Best Line I’ve Heard Today

And never, ever, on stupidity, arrogance or narcissism.

Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away a friend of mine in high school told me ¨Surfisto, you mind as well *&%$ her because if you don´t someone else will.¨
Sorry for the off color post, but I think it might fit here.

As one on the Lust Czar short list of appointees, I approve this message.

Corporate scandals are more potent than the sex scandals as they affect more folks adversely than the sex scandals.Greed generated from the mind is often premeditated while lust from elsewhere often is impulsive and transitory,thus comparatively benign,unless perpetrated by the afffliction of mind, would then be similarly blamed as greed.

But to see real damage you have to look to non-greedy, true believing ideologues. I'll take 100 Jeff Skillings over Pol Pot anyday.

And plane crashes are never blamed on an increase in gravity.

Sex scandals are mostly Rethuglican "phony family values" driven. Lust for power is worse than a desire to screw as many women or men as you can, or cheating on your spouse. Greed is the more offensive vice because it tends to morph into other vices including stealing and murder. The mafia is an example of that. I'm in favor of the death penalty for greed in all its most obnoxious forms and manifestations. Gates and Buffet must be put to death. No one should have that kind of economic and consequently political power, notwithstanding the Supreme Ct.'s decisions to the contrary.

P.S. How dare the right-wingers who oppose same-sex marriage think that they are entitled to ask someone's gender at the time he or she seeks a marriage certificate. It is none of their goddamn business. Right-wingers only want anonymity for their hypocritical drug use and sexual escapades and for their financial crimes. Otherwise, they are right in your face, your privately owned abortion clinic, or under the sheets to see if you have a penis or not. To hell with those stinking, gutter religion hypocrites who hunt and kill little animals for fun and sport. I hate them and wish them ill. I hate rednecks and country music, too.

The only reason we hunt and kill little animals for fun and sport is because there are penalties for getting caught shooting hate filled progressive trash such as yourself.

Great point!!!!

Too far, RedNeck. Way too far.

Too far would be going all positive eugenics on their progressive asses.

So we just have to settle for putting holes in small furry creatures.

Does retroactive birth control qualify as positive eugenics?

I can support that.

Sir, yes sir!

How may guns and other killing devices do you own? What animals in the wild have you slaughtered recently? Do you have any other terrorist tendencies? Who taught you that it is okay to kill for fun? Do you read books instead of drinking beer, sleeping with your sister in a trailer, and killing things that did no harm to you? Why are there so many lowlifes like you in this country that want to kill? I know why you disgust me, so I won't bother to ask why you're so disgusting. There are millions just like you. That is why this country disgusts me, and why the country is held in such low esteem worldwide. Sadly, I have little hope that your kind will be destroyed anytime soon. Home schooling has only made the problem worse because your vicious and violent and incestuous hillbilly culture is perpetuated by the nauseating home life that you can't escape. You'd deserve my pity, if you weren't such a wretched lot. So, I can only hate you, your beer and cigarettes, and your guns and other killing devices. I hate your country music, your grits, your Wal-mart, and Nashville as well.

Criminy! A wee bit over the top, I'd say. I hear you though and I feel your pain. But I still like some country music (Crazy Heart is great, btw), grits and nashville's a beautiful place.

Actually, the last time I killed a little animal, I had "The Communist Manifesto" in my hand as I sipped Champagne and had caviar on toast; of course Pacifica Radio was lecturing me on the beauties of redistribution of the wealth; when a bunny rabbit hopped onto my lawn, and I grabbed my ever handy pump shotgun, bought on-line from a site connected to Move-on.Org, and blasted his cute little ass all to hell and gone.

Blew that little sucker into so many little pieces that I called him lawn fertilizer.

God that felt good!

