Masterdan's BYOND website

Ayn Rand is a crazy moron (proof)

Fri, 15 May 2009 03:17:30 GMT

From an interview with playboy.
http://www.playboy.com/articles/ayn-rand-playboy-interview/ index.html

PLAYBOY: According to your philosophy, work and achievement are the highest goals of life. Do you regard as immoral those who find greater fulfillment in the warmth of friendship and family ties?

RAND: If they place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life and human relationships are not primary in a man's life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite; whereas, if he places his work first, there is no conflict between his work and his enjoyment of human relationships."

Thank god some people take objectivism seriously, or we wouldnt have youtube stars or fox news journalists.

cont.
PLAYBOY: If widely accepted, couldn't Objectivism harden into a dogma?

RAND: No. I have found that Objectivism is its own protection against people who might attempt to use it as a dogma. Since Objectivism requires the use of one's mind, those who attempt to take broad principles and apply them unthinkingly and indiscriminately to the concretes of their own existence find that it cannot be done. They are then compelled either to reject Objectivism or to apply it. When I say apply, I mean that they have to use their own mind, their own thinking, in order to know how to apply Objectivist principles to the specific problems of their own lives.

OH Ayn, if only you knew, Objectivism not only became a dogma but your followers dont even use rationality to defend objectivism itself! They just use the almighty banhammer!

XMen Origins: Wolverine Review

Sat, 02 May 2009 03:12:19 GMT

It sucked.

It started strong, then they proceeded to bring in too many characters, not develop them enough, failed to kill silverfox at the appropriate time, and the worst most unforgivable thing they did:

They ruined Deadpool.

UNFORGIVABLE, they completely completely butchered his story and downplayed his personality and style. Screwed, that's how I feel, I had two favorite characters in this movie Gambit and Deadpool, Gambit barely got any screentime and absolutely NO character development and Deadpool end being screwed up so royally it isnt even funny.

Oh, by the way, you know how you always thought characters with regenerative powers could die if shot in the head (in wolverines case in an area without adamantium bone), or with an adamantium bullet, or if they got their head cut off? yeah none of those work. Essentially there was no suspense or consequence of any fight involving: Wolverine, Deadpool or Sabertooth.

How can I care at all when Wolverine and Sabertooth are fighting when they are shown being shot and blown up in major wars for the opening sequence? it is made abundantly clear that close range gunshots to the body and head do nothing, hell it turns out the worst you can get out of gunshot wounds to the head is amnesia. So go see this movie if you like invincible characters causing things to blow up and characters with potential to become dead, do that, go watch it if you want to see the most franchise ruining since XMen3.

If you need one sentence to keep you from watching this movie, its this:
(SPOILER)

"Deadpool gets an adamantium skelleton with retractable hand Katanas as well as wolverines regenerative healing factor, Cyclops' optical blasts, teleportation and still after getting Decapitated manages to survive in the after credit bonus scene to allude to his anti-climactic return in some other butchered Xmen movie.

(/Spoiler)

Wow, I guess I am a University Graduate now

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:05:28 GMT

4 Years and a Bachelor of Commerce degree later.

It hasnt quite sunk in that Im done.. hmm, pretty exciting though.

Financial Crisis: What went wrong? Who is to blame?

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:52:10 GMT

I get asked this a lot, from my engineer friends and others who don’t really follow the financial sector and American news and global events and such. So I thought it would be nice to outline an unbiased look at what happened and why Secretary Paulson of the Bush administration and now Secretary Geitner of the Obama administration have been bailing out financial institutions.

I won’t get too specific but I’ll try to explain the things that caused trouble and how they continue to cause trouble.

