Just in case anyone else didn't catch on, this article about Sarah Palin's interview with Charles Gibson, written by "political humorist" Andy Borowitz, is satire. (Rather hostile and venomous satire, but satire nonetheless.) Think of Borowitz as sort of like a bitter version of Dave Barry, except that if Dave Barry had written this article, he'd have written it so that it was (a) more obviously satire and (b) actually funny.
By way of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
randwolf, another good (and very clear) analysis of the mortgage bubble problem. (Now with real link! Doh!)
Like author Mark Chu-Carroll, I find it difficult to believe that supposedly skilled investors did anything this stupid. It's as though someone from space aimed a giant Stupid Ray at Wall Street.
I suppose it comes down to just another example of the incredible power of sheer unrestrained greed. Radix malorum cupiditas est.¹
[1] Word order in Latin sentences is flexible, because every word in the sentence gets declined to unambiguously show which part of the sentence it is. Thus in Latin, the three sentences 'Radix malorum est cupiditas', 'Radix malorum cupiditas est', and 'Cupiditas radix malorum est' are equivalent (though the first two forms are the most common).
New reports indicate that undersea methane clathrate beds off the coast of Siberia are collapsing. In places methane is being released so fast that it doesn't have time to dissolve, but is bubbling to the surface in columns. Millions of tons of methane are being released into the atmosphere, and methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The amount of methane observed being released from the Siberian continental shelf may be as great as the previous estimated total methane release rate from all the world's oceans combined.
So who else has read John Barnes' Mother of Storms? A massive collapse of clathrate beds was his starting scenario...