quote shortened a bit for better impact:

Any bank that's "too big to fail" is too big for a free market.

That is the summary of a valuable lesson purchased with many $trillions. Anyone objecting to the use of anti-trust laws needs to refute this before proceeding.

And, Renman, while you are enjoying yourself, reflect on the evidence that an adult animal is an aware being, while an embryo, human or otherwise, is not. I am not saying "do not kill to eat", but rather just urging that you use a bit more of your mental powers to understand what this means.

wrote:Mike, it's only your contention that a embryo is not an aware being.

No, the connection between brain and awareness is well-established. Cut out certain parts of the brain, and you lose certain kinds of awareness. If you want to argue that an embryo has some kind of non-brain awareness, go right ahead. But that does not sound like your kind of thing.

You might be interpreting "too big to fail" (in quotes in the original) too literally. Think of it from the future as just a way of denoting the relationship of a then current (now future) corporation to its financial environment while referring to the then historical (now current) situation in which the lesson was learned once again.

Attributing feelings to animals is not equivalent to religious belief. It is hard to avoid given the relationship between awareness and the human brain.

=

if a conservative is for something, the liberal will automatically and knee-jerkingly be against it, whatever it is.

I was thinking of giving some counter examples, but realized that is silly. You made the statement; you show that it is correct.

because it can cancel the deal between those who have bought the government and those doing the governing. One might think that the cost just goes up because they have to pay for the next level of control, that is, for the whip to be used against the public on a large scale. But once the big whip is out and the pretense of democracy is gone, the power balance shifts much more to those doing the governing and away from those currently paying. So they will not pay for the whip, fearing that it will be used against them.

The current system of bought government, over time, is just as unstable as the current financial system. It must change for better or worse. Public outrage is the key. How do you encourage the kind public outrage that moves the system towards a healthier democracy?

Although the NYT deserves criticism for ignoring its on policy on anonymity, I agree with Dogvane that RS, in the case of the Taibbi article, has problems of another sort. It is a fine entry level work on CDOs and CDSs, but Taibbi fails to convince me of his theme expressed by part of the subtitle:

How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

and stated in this from page 2:

The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

Did the meltdown and bailout do any such thing? I think the "takeover" was already a complete done deal, having nothing to do with the meltdown and bailout. So this claim is not correct:

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

They are free men because they already bought the right people years ago. The meltdown was a grand screw up, occurring not directly from the power they bought, but rather from an inevitable misuse of those powers resulting from a game of "financial chicken". That is, who had the balls to cross the tracks last before the freight train reached the crossing? We all know who waited too long.

5:00 PM is right at the beginning of an experiment; so I do not think I can make it.

Jebbie, I was thinking of exactly this:"Geithner must go." as the new page came up and I saw your comment. It has probably occurred to a lot more folks, too.

wrote:

The right didn't have much reason to criticize President Bush because he had campaigned honestly, and then did what he'd said he'd do.

"Compassionate Conservatism"

wrote:

The right didn't have much reason to criticize President Bush because he had campaigned honestly, and then did what he'd said he'd do.

"We don't torture."

wrote:

Fine, how about taking birth control rather than killing the baby --- that is a good choice.

Might need to decide when it is a baby.

The world shows up for us as bits of information that we decipher, like linguistic relics of an ancient culture that we have to interpret.

"Oh, how sad", he says! "It cannot be right!"

Many of of us would say that it is incredibly interesting that we can construct such a rich interior world from those bits of information provided by our senses. Indeed, if Noe were to say, "And it is there that the miracle occurs.", one might find it harder to laugh. But no, like all hucksters (even self-deluded ones), he starts by denying the undeniable.