You are going to need to understand what a Credit Default Swap is, this little financial security is more aptly described as a form of default insurance with some dangerous differences. Credit Default Swaps or CDFs are derivatives that are traded where one person vows to pay a lot of money to another person if a bond or mortgage defaults, so if a company goes out of business such as Lehman brothers or Bears Stern then any CDFs issued for those bonds would then get insurance like settlements. Now CDFs are issued as insurance and the other individual who is in essence insuring against a default of some loan will basically pay periodic small payments in exchange for this insurance. Now if anybody has any knowledge of insurance there are a few basic regulations and rules that make a lot of sense: (1) you must have a certain reserve of cash to cover the potential payouts of insurance. CDFs have no such regulation because they aren’t technically insurance but considered a financial derivative. (2) You must own the underlying asset in which you are insuring, if you had insurance on your neighbor’s house why not burn it down and collect a buttload of money, this did not exist for CDFs, you could essentially speculate and gamble with what mortgages or bonds would go belly up, this brings in a lot of bad incentives for people who might prefer that defaults occur.

So yes, you can see that CDFs are flawed instruments that allow companies to really be at risk of gambling more money than they have if some company or some pool of mortgages start being defaulted.

Now lets compound this problem, we have some serious problems with management compensation, from the 1990s on we see a dramatic increase in percentage of CEO and other executive compensation being done in stock options, so instead of being paid for a job well done we have management paid for convincing people that a job has been done well. So how do you do that? leverage (borrowing lots of money) and selling loans that are insanely risky such as liars loans, liars loans are basically loans in which you don't verify information that people are giving you about their income, so you take peoples word on it that they make 100,000 a year even though they might only make 10,000. The fact that lax regulation allowed for liars loans meant that sub-prime mortgages and other risky loans could be issued with impunity. This may seem stupid, why issue risky loans that will make your company do poorly and your bonus will be weakened. True, but only in the long run. In the short run risky loans allow for really high returns because the more risk the higher the interest rate you can charge, these managers get really high and inflated profits for the company in the years in which they are CEO despite the fact that 80% of these loans will end in default and huge losses down the road. Oh, and lets not forget this, the ratings agencies basically started slapping AAA zero credit risk ratings on all these bad loans which then were traded!

Christ, so basically you’re a bank, you give loans that you know will probably be bad but then you can bundle these bad loans as securities and get AAA ratings from the retarded rating agencies who were negligent at actually doing their job, then it’s not your problem anymore. In periods in which banks made stupid amounts of money from risky loans, the executives were able to then get huge bonuses, when the company starts to collapse due to these toxic assets turning bad on them they aren't going to be losing any money and may in the worst case scenario be fired (Oh, please don't fire me, I only gave myself 100 million dollar bonus every year for the 8 years I was CEO, how will I possibly live off that?!). Yeah, boo hoo.

So, Is the Bush administration to blame for this? Yeah they actually are, see it is an ideological problem, the republicans in control just believed that de-regulation was good for keeping strong markets, if you make things a matter of ideology you lose your pragmatism and you lose any aspect of personal judgment. CDFs were horribly unregulated and dangerous but nothing was done because regulation was vilified as bureaucracy and something that would dilute the strength of the booming American economy. Of course we can go back further, the Clinton administration peeled back regulation such as the Glass Steagall Act which was a stupid move which allowed Commercial banks and Investment banks to no longer be separate entities, meaning they would become too big to fail (ie Citigroup). So it isn’t a political issue, it’s an issue of due diligence and competence. The Republicans of the Bush administration and the Democrats of the Clinton administration had the same flawed economic mindset that regulation is simply a way to shrink the pie of the economy, and that government intervention was a bad idea. Somehow all the lessons learned from the great depression were forgotten during the Reagan administration onward, it is not a matter of I am a republican so I believe in deregulation, nope unfortunately this was the one thing that both sides agreed with, mostly because politicians were being paid off by the industries that benefited from this risky behavior.