Now for possums, they move slow, I don't waste good shells, I use a 34 inch Riddell Aluminum bat (Tidal Wave model) to beat them to death. That bat lets you begin your swing fast and then the water moves to the end and you get such a smooth transition to weight and power at high speed. True you can't hit the possum 300 feet like you can a softball, but you'd be surprised at how many Texas Leaguers you can drive. I tried using my driver, but there is just to much heft to a possum for the club to handle it, even if you get a good tee shot on their head.

Armadillos, different story, they can move quick, so if I can't catch them in the open, I dig them out of their holes and let the Doberman have them for play time, it is just amazing how they can fit their jaws over a 'diller's back and just crush him. Yee Haw!

All of this relaxation sets me up for a night of peeking in the bedroom windows of looney lefties to make sure they are behaving with God's will as expressed in my Walmart purchased Bible.

Sounds like fun! Mind if I bring my banjo?

Gotta fit in the Ford F150 pick-'em-up truck!

The real problem with blasting those bunnies like that, well there just ain't nuff skin left to rip off and make outfits for the chilluns.

Head shots with the S&W.

Come, boy, see for yourself. From here, you will witness the final destruction of the Alliance and the end of your insignificant rebellion.

You want this, don't you? The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.

And when there are no corporate scandals, has greed declined?
Would someone invent a greed index already? Thank you!

Great line. Have fun in FL, us students of yours are freezing our asses off. See you next week.

Every corporate scandal can be traced somehow to some company enjoying its preferential access to an unnecessarily empowered government. Minimize government involvement and level the playing field.

Sex scandals are a sign that the people still equate monogamy with integrity in all fields. Where a person likes to stick it should not be our concern as long as he's not sticking it to us!

You didn't quite give us "the line". The best two lines I've heard today continue to be:

So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective--
Prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective

We need to regulate lust. We need a pair of federal eye balls in every room in every home and every hotel. We need body scanners to check to see if somebody is getting a hard on.

I want to be Lust Czar.

LOL!!

Vidyoooohs....the Commissar of luv.

Tiger Woods holds that position.

Sick burn.

Belly laughs.

Exactly, sandre. I we have to do is wait until the Christian Right takes over.

Sandre was tongue-in-cheek, but looney lefties can never catch that because they can't conceive that someone would be poking fun at them.

The Bible forbids such lust, also known as "adultery" for which the penalty can be death under certain circumstances.

P.S. I thought he was being a fruit all along.

Yeah, actually I caught that. You missed the sarcasm.

You have a very good point. Thank you.

That's another sign of liberal bias in the media. If conservatives ran the media, you can be sure every sex scandal would be more proof of the declining moral values of Americans.

That is soooo true...

Aren't government scandals about greed too?

"Aren't government scandals about greed too?"

No, wrong narrative. Government scandals are caused by corporate greed.

What are you talking about? Aren't those people supposed to be devoid of self interest? :)

well, they're devoid of something.

Eh - I figure there are always greedy people and always lustful people and that that inevitably comes to the surface sometimes. I don't know if the narrative is any different for the two. Think about the "value voter" sort of commentator talking about immorality and promiscuity.

Correct, Daniel. Corporate scandals aren't really blamed on "an increase in greed." Usually, they are blamed on that one corporation's greed or it's CEO's greed, etc. Similarly, sex scandals are in fact blamed on the one public figure's lack of discipline, though never explicitly stated as "lust." This comparison is really missing something.

The financial "melt down" is routinely blamed on greed. And a more meaningless accusation is hard to imagine.

So you're saying that greed was not a significant factor in...

* credit rating agencies giving AAA ratings to subprime mortgage-backed securities, or

* AIG selling CDSs to insure those securities, or

* mortgage companies hawking subprime mortgages to unqualified buyers, or

* unqualified buyers taking out mortgages they could not afford, or

* industry lobbyists opposing any regulation of the subprime and CDS markets, even transparency requirements related to public disclosure, or

* politicians (both parties) taking campaign contributions from these lobbyists or leaving the government to work for these industries;

none of this had anything to do with greed?

