Collateral Casualties should be minimal…

As the machine gun drone sprays the area, Revolutionary Grrl leaps for the rope she swung in on...

It's 3 a.m.--collateral casualties should be minimal--the crooks are all there during the daytime!

Ah-hah, our girl has taken out the drone’s sights with her paintballs. But … the drone sprays the area with bullets? Aren’t they afraid of collateral casualties? Naw, it’s 3 a.m., all the real crooks are there during business hours. There shouldn’t be anyone in the business district except some accountants trying to balance the books for year’s end.

Speaking of collateral damage, yours truly has been down with a horrible cold since Thanksgiving. We hope you all had a great Turkey Day. We did, but then the sniffles began the next day and the runny nose on Saturday and … well, I just haven’t been paying much attention to anything else for a few days. I see the insane wing has been jumping up and down trying to get the war on Christmas noticed again. Fat chance–Hallowe’en candy disappeared ON HALLOWE’EN so Christmas merchandise could be put in place! Black Friday was one of the most successful ever, according to Walmart–there were stabbings, several murders, a woman tasered another one … Just good clean American consumerism at its finest.

The fright wing, in the person of Rush Limbaugh, has continued to jump up and down about the Pope being a Marxist. You tell them, Rush–maybe you can lose any Catholics in your audience, or worse, in your sponsorship. And of course, they’re all aflame about people honoring Nelson Mandela, who died during the break. Another Marxist–he even admired CASTRO! I saw one letter claiming God had sent him to hell. God certainly took his time about it, since Mandela was 92, but then I think that 27 year imprisonment was more likely Mandela’s hell and that if there is an afterlife, he’s certainly in a better one than the injustice under which he’d suffered. Nonetheless, the Westboro Baptist Church has promised to go to South Africa to protest at his funeral. Let’s hope they suffer a little collateral damage when they discover that while free speech is usually guaranteed for citizens and residents, visitors to a country usually aren’t tolerated as well. Or do they think South Africa is part of the USA?

ANNOY YOUR FRIENDS! CONFOUND YOUR ENEMIES! PRESS ONE OF THESE BUTTONS--OR ELSE!

Goldman Sachs–shorting America

Lloyd Blankfein as Matt Taibbi's great vampire squid and his version of MAD--mutually assured derivatives--just as bad as mutually assured destruction.

The Great Vampire Squid testifies in front of Congress. Mutually Assured Destruc ... Derivatives?

Oh, how I wish I’d come up with Matt Taibbi’s description of Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.” A prescient lad, he said that even before the revelations this past week about “The Big Short”. Seems these very shrewd operators basically: 1) made a bunch of loans to people they knew had a very good chance of defaulting; 2) bundled them into a security that they noodged Moody’s and Standard and Poors to rate AAA; 3) sold them to unsuspecting investors as a solid investment; and 4) shorted them so that when the price fell, they’d clean up. In fact, the only way they could have lost money would have been for the loans to be repaid. Thus they not only screwed the poor schmucks who couldn’t repay loans (remember the sliding rates that went up after a few years? Let’s stack the deck while we’re at it.) But they screwed their clients.

And when the bottom fell out, they screwed everybody. Lloyd Blankfein–who has an eerie resemblance to Erich von Stroheim, the “Man You Love To Hate”–claims he was doing God’s work, but for the life of me, Blankfein’s God has little to do with any modern God I know–more like Cthulhu (and we’re back to great vampire squids). Senator Dodd from Arkham has heard the call of Cthulhu and has busily crafted a financial reform bill that keeps the monsters and their derivatives intact–it seems mostly concerned with restoring the power of the regulators to wank instead of work and watch internet porn. Not break up the banks that bet AGAINST AMERICANS.

Most recently, Blankfein has had the gall to tell us that if we break up the banks, we will weaken America. Like the worst economic crisis since Black Friday didn’t do that already. Maybe he meant it in relative terms. After all, they broke the economy of the entire world–maybe America would have come out ahead on the deal.

If we’d shorted it.

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