What does CDFs and deregulation have to do with bailing out banks though?! What the hell is the point of the trillions being spent and the huge deficits? Is it those pinko democrats spending too much? Is it Obamas fault? This seems to be what Faux news thinks, but lets look at why the government felt it had to intervene, oh and before we start blaming Obama remember that the bailout was actually done during the Bush administration, something that the average attention deficit pundit forgets. However, im not going to say the bailouts were bad, you know why? Because the bailouts weren’t as simple as people make them out to be, what people found was that CDFs and the high degree of leverage of these banks meant that when one institution fell, other institutions would be in risk of failing because they had issued CDFs on the bonds of the first company! All these companies started gambling that each other would not fail, they also gambled that the mortgage market would never decline but would increase steadily, we saw fannie mae and freddy mac the biggest mortgage providers in the world collapse and become nationalized during the bush administration. You want to talk about socialism? The republicans actually were the first to nationalize these large banks so lets not selectively forget that. In fact Secretary Paulson was a staunch free market advocate, he was ideologically very right and very against government intervention, and he’s the one who started orchestrating the bailouts and capital injections. I don’t blame him though, im actually really impressed with his ability to part with his ideology and handle this crisis, the mistake he made? It wasn’t bailing banks out, it was letting one fail; ie Lehman Brothers. He wanted to send a message that you couldn’t rely on the government to bail you out, but moral hazard as big an issue as it is, is dwarfed by the systemic risk that was created by deriviatives such as CDFs and the shear scale of banks and insurance giant AIG. When he let Lehman collapse, the crisis accelerated and a domino effect took place, confidence in the markets fell, CDFs on Lehman bonds were cashed in and AIG which was highly invested in CDFs as a consequence began its journey towards insolvency.

This isn’t a political issue; the truth is that there is no place for ideology here. Regulation exists for a reason, it wasn’t the war that caused this meltdown, it was simply the lack of effort that the Bush administration put into regulating a capital market that was bubbling like crazy. This is such a large issue but at the heart of it is simply a focus away from the due diligence in the white collar finance sector and a changed focus into foreign policy, something which has been disastrous for the US. So please, stop arguing that Obama is a socialist for bailing out banks, he didn’t start this, stop blaming government intervention for this recession, the federal reserve’s actions HAD to be taken because the financial markets were on the verge of complete collapse, you can sit back and critique but the truth is that there was a defining moment in history in which the consequences of deregulation came knocking at Secretary Paulson’s door, he had to choose one of two things: (1) let the Capital Markets collapse (2) Bail out these banks.

I may not like the deregulation and lack of intervention that the Bush administration was responsible for, and I fault them for precipitating this crisis, but I do not pretend like the Bailout was a bad decision, there was no third option and the bailout was simply a consequence, not a decision. So please, be thoughtful and do your research before you blame a political party for the problems the world faces now, blame the institutions, blame the corruption that was on both sides of the aisle, blame the ideology that deregulation is good. It is time to stop treating this like something simple, hard lose-lose decisions have to be made when you are reactionary; the real lesson to learn is that regulators and government needs to be proactive and not reactive to these problems. I wish I could go more in detail, but this blog post is already too long, the takeaway point is that you cant always let one institution fail because the deregulated markets have allowed these entities to drag down other banks and cause a domino effect that would collapse the whole market. Support regulation, support initiatives to prevent bad decisions becoming taxpayers burden, and please stop just reading CNBC or Fox and forming your beliefs from a Democrat or Republican set of talking points. Oh and for gods sake, 10 years from now don’t forget about this collapse, lets remember a lifelong lesson from the greatest collapse of the financial markets since the great depression.

About open-mindedness (youtube vid), to certain BYOND members who are known as ban nazis

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:09:58 GMT

This is a video about elementary logic, rationality and the scientific method. It is centered around the idea of open-mindedness and explains rationality in a way that even elementary school kids should be able to follow. It is great for any person on BYOND (with some person in mind but I cant say who) who claims to love rationality as a core tenet, and yet ignores counter-arguments and believes with extreme arrogance that their idea is right without any evidence to back it up. For you [person-X], maybe some day you will learn not to ban everybody from your blog with a different perspective than you or who offer counter-arguments to your severely flawed ones. I always felt you could use a basic logic101 lesson and this will probably do nothing because you are close-minded, but its worth a try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI

On a sidenote, this video is fantastic for everybody, its just a good way of challenging your own perspectives and your own belief that you are rational or have a balanced perspective. Logic stuff is always nice because it doesnt offend it just informs.

