Seven billion eager souls later, you'd think we'd have it sort of figured out.
..."I don't quite know how it happened. One day I was sipping some Maker's and blowing some hot love into this sweet Ocarina app Moloch gifted me, and the next, boom, seven billion ravenous little fleshbombs running around like they own the place. I gotta back off the mushrooms." -God
...
Hmmm. Given that choice, they might decide they'd rather give their money to German banks than to Greek civil servants. What happens then?
Greece defaults. And that almost certainly means that Greece exits the euro.
Why?
It's the growth thing again. If Greece defaults, nobody will loan them any money. That means huge cutbacks, which means the economy will tank, which means even more cutbacks, etc. The traditional way out of this spiral is a massive devaluation of your currency. But Greece doesn't have a currency. It has the euro*.
So if they want their economy to grow again, they have to (a) default, (b) exit the euro and re-adopt the drachma, and (c) devalue the drachma. This will cause massive amounts of pain, but it will also make Greek exports super cheap, which will eventually revive their economy.
So why not just let that happen?
It's just too catastrophic to consider. German banks, of course, would collapse and have to be bailed out. Ditto for banks in other countries that have lots of exposure to Greek debt. But that's not the worst of it. If Greece exits the euro, it will become terrifyingly obvious that other weak countries might exit too. Portugal, Spain, and Italy are the obvious candidates. Investors, spooked at the thought of their money being stuck in a country that might exit the euro and devalue all its bank deposits, would start huge runs on banks in those countries. The ECB would have to intervene and provide liquidity without limit. It would be a disaster.
So exiting the euro can't be allowed?
Right.
But if there's no exit, there's no devaluation, and Greece is pretty much screwed forever.
Right.
...
ATLANTA - Four suspected members of a fringe north Georgia militia group were arrested Tuesday by federal authorities and charged with plotting to buy explosives and trying to make a deadly toxin in a bizarre plot to attack unnamed government officials.
...
...
"I've been to war, and I've taken life before, and I can do it again," [one of the supects] told an undercover investigator, according to the records.
Thomas' wife, Charlotte, called the charges "baloney."
"He spent 30 years in the U.S. Navy. He would not do anything against his country," she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press.
...
The office of Charlie Hebdo, one of France’s leading satirical magazines, has been attacked over its decision to use a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed as its guest editor.
The Paris-based publication was petrol bombed overnight and its offices partially gutted.
...
I don't think it's too strident to demand at this point that David Brooks be hauled up before a jury consisting of everyone else in America and forced to defend himself against several million counts of being an insufferable twat in a public place ...
... In today's episode of Missing the Point So I Don't Miss a Meal, Our Mr. Brooks informs us that he once again has placed us all under close inspection beneath his monocle and discovered that some of us are very angry, not because some thieves in nice suits pillaged the national economy and then held the scraps for ransom. Oh, no, that isn't it at all, and he's got some wholly arbitrary ad hoc sociological categories to prove it.
...
...
Moore said Obama’s problem was not liberals like himself, who would still vote for Obama. The problem was that liberals wouldn’t be able to convince others to turn out for the 2012 elections because Obama did not clean up George W. Bush’s mess.
...
Coulter on black liberals: ‘Our blacks are better than their blacks’
You know on thing that's really hilarious about conservatives? How they preach the "personal responsibility" dogma and then, when they're caught doing something wrong or fucking up, it's always someone else's fault. Asked something in a debate that makes 'em give an answer that reveals how batshit or stupid they are? It's a "gotcha" question. It's discovered that a leading presidential candidate settled a pair of sexual harassment claims against him? He's now "a prominent Conservative targeted by liberals simply because they disagree with his politics."
Now, a liberal could get pretty goddamn upset and sputter, "No..fuck you...After what you did to Bill Clinton? And you're gonna accuse us of anything? Blow a rhino dick, you fuckers."
But screw it. The jig is up. They caught us. Again. You're right, you smart smarty conservatives. This is totally the work of the same liberal cabal that faked Obama's birth certificate and made Larry Craig like to get his cock sucked in men's rooms.
Here's how we did it:
Oh, how we thought we had enough layers for plausible deniability, not to mention the obvious alibi that it was either the Romney or Perry campaigns, but Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh were just too damn smart for us.
Why is the DOJ Assaulting California's Legalized Medical Marijuana Instead of BP?
...
If they really cared about babies, all their energy would be spent correcting that abysmal infant mortality rate. But they don’t. They care about god and public piety, nothing more.
...
...
People are only going to get more and more angry until they start to see some justice. Remarkably, though, our elites don't even seem to get the idea that there were even misdeeds that require any accountability. That's a recipe for increased acrimony and conflict. If bipartisan fetishists and various pearl clutchers want more public unity and less fractious political discourse, they should start looking into how to satisfy the public's yearning to see justice done to those who continue profit at their expense.
The U.S. House of Representatives will vote Tuesday on a resolution to affirm the phrase “In God We Trust” as the nation’s official motto, according to Politico.
Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA), the founder and chairman of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, sponsored the legislation. It would encourage the public display of the motto in all public buildings, public schools and government institutions.
Forbes said he introduced the bill in January because he was troubled by a pattern of omitting God from the nation’s heritage.
...
Sierra County now has 2 passive speeder deterrents. The original is "Manny the Mannequin" in a static post position. The sheriff's office tows Manny around a couple of times a year and parks him in spots where we receive the most requests for his presence, to slow speeders down.
He is one of the hardest working deputies in that he never takes a break, never gets complaints nor does he ever complain. He slows speeders down without ever having to write anyone a ticket.
Additionally, the sheriff's office spent about $12,000 on a new "Your Speed Is" flashing radar speed sign on South Lincoln Street (SR-89) in the Town of Sierraville between Willow Street and Beverly Lane.
In the other picture you can see the original sole traffic signal in Sierra County, the flashing red light at the stop intersection of highways 89 and 49 (Main and Lincoln Streets) in Sierraville.
With the flashing radar sign, we now have two actual traffic lights.
A few years back Representative Barney Frank coined an apt phrase for many of his colleagues: weaponized Keynesians, defined as those who believe “that the government does not create jobs when it funds the building of bridges or important research or retrains workers, but when it builds airplanes that are never going to be used in combat, that is of course economic salvation.”
[...] In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again.
So I welcome the sudden upsurge in weaponized Keynesianism, which is revealing the reality behind our political debates. At a fundamental level, the opponents of any serious job-creation program know perfectly well that such a program would probably work, for the same reason that defense cuts would raise unemployment. But they don’t want voters to know what they know, because that would hurt their larger agenda — keeping regulation and taxes on the wealthy at bay.