*Credit ratings agencies gave bad ratings partly because the government created the concept of Nationally Recognized Securities Ratings Associations (NRSRO's), a title it conferred only on the big three ratings agencies (Moody's, S&P, Fitch). It also created restrictions and "incentives" for those agencies in order to keep their title, hence a government monopoly on ratings.

*Need help on the AIG CD's question

*First of all, why did the buyers buy when they couldn't pay? That's not greed; it's stupidity on the consumers' parts, which you address later. Second, Fannie & Freddie (as well as other programs that encouraged giving housing to poor folk) made it easier for the "disadvantaged" to buy homes and for banks et al to give them loans. In Fact, many of the bad loans were given out BY FANNIE & FREDDIE, both of which are largely run as government charity wards.

*Regulation, as stated above, caused many of the problems. It's not the cure-all you think it is.

* Politicians are the world's most unreliable people. If you want to regulate anything, start by regulating the senate and the Fed.

And at whose behest do you think the government created the NRSROs? And why did they want a monopoly? Greed wasn't a factor?

I'm not saying that regulation is a cure-all. I'm saying that failure to regulate, and the capturing of regulators by the regulated, is sometimes destructive, as it clearly was in the recent financial melt down, and those failures were. at least in part, related to greed.

Hmmm. How do we know the rating agencies were greedy? Is the fact that they asked for the preferred status (stipulating that this is true) sufficient to prove greed? If not, where is the proof? If so, how do we explain the government's willingness to grant it to them? Must be greed! So how do we improve the system by granting regulatory power to an entity that is greedy? Or perhaps they were stupid. Somehow that doesn't make me feel any better.

Why is that greed? Because the rating agencies provided compromised ratings that contributed mightily to the financial meltdown, creating huge losses for millions of people who had trusted their independence and impartiality, for the financial benefits they earned through the conflict of interest inherent in taking money from the same companies they were rating.

Yes, the regulators contributed to this. That's what happens when regulators (and politicians) are captured by those they regulate. That's an argument for keeping the regulators independent of the regulated (for example, by limits--not prohibitions--on lobbying and corporate campaign contribtions). It is not an agrument for eliminating all regulation and leaving those companies to do what they want to do without restraints by regulators.

How would does giving companies free rein by eliminating regulation lead to a different result from those companies capturing the regulator and gutting enforcement of regulations or eliminating the regulations altogether?

Ah, where to begin? How about the beginning? We still don't have a definition of greed that is predictively useful. We also don't know that the agencies provided compromised ratings. We do know that everyone who was paying any attention understood that the rating agencies were being paid by the entities they rated, so there was perfect transparency on that front and no cited reason why the rating agencies would choose to do a bad job here and a good job elsewhere. We also know that yield spreads often (usually?) move in advance of rating agency actions, suggesting that the agencies themselves follow the market rather than lead it, which in turn suggests that their role is primarily an artifact of regulation rather than as a valued information provider to the market.

And regulatory capture IS an argument for eliminating regulation, at least in specific circumstances. In this instance, if the regulations were actually binding, giving the information market free rein would have resulted in more sources of information regarding the credit worthiness of the instruments being evaluated, which could only have been a good thing.

It may not be as simple as that. The NRSRO's were created originally to ensure that ratings organizations DIDN'T get carried away. Same for the Basil rules.

OK. But whatever the original intent was behind NRSO, and organizations usually evolve beyond their original intent, their acceptance of funds from companies for which they were also providing ratings created strong economic incentives which undermined the original intent to provide independent, impartial ratings of those companies. (It happened with stock analysts, too. See WorldCom as one example.)

It was a clear conflict of interest.

I'm not saying that airplane crashes have nothing to do with gravity. I'm saying that it has no use whatever as an explanation. It is a constant, a given, part of the background at all times.