Hippies have overrun Digg.com, Reddit.com and Internet town forums!

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 19:26:23 GMT

God help us all, in the midst of an Economic Crisis that has been precipitated by the collapse of the housing economy, collapse of many banks, collapse of insurance giants, and has resulted in horrifically high unemployment and a global decline in GDP and the god-forsaken internet only cares about legalizing Pot.

To all the retards who make blog posts on the internet about the brilliant idea of legalizing and taxing pot to solve THE ENTIRE WORLD'S PROBLEMS, go shoot yourself in the face. There is a time and a place for this discussion and it is NOT now, you little retards actually think legalizing pot is going to balance the budget? REALLY?! what are you daft? yes it can be taxed I get your brilliant idea, however it is not without negative consequences and it really is a trivial thing to be promoting so heavily now.

I am talking about of course, this: http://www.salem-news.com/articles/december122008/ barack_cannabis_12-12-08.php
Thank you internet, thank you for discrediting democracy as it pertains to the medium of the internet. Now we all lose the credibility of our opinions through this medium, because instead of asking important questions on unemployment, the cost of government running in deep deficits and health care you chose to flood the internet and the polls with pot legalization questions.

Okay, let me just remind you all that this argument has some merit, pot should be decriminalized as for as holding small quantities go because it is a harmless drug that's only real problem is it makes people gain weight, facilitates being lazy and smells like garbage wrapped in skunk diarrhea. It is certainly less damaging than alcohol to society.

The problem here, is that the Pot argument is an argument of personal liberties, NOT a solution to the economic crisis. Obama responded to these retarded questions with this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M6orSr5QvA&eurl=
And I respect him for it! Laughing at the question of whether or not Pot legalization will create jobs and help grow the economy and making it the top freaking question is the least to be expected. It does say bad things about the online community, it says that we dont care about the big picture, it says that we care more about adding another recreational drug to the legal list of ways to burn your free time more than we care about having a job or maintaining national security or keeping the markets from collapsing.

To all the morons who have decided to use this crisis as an opportunity to flood the political conversation with drug talk, screw you, there are way more important, tough questions to be debating than this. Obama is a good president but his decisions need to be criticized and analyzed and the fact that the democratic public has decided to focus on another trivial and certainly not pressing issue is just asinine.

Im glad Obama stood up to this childishness, Im glad that he isnt the hyper left-wing candidate you thought he was. He has always been a moderate, he has always said moderate things, I'm increasingly annoyed at some of the comments made by bloggers whose minds have been blown by Obama's response to this, they really thought he would take this question seriously, because they really have convinced themselves that this question is pressing.

Newsflash, it isn't.

Weed being sold like it is in Amsterdam has come with consequences, I talked to my Dutch friend about it and she made it quite clear that it isn't that great of a thing, she personally has never smoked it, but apparently the people it attracts (she mentioned German tourists) are absolutely a problem. I am a big fan of Canada's take on this, crack down on dealers and grow ops but dont even criminalize possession of small quantities. Regardless, the merits and flaws of the discussion being posed by the internet at large isnt the point, the point is that this is not the time and place.

The world should have learned its lesson when it ignored the actions the Bush administration was taking during 2003 and instead tuning in to hear about Paris Hilton and other arbitrary bull, so no more, as the nation is in a critical and emergency state the people have to be interested in the big and real issues and pay attention for gods sake. You cannot ignore the trillions of dollars being spent, you need to pay attention and be sure your government is doing things well, dont look back in 5 years of hindsight and blame the rest of society for not being watchful of your government, you start taking this economic collapse seriously internet or face the inevitable decline into obscurity as the executive branch becomes more and more hesitant towards using the internet as a medium because of the shear level of retarded that exists here.

/rant.

AIG Conspiracy Theory

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:25:49 GMT

I am about to blow your mind.

a) Barack Obama is the number 1 recipient of campaign contributions from AIG

b) AIG insurred the World Trade Centers against Terrorism very shortly before 9/11

c) Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein

THEREFOR, Barack Obama caused 9/11.

