[Roqueredonde, France, August 22. Image via Bauer-Griffin.]

YOU CAN BE A GOOD PERSON AND BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN TO YOU.

Imagine saying "karma is a bitch" to Job. Or, you know, Jerome Kerviel. GOD THAT SOUNDS DUMB, doesn't it? Has anyone who has ever said that read anything, ever? Wait, forget that, did they ever go to fucking high school?

TIBET IS COMPLICATED

I like Buddhism and I despise Chinese autocracy. I can sympathize with any ethnic group that has endured sixty years of unending campaigns of re-population, marginalization, the exile and imprisonment of its most venerated members. But the fact is that, hi, the Chinese government has not really been good to any of its people, especially the religious ones, Tibet's claim to territorial sovereignty is pretty weak, and this problem whereby many Chinese have adopted this sort bigoted notion of Tibetans as backward descendants of the foul-smelling brutal savages responsible for the nation's darkest period — darker than the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Probably not something too often discussed in history classes! — is a basic problem of they don't exactly get democracy.

THIS WEEK'S NEWSWEEK WONDERS YET AGAIN WHETHER WE ARE THE DUMBEST GENERATION.
It quotes that George Santayana quote about being condemned to repeat history etc. etc. That was from 1905. In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt wrote in an elegy to a historian that is now the forward to a book about the Mongols I bought in hopes of better understanding China's historical relationship with the people of its Western steppe regions. "It is extraordinary to see how ignorant even the best scholars of America and England are of the tremendous importance in world history of the nation-shattering Mongol invasions," he wrote, calling the Mongol conquests "terrible beyond belief "and "the most stupendous fact of the thirteenth century" and shaming some British historian who had written an essay about the thirteenth century in which Genghis Khan went unmentioned. I read this, and thought, "How nice it is, the prospect of once again electing a president with some understanding of history! (Since I am not going to have time to actually do it myself." And then I saw this. Oh, well. You have to start somewhere!

• For some inexplicable reason publishers seem to think Michelle Obama could write a bestseller. Perhaps it was that college thesis? The admirable physique? Just hard up for cash in a challenging credit environment? [Observer]
  
• McCain: the "first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency." ? [NYT]
  
• Why would you assume our passports were made in U.S. America? [Washington Times]
  
• Sigh of relief for society! Jamie Lynn Spears is engaged. [US]
  
• Boycotting the Olympics: actually a pretty powerful condemnation of repression, when you think about it. Oh, well. [Slate]
  
• Some guy made up a story about how Diddy knew about Tupac's assassination plot and the LA Times totally bought it but the source turned out to be a "wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as 'a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.'" [TheSmokingGun]

• I am fucking sick of all these polls saying 28% of Hillary supporters would vote for McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee and 19% of Obama supporters feel the same way, especially when the national matchup polls prove they are talking out of their asses. [Gallup
• Wait, let's broaden that statement: I am fucking sick of all of it. And: what he said. [Politico]
• Also, what Nancy said too. I think. [CNN]
• Foreclosure bus tour! [Breitbart]
• Wall Street losses from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market may amount to $460 billion, which is half a trillion dollars. (Wow, Moe, way to put shit into context there.) [Bloomberg]
• Jezebel in the news: our very own commenter RyanB writes about being a tragic mulatto like Barry and how she's — scandale! — still registered to vote in Pennsylvania. If you ask me, the real tragedy is that there are no jobs in Philly.
• The Hills premiere was the highest rated thing on cable all year, which isn't really saying much, although it's saying something, and whatever that is is sufficient to depress me. [US]

• Yeah, how do we know when the this fucking nomination process has gone on too long? When the candidates' lives have not only been covered breathlessly in US Weekly, ostensibly dignified magazines like The New Republic have started co-opting their "if they mated" feature. [TNR]
  
• The Hillary campaign is now pinning its future on an "Electoral vote" strategy, basing her appeal to the conventioneers on the notion that she should win the nomination because she managed to win big states important to winning the electoral vote. Because California is in grave danger of voting for McCain over Obama? [NYT]
  
• Will her concession to Sinbad re the "sniper fire" mess up her chances? [NY Times]
  
• Speaking of comedians who are not Sinbad, this little Q&A with Tracey Ullman reminded me how much I missed Dave Chappelle. What's he up to? No performances I can find. [WSJ]
  
• New York risks losing as many as 20,000 finance jobs. I would be sad, but it's also sort of a "And at long freaking last they came for the bankers, and I didn't say anything because I had already spend much of my twenties unemployed kthanxbai" situation. Also, no industry finds fresh liquidity faster than finance, so, you know, they'll be back. [Reuters]

