Good Grief Gross

Gross Urges ‘Full Nationalization’ of Housing Finance - BusinessWeek: "Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gross, who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co., said the U.S. should consider “full nationalization” of the mortgage- finance system as the Obama administration plots the revival of a market that was at the center of the 2008 credit crisis.

“To suggest that there’s a large place for private financing in the future of housing finance is unrealistic,” Gross said today at a U.S. Treasury Department conference in Washington. “Government is part of our future. We need a government balance sheet. To suggest that the private market come back in is simply impractical. It won’t work.”"

Moonbattery: The Ant and the Grasshopper

Moonbattery: The Ant and the Grasshopper: "The ant works hard in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.
How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green…'"

PenguinOmics

Krugman in Bizarro land | Questions and Observations: "There may “legally” be a “trust fund”, but there’s nothing in it but government IOUs. The federal government has borrowed every dollar that was ever in the “surpluses”, put them in the general fund and spent them. Now this isn’t even arguable. This has been known for literally decades.

But Krugman insists that all the money that’s been taken from us for Social Security (FICA) is in a tidy heap in the “trust fund” which has run surpluses for decades.

Lord, anyone with the IQ of a penguin knows that there isn’t a dime of real revenue sitting in that account – it is stuffed to the gills with treasury bonds. To this point that hasn’t been a problem – because it has always taken in more than it paid out."

COTD: Fiery Rains

Belmont Club � If I had a Hammer: "24. Walt

Blameless lives and silver planes
Buildings down in fiery rains
Muslims cheering in the streets
Glorying in Muslim feats
Now a mosque they wish to build
Near the site the bodies filled
Smiling slyly as they claim
We are not the ones to blame
Gentle lefties take the hands
Of the killers whose demands
Lefty leaders bow to grant
Sneering at the people’s chant
That to build there’s a disgrace
And are told to mind their place
We have news for those who would
Build a mosque where once there stood
Buildings filled with kin and friends
Whose killers now Barack defends
Build your mosque in New York town
Don’t be surprised when it comes down
Along with all the Muslim dreck
Who think they have the right to wreck
The lives and dreams of other men
The 52s will show them when
We’ve had enough of killer’s ways
The end is coming, count the days

August 14, 2010 - 5:51 pm � Link to this Comment"

Large Brains And Big Guts

Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter : NPR: "Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw — fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

'You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time,' explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

Until, that is, we discovered meat."

Useful Idiots

Ace of Spades HQ: "Really good. Part 1 about Stalin (and they take the bark off the NYT and Walter Duranty), Part 2 about useful idiots about the Iranian Revolution and other horrors.

This is hard hitting stuff -- the BBC is state owned and yet they produce this.

Compare to the American media -- not paid by the government, but owned even harder.

BTW, contains the quote 'something so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.'

(Oh, this is how tough this is on leftist apologist intellectuals: FoxNews wouldn't air this because it seems too bating and would get them too much criticism. For example, here's a lurid fact the documentary notes: Walter Duranty wrote the 'poetry' for Allistair Crowley's psycho-sexual Satanic rituals and often was bound in chains and had crosses carved in his chest. Another historian notes, flatly, the Soviet archives say he was being blackmailed over 'sexual misdemeanors' of unknown types.

It's really like, Whoa. This dude is hard-core!

Oh, and he lays Stalin's victims pretty much at the useful idiots' feet and refuses to make excuses for them.)"