Don't Piss Down My Neck and Tell Me It's Raining
I'm not the most optimistic person these days. Perhaps, the spellbinding "The Secret" has lost its magic. I don't mind optimism in others. I'm actually glad to see it when it's rooted in solid facts. However, what I can't stand is when people use shaded figures from data skewed by past administrations' actions to look more rosy than they actually are. What can I say, when someone tells me to stand hard and fast on quicksand, while they're running away with my belongings, I tend to get suspicious. Particularly, when they boast to know the depth of something they can't possibly fathom. Particularly in the ashes of an economy, where we were told the engine of the bus was eternally self fueled and propelled, when it was merely in a vehicle on a downhill slope approaching a cliff. We measured its efficiency by rate of growth and lack of actual work, when we should have been checking the brakes and tires. We let the driver escape with the fares and we're still blaming the passengers.
What I also find distastefully incongruous is that some of the same commenters who applaud the numbers and graphs and past actions and words as evidence a diarist's viewpoint is superior to another(which is a defensible position) are some of the same who dismiss the actions of the banksters with the devil may care statement of "noone could have known" line that is at the very heart of the Black Swan model. They completely ignore the graphs and data these fine folks had in their possession and failed to use to prevent catastrophic financial losses to retirees, schools, hospitals and 401(k)s, utility districts etc, etc.
A Black Swan event is a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics:
- It's unpredictable
- Carries a massive impact
- After the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random than it was.
Does one out of three qualify the manufactured financial "crisis"? The only way to call the Credit Default Insurance Fraud; that screwed us out of trillions; a Black Swan event would require dragging a swan through the manure spewed from the mouths of these thieves' defenders.
There was nothing random about lending hundreds of billions of dollars in loans designed to fail and buying 5 times the value of those loans in insurance should they fail. Any proper insurance company or financially bound party would duly investigate claims from such parties.