• Puerto Rico is switching from a caucus to a primary. I suppose this would ordinarily be bad for Obama, since the caucuses tend to favor him, except that no one expected him to win Puerto Rico? [NY Times]
• Dr. Phil hasn't given shit to Barack Obama despite the fact that he owes Oprah his life. Typical white person. [World Of Wonder]
• Will Hillary ever be "one of the cool kids"? Will this election ever move past high school? [Huffington Post]
• Black feminists try to sort out whether racism is harder for them than sexism and just when they find themselves leaning toward thinking it is, the sexism shows rears its pretty head again; it probably won't surprise you that this story is depressing. [Wash Post]
• Indicted Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Sent text messages on a beeper? [Detroit Free-Press]
• A few brave Han Chinese dissidents are getting jailed for openly calling for their government to open a dialogue with the Dalai Lama. [Wash Post]
• "November's election could be, for the first time in a very long time, a choice between two radically different visions of U.S. global engagement. "We want to have this debate with John McCain," a close Obama adviser says. "[Obama] will offer this clear contrast." [Prospect]
• Gene Weingarten discussed his epic piece on the 24-hour blogpundittalkradio culture we discussed in today's Crappy Hour in an online chat this morning and he agrees with that Ann Coulter is not for real and that the copy editors made a grave mistake in changing it to "douche bag." [Wash Post]

• Have you been wondering, like, where the hell has Hillary gone? What with all the gubernatorial humping and the Bible thumping and the AIDS conspiracy theorizing and the grandmother/bus/throwundering and the fifth anniversary of the war and the "meh" reaction to the public unveiling of her schedule for the entirety of the nineties, you'd think she had, like, left the race! Well, she kind of has. Her own people are giving her a 10% shot at winning the primary. "The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe." [Politico]
  
• In other words, when her campaign says the Richardson endorsement was "insignificant", they are pretty much on the money. [CNN]
  
• But what kind of job did it buy him? [Wonkette]
  
• Whatever, TAY ZONDAY is back in the news. [Wired]
  
• China released a list of 21 most wanted endangerers of national security. They have mustaches and carry swords. [WSJ]
  
• Why is this State Department bullshit such a big deal? Doesn't anyone think, like, you know, it would be kind of cool to see where Barack Obama traveled back when he went by the name "Barry" and a bunch of other countries went by old names like "Rhodesia" andsuch? Sayin. [Wash Post]

• Why does everyone love David Paterson even though he's a crooked womanizer also? I just assumed, "because it is a lot tougher to pull off being a crooked womanizer when you are blind" but actually it turns out that he is just generally a nice guy. [Wash Post]
• You don't hear about Spain being powerful much anymore but as it turns out they are the secret forces running professional basketball. [WSJ]
• Speaking of the Euros France is getting rid of some of its nukes. [BBC News]
• Abigal Taylor, a 6-year-old girl who had a rare intestine transplant surgery after being disemboweled in a freak pool accident last June, died. [CNN]
• Oh my God Jim Newell you are funny sometimes; why am I old enough to be your typical white grandmother? [Wonkette]
• The Republican attack plan for Obama. [Salon]
• You can still run for mayor after being registered as a sex offender, you are just probably not going to win. [Houston Chronicle]
• Speaking of attacks, this lady may not look scary, but watch out for her outside certain tamer amusement park rides. [Fox News]
• When you live in New York you sometimes forget that you are missing out on anything but here, I just found something. [Very Small Array]

[March 21, Dharamasala. Image via AP.]

• Obama's slightly racist grandma is not dead, she just doesn't feel like commenting on his speech apparently. Here is a picture of her clutching her grandson for fear of being beaten up by darker-skinned black men. No just kidding, it's just a graduation picture. Sorry to drag you into this, Madelyn Dunham.
  
• ""As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say 'That's a terrible statement!' ... I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I'm gonna be probably the only conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you — we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names..." Well Jesus F. Christ Mike Huckabee, if you didn't just win yourself some major days off from Purgatory right there. [Politico]
  
• John McCain keeps randomly linking Iran with Al Qaeda. I'd say he's trying to make this into a self-fulfilling prophecy like happened with Iraq and Al Qaeda so that he can make the 100 years thing its own self-fulfilling prophecy. But he could also be just old. [Huffington Post]
  
• Getting raped on Spring Break is just par for the course these days I guess, but getting raped and then hurled over a sixth-floor balcony is a bit much. [ABC News]
  
• Hillary's packed schedule as First Lady consisted mostly of philanthropic crap, ceremonial visits to foreign countries and REDACTED. Newspapers are still frantically scanning the newly released papers to find out more re our former "co-President" but one thing we do know... [Wash Post]

