Archive for October, 2008

Wall Street was stunned. Washington was stunned. Everyone was stunned

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

“Quite a coincidence that you’re interested in this one,” the salesman says. “Another lady was just in here wanting it and she ran home for her checkbook. I can’t guarantee it’ll still be here in half an hour.” Eleven days ago, the entire government of the United States — OK, no one invited the Supreme […]

It’s not as though anyone saw it coming

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

Who’s to blame for the current meltdown of the financial sector, caused by the dependence of so many corporate balance sheets on defaulting home mortgages? Since the White house has been occupied by a Republican — and one with low approval ratings, at that — for the past eight years, many may be inclined to […]

Every bug is sacred, every bug is great. If a bug is wasted, God gets quite irate.

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Let’s say you want to reverse the American industrial revolution, restoring America’s technology and economy to something much closer to the way they functioned before the Civil War. In fact, let’s say you’re such a radical Luddite that you oppose even the “green” technologies of wind turbines and solar energy farms, since they have to […]