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)

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.

Conservatives tend to believe in Original Sin, or something like it, This is the lead article to the November 2006 issue, Hijacking the Conservative Movement — Read Joe’s columns the day he writes them.that will forever prevent man from achieving perfection. This attitude produces a disposition that tends to be both skeptical and tolerant, deeply dubious about overhauling society. Societies and traditions can’t be built from scratch; as Burke said, we must build out of existing materials — that is, real human beings and their habits, rooted in history.

Hijacking conservative movementLiberals, on the other hand, speak freely of “ideals,” imagined perfections that we can achieve if only we have the will. “I have a dream,” as Martin Luther King said. Hence liberals typically talk of abolishing evils — “eliminating poverty,” “eradicating racism,” “doing away with prejudice,” “ending exploitation,” and so forth. This usually means strenuous government action, massive coercion and bureaucracy, because these things don’t just evaporate of themselves.

Hijacking conservative movementConservatives don’t speak much of “ideals.” They think, more modestly, in terms of norms, which are never perfectly realized, but only approximated by sinful man. Consider homosexuality. Whereas the liberal wants to impose “gay rights,” by law and coercion, the conservative sees homosexuality as a defect, which to some extent can and must be tolerated, because it can’t be “eradicated,” but it can’t rationally be exalted to the plane of normality; and he knows that all talk of “same-sex marriage” is nonsense, like trying to breed calves from a pair of bulls. But to the liberal, the only issue is equal rights; human nature and normality have nothing to say to him. What the conservative sees as life’s mysteries, the liberal sees as mere irrationality.

Hijacking conservative movementOne word is notably absent from the liberal vocabulary: enough. For the liberal, there is hardly such a thing as “too much” government. There is no point at which liberals say, “Well, we’ve done it. We’ve realized our dreams. We have all the government we need, and we should stop now.” No, they always want more government. There is no such thing as enough government.

Hijacking conservative movementAgain, Chesterton sums up liberalism in a phrase: “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” We see this again in the grisly business of abortion. To the typical conservative it is an ugly thing, something that may not be entirely “eliminated” but must be contained, condemned, and above all must never be accepted as normal. But to the typical liberal it is a right — even “a fundamental human and constitutional right”!

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

An excerpt from Part 2 (after the jump):

Throughout history, civilizations rise and fall. They fall for the same reason, by my reading of history: the lack of will to defend her, a cancer which starts not from the bottom but invariably from the top. A fish rots from the head, say the Russians, who ought to know. From Nero to Chamberlain, the elites evolve away from an understanding that retaliation against the lawless and the barbaric is not a vice but a virtue. They take the manifest blessings of civilization as a given and foist their own personal guilt and moral cowardice upon the entire city. They open the gates to the savage peoples who have always stood outside of progress and gentleness and culture.

It has always been this way. If you feel you see it happening now, before your very eyes, well… you are not alone. A society unwilling to enforce the laws that civilize it, that is unable or unwilling to see the advantages of civilization, a society led by the pampered, the narcissistic and the corrupt, is not long for this Earth. Our enemies look at us and see precisely these symptoms, and the symptoms are worsening. Our unwillingness to retaliate when retaliation is called for – indeed, the uneasiness with the very idea of retaliation against betrayal – has them licking their lips in anticipation. They see all this decay and they are right to see it, for it is there.

One thing they do not see, however – also there. They do not see the Remnant. They do not see the power and resiliance of what the irreplaceable Victor Davis Hanson has referred to as “the Old Breed.”

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.

“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.