Oh, all right....

The instructions:

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

Take a picture of yourself right now.

Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair... just take a picture.

Post that picture with NO editing.¹

Post these instructions with your picture.

[1]  OK, if you want to be picky, I "edited" this by scaling it to quarter size so as not to totally kill your Friends page.  Click on it for the unscaled original if you're a meme purist.

So ATF wants to police our weapons?

Why should they, when they can't even keep track of their own?

According to a Justice Department audit released Wednesday, the inspector general reported the ATF was unable to account for 76 weapons and 418 laptops over the past five years.

The report said the rate of loss had tripled since the last audit was conducted by the ATF's then-parent agency, the Treasury Department.

"It is especially troubling that ATF's rate of loss for weapons was nearly double that of the FBI and DEA," the report said.

[...]

Of the 76 missing weapons, 35 were stolen from agents' homes, hotel rooms or vehicles, the report said.  Some of the others were left in public places or lost in shipping -- or their losses were still unexplained.

Two of the stolen guns were used to commit crimes, the report said. One was used to shoot through the window of a residence, and the other was recovered from suspects arrested on burglary charges.

The inspector general determined that 53 percent of the weapon losses were the result of employees' carelessness or failure to follow ATF policies.

Of the 418 laptops, 50 were reported stolen.

It's the stupid, stupid

"Worst Crisis Since '30s, With No End Yet in Sight", says the Wall Street Journal.

The latest trouble spot is an area called credit-default swaps, which are private contracts that let firms trade bets on whether a borrower is going to default.  When a default occurs, one party pays off the other.  The value of the swaps rise and fall as the market reassesses the risk that a company won't be able to honor its obligations.  Firms use these instruments both as insurance -- to hedge their exposures to risk -- and to wager on the health of other companies.  There are now credit-default swaps on more than $62 trillion in debt, up from about $144 billion a decade ago.

(Emphasis mine.)

So not only is half the economy based on funny money that only exists on paper, half of which consists of bad debts (but they look great on paper!), but if that wasn't enough, they're engaging in legally-sanctioned gambling with it.

Is anyone in any remaining doubt as to why the economy is screwed?

Credit default swaps "didn't cause the problem, but they certainly exacerbated the financial crisis," said Leslie Rahl, president of Capital Market Risk Advisors, a consulting firm in New York.

No shit, Sherlock?

The sheer volume of CDS contracts outstanding -- and the fact that they trade directly between institutions, without centralized clearing -- intertwined the fates of many large banks and brokerages.

So nobody outside the companies gambling with them really knows how much is tied up on them until the shit hits the fan.  Bloody wonderful.

In normal times, capital-starved companies usually can raise money on their own. In the current crisis, a number of big Wall Street firms, including Citigroup Inc., have turned to sovereign-wealth funds, the government-controlled pools of money.

But both on Wall Street and in Washington, there is increasing expectation that U.S. taxpayers will either take the bad assets off the hands of financial institutions so they can raise capital, or put taxpayer capital into the companies, as the Treasury has agreed to do with mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Either way, the fuckups who lost all that money by not only making stupidly bad deals with it, but by gambling with it, get to take it out of the taxpayers' pockets.  Heads they win, tails we lose.  Hands up anyone who didn't see THAT coming.

...Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

The more we learn about the utter and total clusterfuck our investment bankers and stock market wizards have made of the economy, mainly out of rampant greed and sheer stupidity, the worse it gets.  I would not be greatly upset at this point if it were to start raining former millionaires on Wall Street again.

(Thanks to wcg for the article pointer.)