Talk about ambitious

Only a small oversight, mislaying $29 billion dollars:

Not only mislaying $29 billion, but telling an inquiring MP and journalists about it, with documentation. Awesome! (and how could you not love a blog called The Devils Excrement?)

smartass remark of the month

apocalypse-strength sunblock

What's that?  SPF 666?

(from the Accidental Historian)

Some things will never change

I was, however, fascinated by the article mentioning that, in stereotypical British fashion, some of the rioters were queuing up to get loot from shops.

Somehow I hadn't envisioned the Viking raiders queueing to loot the church, but I guess I may be wrong on that :)

London's burning, again

From GK Chesterton:

“You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”

Yes, yes, very clever. Not exactly a good reflection of what's happening, tho.

Free Credit Fuckup

From the Economics of Contempt:

Look, I know these S&P guys. Not these particular guys — I don’t know John Chambers or David Beers personally. But I know the rating agencies intimately. Back when I was an in-house lawyer for an investment bank, I had extensive interactions with all three rating agencies. We needed to get a lot of deals rated, and I was almost always involved in that process in the deals I worked on. To say that S&P analysts aren’t the sharpest tools in the drawer is a massive understatement.

Naturally, before meeting with a rating agency, we would plan out our arguments — you want to make sure you’re making your strongest arguments, that everyone is on the same page about the deal’s positive attributes, etc. With S&P, it got to the point where we were constantly saying, “that’s a good point, but is S&P smart enough to understand that argument?” I kid you not, that was a hard-constraint in our game-plan. With Moody’s and Fitch, we at least were able to assume that the analysts on our deals would have a minimum level of financial competence.

Now remember that the guys that go to work in the personal credit agencies are the ones that can't make the cut for S&P, and consider how much power they have stolen over everyone's lives.

Steamy Days

Well, each summer here we've found June hot, July extremely hot, and August unbearably hot and sticky. This year, June was extremely hot, July was unbearably hot and sticky, and god knows what August holds for us.

Normally in August, when I step out of the car or house or office, my spectacles would fog over immediately. This has been happening for the last 6 weeks, this year. Ominous really. How on earth did people survive this climate before aircon of some sort? Oh, thats right, mostly they didnt.