Lurkers sometimes see the truth revealed when there is no other way.

I lurk at teapartynation.com. I think the following sentence says more about the nature of the people populating it than this (requires registration):

I have been self employed since my early twenties and remain so today. I have lived through all of the Federal Government’s wonderful ideas including the EEOC, OSHA, EPA and the rest and have survived in spite of them. 

Really? The things you think are unjust are not being able to discriminate, being required to ensure the safety of your workers, and not being permitted to pollute? Things you think are so onerous as to make miraculous your continued existence as a corporeal and financial entity?

I'm pretty sure that makes you a racist asshole with a penchant for a sadistic and supercilious management style.

We should grow flowers on its rotting bones.

The Confederacy was an Evil Empire. We shouldn't use its flag anywhere except history books. http://t.co/U3KpvloqaJ
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) September 22, 2013

Word.

Links to here.

A kind of public pissing match.

Been seeing more of this, lately:

And this:

And even this:

And those aren't even of a par with this:

But none of that riles me quite as much as this:

Are you fucking kidding me?

#fuckyouredcup. And the people who celebrate you.

Life expectancy by state.

MN, CT, MA, VT, CA, NY have the life expectancy of Norway, NZ, Holland. AL, WV, MS have LE of Venezuela, Vietnam, and Syria.
— Bill Gardner (@Bill_Gardner) August 4, 2013

Um. Wow.

That's pretty phenomenal.

Not until the Queen herself...

Reading this, my immediate reaction is: Not until the Queen herself stands before Parliament and proclaims both the debt owed by her and her Empire to the work of Alan Turing, and an abject apology for the manner in which he was treated, pardoning all persons convicted under this abomination, will even a modicum of the necessary prostration before Turing's contributions and accomplishments have been achieved.

Turing may have saved the Empire in leading the effort to break the code the Nazis were using, nevermind the uncounted lives saved in shortening the war.

Given how he was treated despite this fact, there is no way to apologize sufficiently. But an apology is definitely necessary.

Rent-seeking as the new normal, and lawyerly arbitrage as the agent of change

From the Financial Times: 

The story followed a Reuters article reporting that the Fed was now “reviewing” a landmark 2003 decision that first allowed regulated banks to trade in physical commodity markets. It was this, we always noted, that allowed for the emergence of a so-called physical loophole for a number of top Wall Street institutions active in commodity markets. The fact that they were swap dealers with physical exposures ensured they were eligible for exemptions (on such things as position limits) whilst other financial institutions were not.
When 2008 hit, and most commodity curves went into super-contango, this allowed those banks with commodity businesses to very profitably enter the warehousing space — which was now a securitised path towards yield enhancement, exploiting the fact that passive commodity speculators were prepared to pay the industry to store commodities no-one else wanted.

Gosh, that sure sounds like something we'd rather they didn't do.

"Libertarian Populism"

"This is what actually-existing right-wing libertarian populism looks like, and that's what it needs to look like if it is to remain popular, or right-wing. "

No. Really.