Quote of the day: Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman:

Gingrich Said to Be Paid at Least $1.6 Million by Freddie Mac: The thing I think people find hard to wrap their minds around is the following non-contradiction:

1. Freddie Mac was a deeply corrupt institution
2. Freddie and Fannie did not cause the financial crisis

These are not opposing statements. Those of us attacking the Big Lie about the financial crisis are not defending Freddie.

That said, as a believer in the importance of the humanities, I do have to appreciate Freddie's appreciation for the uses of historians. At least, that's what Gingrich says he was paid for.

But remember kids, all of the following countries are experiencing housing market failures not because the banks got reckless with your money, or because government regulators were so captured by the institutions they were assigned to regulated they failed to intervene in the recklessness. Nope. Belgium, Spain, the UK, Ireland, Austria, France and Italy are all in recovery mode following a tragic passive government failure because a U.S. Senator from Massachusettes said something one morning many years ago:

A firm statement from the squishy middle...

Goddess, yes. Charles Stross says it exactly like it is:

I just want a party to vote for whose three guiding principles are (a) maximize individual liberty, (b) minimize the Gini coefficient, and (c) protect the commons. Yes, I am aware that these three goals are orthogonal and often conflict with one another: that's why it requires an ongoing process of negotiation rather than an ideologically-driven damn-the-torpedoes race to the goal.

Some people think liberty is an endpoint. It's not. It's a process. We can do more or less of it. Right now, there's less.

In the meantime, kids, enjoy this analysis of the "We are the 99%" website:

The overwhelming majority of these statements are actionable demands in the form of (i) free us from the bondage of these debts and (ii) give us a bare minimum to survive on in order to lead decent lives. These are the demands of a peasantry, not a working class.

The Wall Street Journal op-ed pages go lower...

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, the unidentified editors wrote of the Sandusky scandal at Penn State:

We doubt it will happen again. It's also something of a relief that in a culture as libertine as ours at least some behavior—sexual exploitation of children — is still considered deviant.

Thor's balls, does anyone really believe this crap? How hard do you have to beat on someone's precious myths to make it clear to them that what we allow between consenting adults, and what we restrain sexual predators from inflicting on unwilling underage children, are two wholly different things with no overlap and no sane advocates for overlap? Does anyone outside the lunatic fringe right really believe that allowing two adults of any gender to be left alone in the privacy of their bedrooms, or to have their solemn twenty year relationship recognized with the same gravity and legal authority as Kim Kardashian's 72-day marriage, inevitably implies predation (of a sexual nature or, indeed, of any nature) on prepubescent kids?

The whole point of the sex-positive movement has been to dis-empower the harmful myths of sexuality, to bring it out into the open and make it easier to talk about. We have a long way to go in giving people to talk about sex, but, y'know, a lot of what we're talking about isn't about sex. It's about abuse of power. The WSJ knows all about power. Articles like this only serve to further the meme that Murdoch's newspaper is for the powerful, by the powerful, and of the powerful, and fucking, and fucking up, everyone else is, in fact, the only moral imperative.

The world will be a better place when Rupert Murdoch's little empire collapses in on itself, consumed by its own bile.

I think I need a new dictionary...

Words not in the Penguin Hutchinson 1995 CD-ROM Dictionary and Thesaurus.

• Torte.
• Matte.
• Ganache.

Since I prefer to write with the Internet turned off, I keep a copy of this application and library on my laptop for references purposes. Recent writing projects have exposed the epic fail of this plan.