http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/77791.html

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman's failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

"The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion," said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who's proposed a massive overhaul of the nation's banks. "This is fraud and should be prosecuted."

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman's maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

Of course the financial masters of the universe/smartest guys in the room always deserve their wealth, earning it through pluck, grit, genius, and lots and lots of American mythological bootstrapping, but of course when things go wrong and somebody is left "holding the bag" it isn't really their fault and they didn't know anything about why "it" happened and they should never be left holding the bag. Because without them to deal with the "complexity" of their creation they couldn't be the "exceptional" beings they by definition are.

And it's all just so incredibly "complex" that noone could possibly have envisioned the "horrible horrible outcomes" that never seem to befall the masters, just the peasants. Because clearly the fault rests with the peasants for believing what they're told about how the law is supposed to treat all equally and for being big dummies when it comes to investing their money in a rigged legal racketeering scheme.

You know like when it comes to legal definitions of torture, and occupation, and fraud. Some groups of people, by definition, can't be charged with those legal transgressions except in the hypothetical, because in such an incredibly complex world we might fall into chaos without our smartest guys in the room battling the complexity with secret proprietary complex algorithms, and front loaded trading apparatus, and "independent" rating agencies to honestly and accurately reflect the complexity of the world.

Wonderful arguments just start falling apart under the complexity.

Hybrid Foreign Policy Variation #43 on "they're too big to fail" meme. Nice.

Maybe if a particular machine is so complex as to be unreliable, breaking down constantly due to its complexity, maybe the machine is "the problem".

You construct it to complete a task, one you ostensibly claim to want to complete, but you continue to use the machine ill-suited at best if not outright incapable by design of completing the task.

So the question becomes cui bono? Lot of money tied up in the status quo framing of the problem and the possible solutions don't you think?

But you're a smart guy ondelette. It does raise the question of propoganda and who wields it most successfully: if you create the fiction that a situation/problem is so complex that it cannot be solved without an equally complex system/machine (that oddly has demonstrated zero capacity whatsoever to do what it is ostensibly claimed to be designed to do) AND then you describe anyone who says "the problem really isn't that complex and really doesn't require some unwieldy ineffective overcomplex solution" AS CARTOONISH, then you've successfully cabined off as UNSERIOUS the possibility that the the cartoon characters are correct and that their perception of reality is accurate as is their potential solution(s) to "the problem". Or at the very least that their solution doesn't yield as many unintended consequences at 1/1000 of the price (human, political, and economic) and gets you closer to actually solving the problem than does the "complex" solution.

FAIL. Search this thread and see if you insult holds true.

Or the last three.

Like I said I'm going to try and cut back to leave more room for you and Heru.

Besides I'm out in a few to finish up my Halloween costume and get ready for a night of debauchery and the big Ducks v. Trojans game tonight.

So y'all have a safe one tonight and watch out for all little peoples roaming the streets jacked up on refined sugar.

See my following post.

I agree completely. Not all vaccines are bad, the scientific foundation is generally the same, we can all debate which ones are necessary and provide humanity with some net benefit despite the risk.

I've never suggested some vaccines don't contain harmful compounds but neither do I think the economic avarice of big Pharma should diminish a properly focused debate in some conspiratorial way.

Until we reempower the FDA and give it serious clout and regulatory authority that can't be captured we are going to get tainted drugs and drugs with harmful side effects that aren't full disclosed or understood for lack of adequate long-term testing.

Heru is just being a bonehead to frame it as something other than what it is.