For less than the cost of the Iraq War, we could have built adjacent Large Hadron Colliders all the way up the West Coast.

That ought to be enough to get the job done.

Palin on the Economy:

Palin on Foreign Policy:

Palin on Wall Street:

Palin on the Middle East:

Palin is the Death of Meaning, the destroyer of sense and reason, one by one the words she uses are stripped of their definitions and connotations and spat out on the floor like chewed-up gum, once she has completed her great and terrible work there will be no language left to us and even mathematics will stop working

sometimes I think perhaps the Hadron Collider has started to destroy the world, and McCain/Palin ‘08 is how it manifests itself

stolen from elsewhere on the internet, can’t find original source:

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley turned themselves into — by merely saying so — commercial (rather than investment) banks, thus affording them greater guaranteed protection in return for reduced scope of operation. This was … there are no words for this. It’s like the scene in escape movies where the prisoners make inch-perfect uniforms from a gray sock and a tin of nugget and pass themselves off as the German general staff. Will they get away with it? It depends if they’ve got someone on the inside, like say, former Goldman Sachs partner current Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

Can anyone explain why the television ads for The Duchess, the Duchess of Devonshire biopic, open with the voiceover: “She came from nothing. . .”  Her father was the first Earl Spencer and she was related to the Duke of Marlborough, and I mean I don’t want to sound like a prole here but that sounds pretty not-nothing to me, except I suppose in the ashes-to-ashes sense.  Is there some attempt at justification for this in the film, or is it just pure nonsense?

Cat Rambo sez:

I write in large sketch pads, because I like the space to draw arrows and circles and make marginal notes. . . . I always have liked writing with cheap fountain pens, but they’re harder to find than they used to be, and I have a bad habit of losing more expensive ones. So it’s ball-point today, which moves reasonably quickly, but lacks a fountain pen’s rapid grace. 

So why am I telling you all this? Because it’s a prelude to passing along the best writing advice I ever got. Are you ready? You might want to write this down if you’re still figuring out your own process.  It’s this: what other writers do doesn’t matter. Syne Mitchell told my CW class: “Figure out what works for you. And do it. Lots.” And I’m repeating it because that is seriously good advice. You don’t need to write two thousand words a day like Stephen King. You don’t have to write in silence, or with only classical musical playing, or by sticking your head in a victrola after downing a bottle of cheap red wine. What you need to do is experiment and find what gets you writing, and keeps you writing.

All the fiction I write is composed acrostically, out of the first letters of every line of every bit of apparently unrelated work I do, like e-mails, memos, shopping lists, this blog post, all the way back to juvenalia composed out of and precisely simultaneously with old school essays. 

I suppose maybe there are other, easier ways of writing, but I consider them cheating.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in a vacuum metastability event.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
As I understand the scientific debate
For destruction a vacuum metastability event
Is also great
And with current theory con-sis-tent.

Robert Frost, “Fire And The Theoretical Possibility Of A Vacuum Metastability Event” (Harper’s, 1920).

supposedly from a democratic congressperson, re the infinity-billion-dollar taxpayer bailout of the richest and greediest people in the world:

I also find myself drawn to provisions that would serve no useful purpose except to insult the industry, like requiring the CEOs, CFOs and the chair of the board of any entity that sells mortgage related securities to the Treasury Department to certify that they have completed an approved course in credit counseling. That is now required of consumers filing bankruptcy to make sure they feel properly humiliated for being head over heels in debt, although most lost control of their finances because of a serious illness in the family. That would just be petty and childish, and completely in character for me.

i mean, i would prefer some actual regulation of Wall Street, or if maybe perhaps 1% or so of that money could go to cushioning the fall for homeowners, but actually something like this would be reasonably satisfying, too

aux barricades, i guess

one of the things i’ve always wanted to do with my life is to start a rumour that destroys a major and venerable financial institution, and now i suppose there may never be a better time

i don’t care which one

i just want to get my name in the papers, as that guy; it’s like the white-collar professional equivalent of taking a shot at Wild Bill Hickok

so anyway, i hear that following recent restructuring Barclays Bank is staffed entirely by four-year olds

the new CFO of Rabobank is actually one of those quite simple computer chips that operate Coca-Cola vending machines, everyone’s saying it

i heard from a guy who heard it from a guy who knows about this sort of thing that HSBC doesn’t exist, it literally has no existence either physical or legal or conceptual, there simply never has been any such thing and I’m not even talking to you about it now

these are all true stories

Webcams!

One of the things that most depresses me about this whole sordid and depressing farce of an election is the knowledge that now we’re going to have to put up with Sarah Palin for the rest of our lives, that she won’t just go away, that now she’s been invited into the public discourse she will never, ever leave.

Sarah Palin’s face, sneering and lying and bullying and whining and then bullying again, forever and forever. Picture it. She’ll remain ageless, preserved, like a vampire, or a robot, or like the picture of Dorian Gray she’ll stay 44 forever while the entire country around her slides into squalor and decay. She will always be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating a guy, she’ll be there, also beating that guy.

Whatever happens in the election, wherever she goes next, to the White House or to some bullshit right-wing “think tank” or vicious, destructive lobbying outfit, she will be there, beavering away, tirelessly applying her best grinning can-do hockey-mom spirit to the job of making all our lives worse and poorer and less safe and more miserable, until the day comes when you die from eating spoiled meat and it turns out it was Sarah Palin’s lobbying that did away with the meat inspection regulations that would have saved you, or you die of heart disease thanks to her efforts to make damn sure proles like you don’t have health insurance, or you die in a war with China that President Palin thought it would be a good idea to start because someone told her it would give her a 5% bump in the polls and she doesn’t really understand how big China is or how many people there are in it.

We all had a lot of time to get used to how awful creatures like Giuliani and Romney were, they encroached on your conscience slowly, creeping up, infecting and despoiling the res publica bit by bit, and in its way that was a kind of mercy. OK, you’d think, every time you had to see Giuliani’s hideous ghoul face on the TV, OK, this is horrible, but I can cope with it. Palin’s sudden sucker-punch appearance is just too much.

Picture her face, ten or twenty or forty years from now, giving a tight spiteful little smirk as she explains why it’s a good thing that you’re not getting your pension or any Social Security benefits, probably spouting mangled bits of heartless Econ 101 nonsense she doesn’t even pretend to understand; picture that, and tell me you’re not secretly hoping for the Large Hadron Collider to smash the world.