(/sarcasm)

Corporations can't contribute to a campaign. It is not surprising that the Democrats received more campaign contributions from AIG employees than Republicans, since the Obama campaign received more in total contributions overall. Mr McCain still received lots of money as well, dont forget that.

Also, dont worry so much about contributions from employees at X or Y company, worry about the actions taken from political figures. Barack Obama is president now, he isnt like the other paid off members of congress, I mean logically, if you were running for president and you were going to do it in the interests of Corporations like AIG like people are insinuating, wouldnt you not raise taxes for people making over 250,000 a year? wouldnt you stop the bill returning 90% of AIG bonuses? Actions speak louder than contributions, Obama ran on a platform of transparancy and protecting Main Street from Wall Street, his policies are all progressive taxation and higher regulation on the financial markets. Why would people insinuate that he is pandering to corporations? He has shown no characteristics of being under the thumb of big corporations compared to the last few presidents. I mean, Clinton had Citigroup, George Bush had Enron and the collapse of the Finance sector actually happened under his administration and under his de-regulation, now people are trying to pin Corporate pandering on Obama when he is just fixing a mess created by George, be real hysterical alarmist right wing media, you know this financial collapse wasnt Obama's fault because we all said long before the election happened that you would try to pin it on him. This is all too obvious.

PS: I dont support Congress in its current incarnation at all, we all know that Chris Dodd is in bed with these big banks and AIG, we all know that most of congress is, congress in the USA is the most corrupt institution I have ever heard of. Also, no, I dont think the AIG protests are being created by democratic groups like ACORN in some conspiracy, I think it is a bunch of people who are pissed off at AIG (rightly so) for getting million dollar bonuses with taxpayer money, why would that be a setup? what does the Democratic party gain from falsifying protests of AIG? Also ACORN is just a group that encourages people to get involved with politics and to vote, it is not some group that conspires to manipulate world events. Its mostly grass-roots focused with urban youth involvement in politics.

Bahahha, Silkwizard makes me lol

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:29:18 GMT

More Lulz from Silkwizard:
"Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli" /post
Rick Santelli and Rush Limbaugh are like the most irrelevant and hated individuals in the public realm, especially right now. With half of America being republicans you would expect Limbaugh to be popular with some porportion of that, but he is only not hated by 10% of Americans, and as such the Democratic party has tried to picture him as the GOP leader in order to discredit the entire party and destroy their chances at being relevant again. These pundits who talk about objectivism is a great example of why objectivism is retarded, these are close minded, hatemongering, socially detached, and entirely controversial and flawed people. Out of all the people you could look up to for level headed and logical advice, Rush Limbaugh is not that man, he is a hate mongering morbidly obese, multiply divorced, ball of seething unrelenting hatred and disconnect with the real world.

These people who subscribe to objectivism are basically psychopaths, I say that because psychopaths only care about themselves and dont care about others at all, this is exactly the attitude touted by the drug swilling, academically irrelevant, hag Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was like Rush, her marriage was a failure, her ability to connect with real people sucked, she was rejected wholeheartedly by the majority of individuals, and only other psychopaths and dispassionate give her the time of day. The fact that those two pundits like objectivism is just evidence that it is completely retarded.

*continued"urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, 'Atlas Shrugged,' is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history."

So? it didnt get better, it just got media attention because the angriest and most hate filled (and loudest) americans are talking about it. Critics and academics still are calling it horrible.

"There's a reason. In 'Atlas,' Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?"

Yeah it does, except in her fairy tale world the good guys were the big business titans. In reality these are not the good guys, regulation has to exist from keeping these people from forming monopolies, price fixing, exploiting labor, creating poor social conditions (industrial revolution anybody?), and turning the united states into China. Thank GOD there is regulation and social balance that keeps the standard of living up and protects those who do not control the means of production from starving to death. Nobody cares about billionares, why would we feel bad that they get taxed more? they still have more wealth after tax than a rational person could spend in a responsible way in an entire lifetime, meanwhile people are starving to death and Objectivism says that it is because they have poor characters. Bull, we all know that entitlement exists, we dont start out equal and simply make wealth equivalent to the number of hours worked, its fallacy. Those with connections get white collar jobs and those who dont have to struggle.

