written outside of generally accepted good loan writing procedures. Banks don't write loans that are too risky to make a profit on, because their motivation is profit, unless they can find someone to buy it. And nobody will buy it at a profitable rate unless it can be guaranteed somehow. Enter the implicit guarantee of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (fuck, added for spice)

Guarantee: why the loans exist in the first place. Without the guarantee, people won't write them at the low rates that poor people need to buy a home with. Ergo, less bad loans when everything goes to hell.

Securitization: why the loans are owned by investment companies when they go bad, instead of Countrywide and Wachovia. (fuck, gratuitously included for no reason. Ok, I'm done with the fucks.)

So, the scenario is this:

Clinton says "write bad loans for good rates." F/F (Fannie and Freddie) do so because they operate by different rules, as dictated by the government. The upside is that these "alternate rules" create an implicit guarantee of F/F.

Loan gets made. Poor Guys #1 through #1,000,000 buy houses. Loans get sold to F/F because F/F is buying them because Clinton told them to, and implicitly guaranteed that the company would be covered. It would be Poor Guys #1 through #100,000 buying houses, but these cheap loans are being sold to poorer credit risks, so more people get them. This causes the housing market to grow into a bubble, because a lot more homes are being sold, and builders can't keep up with all this new demand. This creates the illusion that you can buy a house that you can't afford and flip it later on, and come out clean. So a lot of people, not just poor people, buy houses they can't afford as investment vehicles.

Fannie creates a security (basically shares of stock) on a group of loans that it bought. It sells these securities. These are bought by Lehman Brothers, because they have a good rating, because the government guarantees the company that wrote them.

This goes great as long as prices are going up. Even if you can't afford it, you can sell it for a profit, so you're fine. When housing prices go down though, poor people as well as investors get stuck holding houses that are worth less than they owe on them. So the loans start failing in large numbers.

Poor Guys #1 through #600,000 pay their loans OK. Poor Guys #600,001 through #1,000,000 default on their loans. This causes the value of the security to tank, because the government is guaranteeing F/F, not the loan itself (as far as I know). The value tanks so much that F/F go bankrupt, and anyone holding these "toxic loans" suddenly has a lot less money than they thought they were going to have. This causes failures outside of F/F: Companies that own the stock (Lehman, many banks) and companies that insure those companies (AIG). Suddenly companies can't pay the credit that they owe, so the creditors all freak out and raise their credit rates, or issue less credit. Less credit is less economic activity, and other people can't borrow money to pay their bills. Recession ensues.

This is how Bill Clinton's desire for poor people and minorities to own homes resulted in a worldwide market meltdown.

This meltdown has so far cost trillions of dollars in value, and will cost trillions more in inflation due to all the money being pumped into banks to keep them from failing.

At least that's how I understand it.

I'm about to twist off

OK, I created this blog because I'm pissed off and I'm getting more pissed off.

This is my question, first: Does the world need to know that a fucking plumber in Ohio owes back taxes?

That's what our democrat-controlled leftist media assholes have done. See, if you ask The One a question, you'd better be damned sure he answers it right. Because if you manage to stump The One, what do you think is going to happen?

Well, let's put it this way: What if you stumped God? What if you asked God a question, and God is like "...shit, you got me, man." What would happen to you? That's right. God would vaporize your sorry ass in about two seconds for making him look stupid, because God is powerful. He can do that. You'd be turned into a pink mist if you did that to God.

Obama, The One, he is all knowing, and as gentle as the lamb. But he is not a spiteful god, no. He does not kill people for making him look stupid. He is far more cruel. He sics his vicious attack dogs, the American Mainstream Media on you, and ruins your life.

So that's where we are. The MSM has revealed what might be the most important information of the entire election: That a fucking moron plumber in Ohio owes back taxes. Why do we know this? Because the moron plumber has to be destroyed. Never mind talking about why Obama would say what he did -- the media does not question The One. The media simply does as it is told.

You know what's going to make me piss my pants in glee? When the mainstream media digs into Obama's past half as hard as they dig into the past of a fucking plumber in Ohio.