argus

Welcome, Comrade! Steps are simple, as you will see. In Soviet Russia, we had similar process — only without all of media coverage. But I am of the thought that makes it more exciting, yes?

1. Spend hundreds of millions of dollars to overturn 80+ year old banking regulatory legislation (Glass-Steagall Act)
2. Merge several massive companies into one ginormous financial behemoth under the newly-liberalized regulatory environment that you just purchased (yay!)
3. Use the combined lending/borrowing capacity of this new ginormous conglomerate to leverage your ass — and everyone else’s — to the moon and back, several times over
4. Cash out (but under less-alarming euphemism, “moving on”) while the hogs are fat, buy island/jet/concubines/personal army
5. When the deleveraging starts, have your poor-sap replacements demand that the government bail you out since you’re “too big to fail” (nevermind the fact that you paid off the government to let you get that big in the first damn place) — gotta keep those stocks riding high and paying dividends
6. Profit!!!!11

See, comrade? Is easy, yes? If you are a CEO or have access to a CEO, you too can be the next Citigroup [insert non-specific name for frighteningly-large-yet-struggling financial institution here]! Welcome to future of “capitalism”, yes? Ha ha! “Cha-ching”! Ha ha!

(actual timeline of real-world events here)

Succinctly summarized by T.S. Eliot:

The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.

More excellent reading over at Novae Militiae, wherein I discovered this Eliot quote.

Another link from that site led me to a late 2006 post at Sobran’s, Hijacking the Conservative Movement. Find an excellent excerpt from this piece summarizing the difference between conservatives and liberals after the jump.
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If you haven’t been reading Bill Whittle’s painfully-infrequent (but always worth the wait) posts, now is THE time to start. Go read his latest two-part presentation, You Are Not Alone:

• You Are Not Alone, Part 1
• You Are Not Alone, Part 2

An excerpt from Part 2 (after the jump):

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Future President Thompson weighs in on gun control and it’s “sudden” relevance after last week’s tragedy.

The logic behind this attitude baffles me, but I suspect it has to do with a basic difference in worldviews. Some people think that power should exist only at the top, and everybody else should rely on “the authorities” for protection.

Government must deal with greenhouse gases: US Supreme Court

“The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized,” said judge John Paul Stevens as the ruling was carried by five votes in favor to four against.

Reeeeally. A recent documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” (Google Video, YouTube, Wikipedia info) offers some of the most compelling counter arguments to the manmade global warming meme that I’ve come across in quite a while.

What makes the Supreme Court story so ridiculous is a) the idea that our esteemed USSC judges are even remotely qualified to evaluate the case for manmade global warming and then issue judicial decrees based on their evaluations and b) it makes heavy use of the idiotic “consensus of scientists” argument. I won’t even touch a), but I’ll address b) …loudly, for those of you in the cheap seats: REAL SCIENCE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CONSENSUS. Wake up, before it’s too late.