Objectivism is simply evil, and not only that, but logically a failure. Any person with common sense knows that the rich arent the ones that make our world work, you cant own a steel mill without the dedicated workers who work 50 hour weeks doing hard labour, the blue collar people are essential to society just as the white collar people, and Ayn Rand pretends that "we dont need you". Im a white collar guy in all reality, but at least I respect my fellow man, those who decide to do blue collar jobs are passionate and hard working and dont deserve to go bankrupt because of a corrupt health care system and dont deserve to lose their house because the heroes of Ayn Rands demented world convinced them that they could afford a mortgage that they couldnt and at the same time did the same irresponsible behavior in a macro scale, by leveraging themselves (investment banks, AIG) way beyond their means and collapsing. We bail out the white collar people and republicans are fine, we bail out the blue collar people and the GOP rally to let these "losers" be homeless.

I hope something horrible happens to these egotists, I hope they lose their house and have to end up on welfare. That would just be fantastic.

Earmarks, some facts

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:34:29 GMT

"Among the many earmarks are $485,000 for a boarding school for at-risk native students in western Alaska and $1.2 million for Helen Keller International so the nonprofit can provide eyeglasses to students with poor vision."

Basically, earmarks don't mean "wasteful" spending. There are lots of people who assume that earmarks are simply random stupid ideas that Obama has personally come up with and appropriated the majority of the stimulus package to.

In reality, the earmarks make up 2% of the total spending and are as excessive as they are due to the bureaucracy of congress. It isnt Obama coming up with these appropriations, it is the members of congress from both parties, who are the republicans kidding when they put the blame on Obama for doing this? He promised to fight earmarks but that was before the economic crisis got this bad, time is of the essence and when you have to push through significant spending legislation to recover the economy there will be some waste. The biggest problem with this entire discussion is the inevitable blame placed on Obama. You give the guy the biggest collapse of the financial sector since the great depression in his first 50 days in office and you get mad that "earmarks" a word that most people dont really understand make up 2% of the stimulus spending? that basically translates to 2% spent on philanthropic and social causes. None of this money would be appropriated in this bill to something retarded like a 6 year war based on false pretenses that eventually divides the country against itself, costs trillions of dollars and causes a rift between the USA and other nations especially in context of the UN.

However, so quickly we forget. We forget why Obama is forced into a reactionary position, the last guy in office left him with something that due diligence and appropriate regulation would have been exposed much sooner. Any time a politician has to react to a serious collapse of any sector in an expedient manor they are not going to be able to do it without some waste, you know that saying? "Haste makes waste"? well that isn't his fault, you cant take a long time to accomplish something like a stimulus plan or else the economy will take longer to recover and the cost of the GDP will not be worth inefficiencies of the plan due to the short time line.

Im hopeful that Obama will make good on his promises to change congress and stop it from running on lobbyists and corruption. However hes working with a broken system now, a broken system that hasnt been fixed for decades. This focus on earmarks is simply a way of ignoring the shear amount of hard work he has put in and the incredible progress he has made in the face of such a calamity. I've had enough with these idiots who act like they could do better, but are ignorant to the realities of the world.

Omnibus Earmark Spending

Ag-Rural Development-FDA $353,105,900
Commerce, Justice & Science $752,999,420
Energy & Water $3,534,626,863
Financial Services $135,276,814
Interior $433,947,000
Labor-HHS-Education $973,065,800
Legislative Branch $380,000
Transportation and Housing & Urban Development $1,487,607,944

Grand Totals $7,671,009,741

Lets just remember for a minute, that earmarks are not wasted spending necessarily, and that they are the pet projects of senators who Obama doesn't have time to fight right now. I think in the past 8 years you can think of worse uses of money than Education, Science and Urban Development. I mean, this is a stimulus package, maybe paying for some social programs that help people and at the same time create jobs aren't really that bad? Isnt the the whole point of this bill anyway?

