On spies:
It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.

^*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). So in jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance.

—Willem Buiter

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

—Honore de Balzac

See full Tom Tomorrow cartoon here.

Shanda fur die Goyim!

To quote Freddie Dalton Thompson from The Hunt for Red October:

Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, “[Not] a mindful human being. That’s probably the nicest way I can put it.”

New favorite German word: Backpfeifengesicht, a face that needs to be slapped.

SEC Rule 10b-18 allowing stock buybacks adopted in 1982

 

As the saying goes, “バカにつける薬はない”.^*

^*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.

That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.

—P.C. Hodgell

How to embed a threadreader app thread:
Start with url: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1305261859155505153.html

Look at the number after the thread, and paste in the number sequence into this:

<iframe allowfullscreen=”” frameborder=”0″ height=”1500″ src=”https://threadreaderapp.com/embed/##############.html”  type=”text/html” width=”340 px”></iframe>

^*As I have asked many times, “Is there anything that big finance can’t make destructive and evil?”^†
†If the goal is to involve Wall Street in a public service, the effect will harm that service. QED.

Left align right align

on same line

Requiring police officers to self insure

……
testing

testing

Betteridge’s law of headlines, “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

1. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
2. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
3. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
4. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>

(יש”ו) (Y.S.) yimakh shemo יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ “May his name be obliterated”

Kung Fu monkey has the final word on Rand and her Randroid followers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

^*At Naked Capitalism, in the aptly named post, “Neo-liberalism Expressed as Simple Rules,” gives two basic rules:

1. Because markets.
2. Go die!

The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.

Iron law of institutions – RationalWiki

H/T Stephen Saroff      o o  The Bear who Swims      
                        (_)_____o      
                     ~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
                         oo    oo

^*What, you’ve never seen Ruthless People? Great movie.

condi quote with link:

Trust me, she is no expert on the Soviet Union
I actually saw this ditz in action. She came to Berlin and was giving all the strategic intel troops in Europe a speech about the Eeeeevil Empire :shudder: and how they were so numerically and militarily superior to our troops, how they had Super Weapons That Could Shoot Through Fifty Feet of Concrete…and all this time, I’m looking over at my guys like “we’re talking about the same Soviets, right? The ones we have can’t shoot, can’t march, are underfed, can’t run…” We’re passing notes between the Berlin contingent, the Augsburg contingent, the Bad Aibling contingent, the human-intelligence guys, the Spetsnaz analysts…and we all came to the same conclusion: the Soviet Army Condi Rice was working was a hell of a lot better than the one we were.

Finally my colonel looked at me and said, “Jim, I’ve had about enough of this shit.” He actually stood up and said, “Ms. Rice, one question. What are the true-unit designators and honorifics of the units you are describing?” Condi Rice’s response was classic: “What is an honorific?” If you do not know what an honorific is you are no expert on the Soviet Army, and Condi Rice didn’t know. (We didn’t tell her either; we all left at that point.)

All Soviet units had a true-unit designator and an honorific. The TUD was easy enough to understand: your unit is the 1st Guards Army or the 20th Motorized Rifle Division. (The title Guards was awarded at the end of WWII to units who fought with great valor.) Each Soviet unit was organized in honor of a famous communist–maybe you were the 144th “Feliks Dzherzinsky” Guards Artillery Battalion. Feliks Dzherzinsky was your unit’s honorific. They’d hang Feliks’ picture in your unit dayroom and everything you did was to impress ol’ Feliks.

IOW, the colonel was telling Condi to put up or shut up; we knew their guys weren’t half as good as Condi was telling us.

Condoleezza Rice was an expert on Ronald Reagan’s Soviet Army, the unstoppable bogeyman raised to justify the runaway military spending of the Reagan era. But Reagan’s Sovs and my Sovs were two completely different armies. Condi’s Sovs were absolute masters of the art of land warfare; my Sovs trained for five months, rotated a quarter of the company, and did the exact same five-month training schedule again. (Later, after reunification I went to a Soviet Army base on an open-house tour and saw a genuine Soviet Army company training schedule. It was painted on a sheet of plywood and bolted to the wall.)

Levels of Tzedaka

You have problem with Corporate Capitalist ^™®©, comrade?^*

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

As Eric Falkenstein observes:

People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend’s bar mitzvah.

Control fraud occurs when a trusted person in a high responsible position in a company, corporation or state uses their powers to subvert the company and to engage in extensive fraud for personal gain.

It’s spelled al Qaeda

---

Richard Whitney (financier) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the corrupt head of the NYSE, who went to jail, and had to find work on a farm when he got out.

The origins of the Evangelical political movement grew from racial bigotry, not abortion.

Dianne Feinstein^*
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

but I’m an engineer, not a doctor, dammit!^*

^*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

 

Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.

This article is far better than anything I could write, (alternate link) I learned some things:

In 1746, Parliament passed the Marine Insurance Act, requiring anyone seeking to collect on an insurance contract to have an interest in the continued existence of the insured property. Thus was born the insured-interest doctrine. The indemnity doctrine, which precludes a buyer from insuring property for more than it’s worth, soon followed. The point of these rules is to limit insurance contracts to trading existing risks and not to create new risks by giving buyers of insurance incentive to destroy property. The doctrines have been part of insurance law in both England and the United States (which in 1746 were colonies under English common law) ever since.

  

^*Full disclosure, I worded at GE Transportation Systems (GETS) their locomotive manufacturing unit from 1994-1996, and for about half of my time there, the chief of the division was Bob Nardelli, who I have never met.

Picture, H/t Pro Bono Statistics

Bummer of a birth mark, InsertNameHere

^*The definition of Santorum is, “That frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex”.

how do do indented multiline footnotes

how do do indented multiline footnotes

The classic rejoinder is the Yiddish, “Az der bubbe vot gehat baytzim vot zie geven mein zayde.” (If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather.)

Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google^™ Adsense^™.

The Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness)

abortion first emerged as a proxy issue about race and segregated private academies

At least, there is symmetry.

As Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, “I don’t think he’s a mindful human being. That’s probably the nicest way I can put it.”

Russia to export Worlds Most Capable Surface to Air Missile my RCS computations