Tom Friedman, ultimate wanker

i completely forgot about atrios' top ten wankers of the decade, a list he compiled to celebrate his ten years in blogging... i'd followed the other nine but it slipped my mind that he was to announce number one on tuesday... so, without further ado, here it is...

THE ONE TRUE WANKER OF THE DECADE

Tom Friedman.

He fetishizes a false "centrism" which is basically whatever Tom Friedman likes, imagining the Friedman agenda is both incredibly popular in the country and lacking any support from our current politicians, when in fact the opposite is usually true. Washington worships at the altar of the agenda of false centrism, and people often hate it. Problems abroad, even ones which really have nothing to do with us, should be solved by war, and problems at home should be solved by increasing the suffering of poor and middle class people. Even though one political party is pretty much implementing, or trying to implement, 99.999999% of the Friedman agenda, what we really need is a third party catering precisely to this silent majority of Friedmanites.

Truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything. The important thing about an issue is whether it proves Tom Friedman fucking right, but if it doesn't we can just move on to the next big thing that will prove Tom Friedman fucking right. If you advocate for wars that go a bit bad, well, it's not your fault. If only Tom Friedman had been in charge everything would have been great.

Such wankers are impervious to criticism because they're always doing battle with straw critics. They never remember what they said last week, and assume you won't either.

i remember the first and only friedman book i read - The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization... i read it when it first came out in 1999 and thought that in doing so i had joined the ranks of wise and sophisticated global thinkers... in the thirteen years since, i have come to share atrios' opinion...

thomas friedman's biggest fan is thomas friedman... friedman loves to bask in the praise those worshipful acolytes who think he's the ultimate representation of wisdom and political savvy... atrios thinks he's merely a buffoon... i agree...

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The MF Global theft

from the nyt...

Federal investigators examining the final days at MF Global and how customer money went missing are poring over scores of wire transfers in and out of the brokerage firm, including the possible movement of $325 million that may have belonged to customers, according to people briefed on the matter.

The suspicious transfer, which until now has not been made public, was first discovered in the early hours of Oct. 31, the day the firm filed for bankruptcy. Initially, the firm attributed a shortfall of more than $1 billion in customer money to an “accounting error,” records show. But after hours of searching, executives acknowledged to regulators in the firm’s offices in Chicago that the shortfall was real — and may have been caused in part by the $325 million transfer, said one of the people briefed on the matter.

It remains unclear where that money went, or even if it belonged to customers. But it is one of many significant wire transfers that federal authorities — including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — have spent months reviewing to piece together MF Global’s final days.

pushing aside the patent b.s. lack of "clarity" about where the money went, atrios chooses to call it what it really is...

When a billion bucks or so goes "missing" it isn't due to complexity, or accounting errors, or those crazy moments right before the firm went bankrupt. It's theft. The money was stolen from customers and then given to somebody else. Precisely why, by who, and to whom are questions that should be answered, but the underlying issue shouldn't be obscured. People were robbed. [emphases added]

seems to be a lot of thievery goin' around these days...

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Atrios: Stealing homes, then destroying them and their communities

he's referring to this...

Across the country, big banks and other large investors are buying up tens of thousands of foreclosed rental properties. They're not always model landlords, according to tenants and regulators. Some banks are failing to follow local and state housing codes, leaving tenants to live in squalor — without even a number to call in the most dire situations.

[...]

That's difficult even when there is a property manager. Luz Escamilla in Hyattsville, Md., says she sleeps with the lights on, "waiting for the bugs to come up." Her place is infested. There are chocolate-colored blotches all over her walls; it's the blood of bedbugs she has killed. [Note: the blood isn't "the blood of bedbugs," it's the blood of Luz Escamilla that has been ingested by the bedbugs.]

[...]

[Anne] Norton, the Maryland bank regulator, says it's often more challenging to take a bank to court than a mom-and-pop landlord.

"Due to disproportional bargaining rights between tenants and the parties that are the investors, tenants feel that they don't have a voice and also don't have rights," Norton says.

States are at a loss, too. They aren't sure how to make banks comply with their housing codes. Norton and nine other regulators are now drafting guidelines to help states crack down.

i find it downright amazing how rapidly the u.s. is making the descent to the status of 3d world country...

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Quote of the day

atrios...

The New York Times is perhaps a commendable jobs program for special needs people.

i love it...

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Sucking on purpose

posting at eschaton, jay is talking about u.s. download speeds, a topic i've posted about before... the nyt article claims that the u.s. comes in 25th in the world... i beg to differ (see below)...

Sucking

It's the sucking on purpose part that rankles. We could have internet innovation managed as well as Korea does. We could have trains as good as some random European country.

We don't.

You know, we should have something state of the art.

That's right. We do.

Drones.

by Jay Ackroyd at 22:55

here's what i posted back in february 2010...

here's the current top 14 world-wide in internet download speeds...

Top Countries by Download Speed

• 1. 23.35 Mb/s Korea, Republic of
• 2. 18.17 Mb/s Aland Islands
• 3. 17.38 Mb/s Japan
• 4. 16.73 Mb/s Latvia
• 5. 15.24 Mb/s Romania
• 6. 14.76 Mb/s Lithuania
• 7. 14.58 Mb/s Sweden
• 8. 14.08 Mb/s Netherlands
• 9. 13.99 Mb/s Andorra
• 10. 13.77 Mb/s Bulgaria
• 11. 12.28 Mb/s Moldova, Republic of
• 12. 10.73 Mb/s Hong Kong
• 13. 10.64 Mb/s Portugal
• 14. 10.24 Mb/s Slovakia

the united states...??

• 29. 7.57 Mb/s United States

yep... we're #29 but that's not the most interesting part... just look at the spread between download speeds...

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