Isnt it interesting that these earmarks only represent 2% of the bill, and the bill only represents globally competitive relative portion of the USA's GDP, and yet republicans are pretending that this 2% of the bill is going to doom the country to communism and collapse?

Conservative spending is important, but it only makes sense to spend months battling for leaner spending and reduced waste when the economy is literally on the brink of collapse.

I'm going to see if i can find more specific earmark programs to really illustrate how this isn't the travesty the GOP is pretending it is.

Also Silkwizard, stop regurgitating republican talking points. Your blog blends into a homogeneous glut or no homework relaying of party messages, maybe you should cut back on watching Fox and listening to Sean Hannity for all your opinions and actually think rationally. I mean seriously, Obama could cure cancer today and you would say that he has doomed the world to overpopulation you alarmist partisan hack.

PS:
"Fugsnarf wrote:
> Obama beleives that no one deserves to be rich. He thinks everyone should be at the same level. Sadly that's never going to be the case. No matter how much he tries to even it out, the government will have the most money and abuse it. It's never even, and I think he knows that, he's just power hungry."

Quote from Barack Obama:
"It wasn't under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks," Obama said. "And it wasn't on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement, the prescription drug plan, without a source of funding."

"We've actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles, and some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can't say the same."

"By the time we got here, there already had been an enormous infusion of taxpayer money into the financial system," he said, adding, "The fact that we've had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk-taking has precipitated a crisis."

These are quotes taken from this article from the global edition of the new york times, the Herald Tribune : http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/08/america/barack.php

Also "Spread the Wealth Around" is a lamen way of saying further progressive taxation, an increase in tax needs to happen to fund the things GWB has put into motion, what is more fair? tax those who cant feed their families because of an economic slowdown or tax those who have millions and millions in the bank. It is a marginal increase in taxation on those making more than 250,000 a year. Boo hoo cry babies. We wouldnt be hearing any complaints about it if it wasnt for the fact that the rich control the media.

Nationalisation and socialism

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:23:05 GMT

posted from an ipod,please forgive typos.
Isnt it a sign of rational weakness that neo cons continue to reduce complex arguments to buzzwords? Socialist,communist,nationalize,terrorist and etc
The focus on extremes represents a strong reliance on the strawman argument of using irrelevant and extreme examples to slander more complicates resolutions. For instance, how do you feel about the idea of bailing out AIG with taxpayers money and then leaving AIG to their own devices? Doesn't it make sense that those who pay the bill ie taxpayers and government by extension then hold the rights to that company and reserve the
ownership temporarily until such time that essentially this investment matures and is prudent to resell to private markets?
the real outrage is that the bailout had to happen in the first place, not that the government should try to control these failures after the fact. In more regulated and more liberal Canada we have no failing banks and actually the most prudent and strong banks in the world right now. We simply werent reactive, we were proactive and regulated without some free market ideological zealotry. Use common sense America, stop focusing on buzzwords and bipolar ideologues.

*Hah at home now and not constrained to the thumb typings of an ipod touch*

I would like to say that I dont support Nationalizing things, private markets that are subject to good regulation run things the best. However the idea that unregulated free markets will act in the macro-economy's best interest is just foolish. Ill outline what the logic is of well regulated markets versus the republican platform:

GOP: Businesses deregulated->less restrictions on individuals->this leads to high risk-> either high return or high losses. If high return->individuals get huge bonuses, if high loss-> individuals might get a salary cap at 500,000 but the corporate entity will be bailed out by the government.

It makes sense why people act so ridiculously under the neo-con system of markets, people want to earn high bonuses and personal salary and not simply make the entity they work for wealthy and thus the shareholders. This is a situation of you being at a blackjack table and being able to gamble with other peoples money, of course you are going to play and play risky. When you lose you dont lose anything personally, when you win your able to take a large portion of the winnings.

In a well regulated moderate and ideologically unbiased society we try something different.

Businesses Regulated->this restricts amount of risk a business can take-> individuals still likely to act in self interest but it is their self interest to not go to jail->moderate risk taken-> Strong financial institutions amidst global credit crisis.