Brain. Cash only, please.

Jim Manzi explains the crisis.

I strongly recommend that you read this article, because it explains what happened to our economic system. Manzi doesn't emphasize enough just how much "leverage" there was in the system; when he talks about fourth parties buying up the rights to the fragmented mortgages sold by third-party bundlers, and the fifth parties buying up fourth party assets, and so on, he doesn't mention important confounding factors: the ability of brokers to create leverages as large as a hundred to one, the failure of regulators to assess this problem as it was happening, and the rating agencies' willingness to mark bundleds of subprime mortgages as AAA. When you buy a product with the expectation that it can be collateral on a hundred times as much credit paper, and the next guy does that on the paper you sell, and the next guy, a hundred-to-one leverage ration become a million-to-one.

Last week, Standard & Poors let slip that at the weekly meeting of their soverign rating committee, the US Treasury's AAA rating came up. If the US loses its AAA rating, then any incentive for other nations to buy our bonds dries up overnight and the only thing we have for servicing our debt is our internal resources: you and me. Right now the debt is $47,000 per person. Are you ready to start paying the interest on a $47,000 loan? (And don't forget, if you have kids, I hope they've got jobs, because that's $47,000 per person, working age or not.)

What this issue doesn't answer is why I and my family, who have a prudent ordinary mortgage, should have to pay either for the bad mortgages of people who bought irresponsibly, or for the failures of financial institutions to properly regulate themselves, or hand over $700,000,000, as much as the combined annual budgets of the Departments of Defense, Education and Health and Human Services, of my money to Hank Paulson to do whatever he wants: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." (no, really, that's the language in Paulson's proposed bill).

Let it all fail. If we want to keep government out of business, now is the time to do it.

(And yes, I deliberately put on Warren Zevon to write this.)

Sunday: Nothin' doin'

I wasted most of the day playing Half-Life. I think I've screwed up badly; I may not have the Long Jump module when I reached Xen. Oh, well, there's a cheat code.

Other than that, I made breakfast; I had baked two loaves yesterday, so we had French toast. Other than that, just chores: steam-cleaned the carpet where the cat peed (again), dealt with the compost, took out the recyclables, did dishes, some laundry, that kind of stuff. Oh, I changed my bicycle tires to street tires, now that the weather's gone grey and chill.

Kouryou-chan, Omaha and I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Kouryou-chan thought it was scary but also too long. I think most movies qualify as "too long" for her; visual media and attention spans that long aren't in her vocabulary, and they ought to be.

Omaha made an incredible roast chicken and gravy, but Kouryou-chan resisted eating the roasted vegetables with it. I made a random salad dressing out of stuff I found in my cabinets. Lisakit came over for dinner, which was nice. We all watched Omaha play Spore; now that's a strange, but pretty game.

Leftover brains, found in the back of the 'fridge.

Feel Their Pain

( Lehman Bro's Chairman whines he'll have to give up his private jet. )

John McCain blames obesity on... political correctness!

( A nation of whiners, revisited )

NYT: McCain's campaign manager received $2 million from companies seeking bailouts.

( A world of hurt for us, but will Rick Davis ever suffer? )

McCain loses George Will

( Ouch! Bow Ties against McCain! )

John McCain won't release his medical records

( Demand to see them. Joe Biden's, too )

Why does the economy perform so badly under Republican Presidents?

( “The facts are hard to dispute; indeed, the historical record is now so stark that diehard Republicans are probably starting to wonder if there is a curse.” )

McCain's Freudian slip reveals much

( McCain already fired the FEC chair )

McCain knows the military, at least... right?

( He can't remember what branch of the military Track Palin is going into. )

McCain campaign insider recommends "uppity"

( No word on whether the advice was taken. )