I think that greed has an additional problem as an explanation that gravity does not. Gravity is understood (to a high degree) and defined. It follows laws (e.g. the Inverse Square Law). Greed is a value judgement. It's like trying to blame the recession on ugly.

Right, gravity is such an essential and recognized part of the explanation for airplane crashes that we don't mention it. But in most crashes, without the framework of our understanding of gravity, none of the proximate causes (equipment failure, pilot error) would make sense or have explanatory power.

Likewise, greed is such an essential element in the explanation of the behavior of many players who contributed to the melt down, that we might well take it for granted. But greed is different from gravity because others have posited alternative explanations and denied the role of greed or even the usefulness of the concept of greed. That doesn't happen with explanations that include, explicitly or impliciately, the role of gravity.

Depends on what you mean by greed. If you mean acquisitiveness, as in "more is better than less", it is an essential and recognized part of the explanation for all economic phenomenon. Hence the gravity analogy.

As I pointed out, however, the connotation attached to the word "greed" is value-laden. I'm confident that we cannot agree on a definition for greed that you and I would both apply in the same way across all circumstances. Put another way, it fails the clarity or clairvoyant test and so is useless in explaining observed phenomenon in any but an emotionally satisfying way.

It also puts the proponent of greed as a causal factor in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why "greed" increased at a particular place or time or market; resulting in the unusual event observed.

To use another metaphor, it's sort of like a scientist who at some point invokes God to explain observed phenomenon. At that point it's no longer science, its religion.

No, I don't define "greed" as "more is better than less"; that's not what others mean either, and you won't find that definition in any dictionary. Greed is "the extreme desire for wealth or power". Sure, "greed" is value-laden, just like your apparent choice not to recognize the existence of greed.

Perhpas you and I cannot agree on a definition of greed, but since the word appears in every English language dictionary, it seems like most English speakers have agreed on a definition. You appear to be one of the few holdouts.

It's not an uncomfortable position at all, txslr. As I said in a previous post, even if the level of, shall we say, "potential" aggregate greed of all human beings does not change (does population growth then require the amount of greed in individuals to decline?), the amount of "active" greed manifested in the world can increase due to the weaking of restrains on greed; for example, the weaking of religious constraints, social approbations, regulatory restraints, and the belief that greed doesn't exist, and the increase in economic incentives for greedy behavior.

Re: " scientists invoking God to explain observed phenomenon", I agree with you here, although there are highly respected scientists who don't agree with us and invoke God, either at the micro level or the macro (as a "prime mover"). To cite a few, they include France Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, Kenneth Miller, professor of biology at Brown University, and the biologist Calvin DeWit--althought they're in the minority of scientists.

Yes, I think this is theology, not science. But scientific speculations about what caused the big bang (like quantum fluctuations) are no more scientific than invoking God.

Be serious. "Beauty" is in the dictionary as well. Does that mean that we all see it in the same way at all times and in all circumstances? Of course not. This makes it a pretty tough thing to model, right? The definition you provide is explicitly value-laden. What is "extreme"? And there are certaintly people who would say that non-satiation ("more is better than less") is greedy once you have some endowment. A lot of people would say that a Bill Gates' pursuit of more wealth constitutes greed given the amount he already has. You may not, but that's the point. The "property is theft" set would define ownership of anything at all as greedy.

However, if you think you can build predictively useful economic models with "greed" as an input, have at it. If you succeed, I'll eat a bug. As a start, define it in a way that requires no value judgement. Then you might figure out how to measure it. Maybe a greed-o-meter?

As for the "invoking God" theme, sure there are scientists who believe in God, but if they write scientific papers in which they invoke God as an explanatory variable I doubt they will be published. Perhaps you have some examples you'd like to share?

And what definition of "beauty" do you use? One you made up or one that comes from a dictionary?

