That'll cost ya your Brains!

[elfs]

The Bailout Price Tag: Everything You've Ever Loved (and a few things you might well hate).

Barry Ritholtz crunches the numbers and finds that the bailout thus far costs more than:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

But add up the numbers and you'll see that the bailout doesn't just cost more than any one of these things. As Ritholtz points out, the econopocalypse costs more than all of these things combined.

Brain reorganizes to make room for math.

Cool! During puberty, the brain re-organizes itself in significant ways to develop a symbol-processing system that allows it to perform abstract mathematics efficiently. Very cool research stuff.

"Rebuild the Republican Party"

This looks like a tragically misguided attempt to bring the Grand Old Party into the 21st century by emulating the Obama model and using the all the tools the young kids are using.

The problem is that nowhere in this do I see objectives. There's no why here. This is an attempt to pull the tribe together without describing what the tribe is for. I want to know how the Republican Party will apply core values of limited, efficient government, respect for private property and private persons, and so forth, into political policy. That's what a political party is: an entity for aggregating collective energy into a force for earning political power. The last eight years, the Republican leadership has been about giving money to the "haves and have mores" at the expense of everyone else, while pandering to the religious subset that helped keep them in office by cutting our throats on the important technological and medical issues of the day.

Until and unless the Republican Party actually becomes a party that can clearly enunciate it's respect for privacy, property, and the diversity of human thought, I'm not going back. An organization without a soul is just a mob waiting to happen.

Freedom Watch is 'pretty much kaput.'

Freedom Watch was an attempt to emulate MoveOn.org. Funded by wealthy conservative casino owner Sheldon Adelson, it cynically shadowed MoveOn, attempted (and often failed) to use humor to make its point, and ultimately collapsed. So don't hold out home for RebuildTheParty, either.

City censors atheist billboard

The city of Rancho Cucamonga has "asked a billboard company if there was a way to have removed" a billboard from an atheist group. The billboard read "Imagine No Religion," and the city said it received 90 complaints about the billboard.

Man, that's a losing move right there.

Andy McCarthy takes another swipe at brown people.

National Review Online continues to sink into the muck and slime. Where they once fired Coulter for her crusader mentality, they kept McCarthy.

The Supreme Court, in the Boumedienne decision, stated that the Military Commissions Act without Habeas Corpus was unconstitutional. Since then, several Gitmo prisoners have sued for the United States to prove their detainment was necessary, and now five Algerian prisoners have been ordered released.

McCarthy, "emboldened" by keeping the seat supporting his ass, continues his assault on common sense:

It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration did not help matters here. Nearly seven years ago, the President publicly claimed the Algerians were planning a bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo. Last month, however, the Justice Department suddenly informed the Court that it was no longer relying on that information. We've seen this sort of thing happen too many times over the last seven years, and the effect can only be to reduce the confidence of the court and the public that the government is in command of the relevant facts and can be trusted to make thoughtful decisions

Yeah, gosh. After the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction thing, and the Fundamentals of the Economy are Strong thing, and the Heckuva Job After Katrina thing, you'd think that our confidence in our government's command of relative facts and thoughtful decision making would be solid, right? McCarthy continues:

Judge Leon concluded that "[t]o rest [combatant detention] on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court's obligation." That is puzzling. There is nothing in the training of a judge that makes him an expert in military matters. In our system of divided government, the question of who is an enemy combatant should be committed to the executive brach [sic] – specifically, to the military professionals waging the war.

But judges aren't expected to be experts on any topic that comes up in their courts; they're experts on the law, and it is incumbent upon the two sides making the case to show how their issue interacts with the law.

McCarthy's take on the way our court system is trying its damndest to figure out how to apply justice? As Radley Balko put it: "I Hope This Whole 'Imprisoning People Without Evidence' Thing Doesn't Make People Question the President's Judgment!"

Typographic Madness: 30 Brilliant Pieces of Design

Something pretty and smart to clear the palette

Comments

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

When I was 10, my babysitter tried to explain her algebra. "But what does x STAND FOR?" I said. I just couldn't get my head around it.

When I was 11, I began my first algebra class, and it went just fine. I knew SOMETHING happened. Thanks for the link.