Cappy

WaMu failed, sold to J.P. Morgan, which as of last week is mostly owned by the government.

Wachovia failed (though the FDIC stepped in a little early so it didn’t look like a takeover, ha!).

And the bailout didn’t pass! Because it wasn’t big enough and didn’t pay off the right people! If it doesn’t pass by next Monday I’ll eat my hat.

The Fed’s budget is being doubled. The FDIC will most likely raise it’s 100,000 insurance limit to 250,000. Temporarily?! Chuckle, chuckle…

Once you get past all the Partisan BS, this video is pretty helpful as far as historical info:

Current Events

The two remaining investment banks in the United States have been, for all intents and purposes, nationalized. I could go into the reasons for why this happened, but others have already done so in a far better manner. But to sum up: the government caused several major problems through over-regulation that it then attempted to “solve” with far more government regulation. So now the Fed has more power over American private finance than ever before, and this will to America going completely bankrupt all the quicker. It happened the same way in Germany, Russia, etc. And once that line was crossed, those countries skipped ahead from a slow descent into implosion to a nose dive.

Others in the Objectivist community are saying that this is an event the country can survive, that the effects can be reversed, that the country just might not cave in on itself…

Really? History and reason begs to differ. Governments do not give up power. It just doesn’t happen. Even in the few cases where it seems like a government is giving up power (such as China’s recent institution of some freer policies), it is only doing so to keep itself afloat (men who starve to death can’t pay taxes).

Countries only have a chance to become freer when the current government is completely decimated (and even then it isn’t a sure thing, of course). Germany and Japan became freer after they were destroyed in WWII, Russia became freer after Communism ran out of flesh to feed on. And America will only have a chance to become free again when the current Socialist government dies.

Why then are the pursuers of a philosophy whose greatest artistic achievement - Atlas Shrugged - supports helping to speed along the death of a violent, immoral government interested at all in attempting to save ours? Must we wait until every hospital and airport has been socialized? Are we not yet convinced that enough lines have been crossed? Are we not yet convinced that there is no going back? Don’t just tell me that it is, show me that it is. Explain to me the realistic steps that could take place that would move our government back to a freedom-supporting entity.

I would much rather sit back, stock up on silver (it’s too late to buy gold…) and wait for the fall. And when that happens, we can be ready to help people understand why it happened, and what should be done now.

Even if the government reverses some of what it has done once things get too bad, what does that prove to anyone? Certainly not that our government should be replaced. Business will get blamed for what went wrong, and the government will get credit for setting it right, just like the Great Depression. No one, except for the few that already do so now, will question the validity of the state we live in until it fails. And it will fail very soon, and I look forward to it.

Current Events, Ideas

For almost a month now I’ve been taking Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. Next month I hope to start a fiction writing course. In September, I start German at the Goethe Institute. And if my corner of the universe remains benevolent, I will start college courses in the Spring.

I miss the structure of school, the required self-improvement, the promise of punishment if I don’t write or read. I thought then that I was bored, but I didn’t know what bored was. My mind now feels like so many packed noodles (drain, but don’t rinse!), and it is only recently that I am finally struggling back to a semblance of intelligence. I pen a story, I finish a book, and I feel a little bit more like myself. I learn new words, most of them unusable, and it gets better.

Somehow I turned off my desires for a while and became complacent. It was easy, since I was too poor and worried. But now, they have come crashing back in force, and I am embarrassed in their presence to have so little to show.

“But look at this story! It’s 17 pages and has some great characterization!”

“It’s also filled with holes and the heroine is barely an abstraction.”

“Yes… well…”

Within four years I intend to leave Atlanta for a city where book publishers frolic, like New York or Chicago. Preferably New York. This means that I must finish a degree, get a firm grasp of editing and the various style manuals, and ideally bring at least some of my efforts to a publishable status. And knowing a foreign language (like German!) wouldn’t hurt either…

Current Events

Neither my roommate nor I are anywhere near being environmentalists, but since the beginning of the drought here in Atlanta (the worst in a century), we’ve done what we could to preserve water. Quick showers, washing dishes by hand, shaving in the sink, bad-mouthing people that water their lawn in secret, etc. But of course, it isn’t water bans or restrictions that is going to solve our problem. Some good common sense would go a lot further.

For instance, if the Army Corps of Engineers hadn’t “accidentally” released 22 billion extra gallons from our biggest water resource, Lake Lanier, last June, that would probably help. But what is much worse is what the Army Corps of Engineers does on purpose, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act.

Nevertheless, in compliance with the Endangered Species Act, the Army Corps of Engineers continues to drain more than a billion gallons a day from Lake Lanier, Atlanta’s main water source, to release it downstream for an endangered species of mussel.

“The Endangered Species Act is a danger to the human species,” said Dr. Keith Lockitch, a resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute. “People find it hard to believe that environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act could really require the sacrifice of human beings to nature. But that is exactly what they have to mean in practice; they mean that in order to sustain some obscure mussel species, the people in Atlanta must go without water.

Environmentalists claim that blaming the mussels is unfair. They say it is just a way of diverting attention from the real causes of the water crisis, which, in their view, are a lack of strict water conservation mandates and the ‘unbridled development’ of metro Atlanta over the last few years.”

Does this seem wrong to anyone who isn’t a dirty capitalist? Because it’s difficult to believe that only people like me are outraged at this. Every news article on the drought is pushing ways people can lower their water usage, but no one in the area is speaking out against this anti-Man nonsense that is going to drain us dry that much faster.

Current Events, Local