Let's use a slightly different definition of greed that you won't like any better: "inordinate or insatiate longing, especially for wealth; avaricious or covetous desire". It's not "my" definition, it comes from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Now, of course, this definition is value-laden, as I said above. But your choice to see every issue as a nail and use the hammer of economics on all issues is no less value-laden. How else can you make the choice to use economic analysis as the basis for making assessments of greed, as opposed to religious or ethical or philosophical analyses? It's a choice you've made either randomly or on the basis of your preference for a set of values, such as efficiency, maximizing economic growth or wealth creation.

And you can set up a straw man by saying that "some people" claim that greed is simply wanting more rather than less or that ownership of "propery is theft" (though I don't know any so dim witted; maybe you hang out with them), but since I never said that, the point is irrelevant.

I've already given you names of three scientists. If you want to read some of their papers, look it up youself. Plus there's Google if you know how to use it.

I can only conclude at this point that you are being intentionally obtuse, so I won't follow you down your little rabbit hole. Say hello to Alice if you see her.

As for the facts, "property is theft" originates with the French anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. I recall Sartre' having held the same position, but I could be wrong about that. I have no substantial areas of agreement with either gentleman, but I wouldn't describe either of them as "dim witted".

Regarding your three scientists, I did look them up and you were wrong.

Sure. It's blamed on greed. Is it blamed on an "increase in greed?" No, it's blamed on the so-called long-standing problem of unchecked corporate greed.

And hence it is meaninless. It's like blaming an airplane crash on gravity. It's always there, but when it is "unchecked" the plane crashes. This explains precisely nothing.

Dammit, I REALIZE that. I'm saying: DON'S COMPARISON IS INVALID. I'M NOT SAYING THE RECESSION SHOULD BE BLAMED ON GREED. Once again: I'M NOT SAYING THE RECESSION SHOULD BE BLAMED ON GREED. Thank you.

Please be so kind as to point out where I said you did. Then I'll take it back. You're welcome.

My apologies. I misinterpreted your tone.

No problem. It's very easy to do on a blog.

Good points. Seems like greed at the personal, corporate and political levels has both intensified and metastasized over the past several decades. So if Gordon Gekko is right and greed is good, we do indeed live in the Great Society.

No, no. You're missing my point. I'm saying greed HASN'T increased, and that few actually make that claim. I would say that if anything, this is a more transparent society (thanks to technological advances in the media) in which both greed and lust are exposed more often. However, there's no more greed than there was before. Neither is there more lust.

I'm just making the claim that this comparison is invalid.

Well, perhpas there is not more greed today in the same sense that there is not more murderous intent, human nature being human nature. But there certainly seems to be a greater manifestation of both greed and murderous intent today. Perhaps its an illusion created by the media's affection for bad news.

Greed is a constant. As for murderous intent, regardless of how the media portray's things today and despite current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent conflict is actually down.

http://www.humansecurityreport.info/

Interesting. First, the manifestation of murderous intent is not limited to warfare. Take a look at the trend in murder rates in the US.

So do you support the increase in international activism and the work of the UN to which your source (look at the bottom of the page) attributes the decline in the costs of war?

And the logical implication of your claim that "greed is constant" implies that population growth leads to a decrease in the greed of each individual.

That's right, dk.Like Newt carrying on with his staffer and telling his wife he was divorcing her when she lay in a hospital with cancer. Same thing goes for Edwards, though he wasn't a values voter favorite like Newt. Or SC governor Stanford. What hypocrites.

Was Stanford a values voter favourite? I thought he pretty well steered clear of that John Edwards "character matters" crap.

Yeah, he was. The Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America were Sanford supporters, and remained noticebly silent long after the scandal broke. There may have been others.

I believe those organizations tend to support Republican candidates as a matter of policy. I'm not terribly familiar with South Carolina politics, but I didn't think Sanford ran his campaign on a moralizing ala John Edwards "character matters" platform. I think it's hilarious when politicians do. There is very little less moral than politics.

Yeah, "family values" was a centerpiece of his political career.