• One thing is clear: she was in the White House the whole day her husband messed up that intern's dress![ABC]
• A Hillary-supporting preacher estimates the bra size of Obama Girl at 54DD. [YouTube]
• An exclusive report from the front lines in Tibet describes a relatively restrained police reaction to the looting, which didn't go over so well with the ethnic Chinese minority. "One Han teenager ran into a monastery for refuge, prostrating himself before a red-robed Tibetan abbot who agreed to give him shelter." [Economist]
• How thoughtful of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to take time out from worrying about his country splitting apart to worry about Bear Stearns. And by "thoughtful" I am pretty sure I think "scary." [China Daily]
• Vote about what kind of liar you think the CEO of Bear Stearns is! [Dealbreaker]
• Michelle Gass a business visionary. First she invented a chocolatey smooth coffee beverage that could be sold at huge markups and used to addict the young and coffee-averse to strongly caffeinated beverages, then she added whipped cream and syrup on top, then she invented a caramel version, and then she invented a diet version. Surely there is no way of creating shareholder valued she could not pull off. [WSJ]
• Scientific sounding study says women should marry men who are fifteen years older than them. I would try to refute it, but so bad at science! [New Scientist]
• Obama is going to be on The View; yay! [ABC News]

MOE: Hey hi what's up shit is pretty fucked huh.
MEGAN: It makes me a little glad I never leave my house. Hooray for blogoraphobia.
MOE: Okay, first things first: there are violent protests in Tibet, and China has to quell them in a way that doesn't make Stephen Spielberg look good, and now the protests have spread to other provinces.
Tibet has long been a pretty sweet separatist province to have, what with the exiled leader advocating nonviolence and spending most of his time with Beastie Boys etc. etc.
MEGAN: And getting to meet practically every head of state in the world, albeit unofficially...
Except for, obviously, those countries in Africa rapidly becoming Chinese client states.
MOE: China has a whole other separatist province called Xinjiang and no one pays attention to those guys. Because they're angry Muslims. Hey Sudanese Islamofascists? How's about some CONSISTENCY??
MEGAN: Wait, didn't we care about that for like 2 seconds last week when Al Qaeda did a video of training there? I didn't realize that we'd forgotten to care about that.
MOE: Hey, look, a story about a recent thwarted hijacking attempt by a Uighur Al Qaeda girlbomber! I think the Chinese government thinks you should care again.
MEGAN: Oh, thanks nameless Chinese propagandists newswriters!
Anyway, so, how soon until they start beating monks in the streets and we issue some sort of vague milquetoast protest about it that in no way compares to our reaction to the monk beatings in Myanmar? Or did I blink and miss it?
MOE: Oooooh, think Laura Bush drop her cookie sheet again and get on the phone with Hu Jintao?
MEGAN: Maybe she could send him cookies? I'll bet some chocolate chip ones could go a long way toward repairing US-China relations
MOE: I
Yikes, that disappeared.
MOE: Okay yeah so, it's very tricky what is happening with Tibet, but either way, it led to an incredibly cerebral discussion of Bjork on the comments over the weekend, did you see? My father was impressed with Bjork's timing on that one, but perhaps if he knew Bjork's tears cure cancer (too bad she never cries) he wouldn't be so surprised. Interestingly, this week Taiwan is holding elections, and he's headed out there. Taiwan is interesting because, you know, they really have it best, as "splittist" provinces go. Elections, democracy, a decent standard of living, no painful shared history of, like, cannibalism or Cultural Revolution or any such thing. The pro-China Kuomintang party is supposed to win though.
MEGAN: Interesting. Wait, now, Taiwan's pro-China even though China considers them a rogue provice? Taiwanese politics are so hard to understand. Is it possible that China's financing the Kuomintang or something
MOE: hahahaha well China's financing the entire economy, sort of like ours. The thing is that the Kuomintang came from mainland China and fled to Taiwan, with numerous palace treasures and such, in 1949. There they found a happy population of ethnic Chinese who spoke another dialect and also, Japanese because the Japanese colonized it, and proceeded to pretty much subjugate them until the seventies, when a democracy movement began burgeoning and our relations with the mainland made it a lot easier for Jimmy Carter to pressure the Kuomintang to treat the "ethnic Taiwanese" better. Somewhere in there Chiang Kai-shek died, his much nicer son Chiang Chingguo took over, and a kind of slow, steady democratization took hold. The thing is that most Chinese, no matter what dialect they speak, are pretty pragmatic and rational and no one wants war with China, but while they have us around a lot of them also don't feel like taking shit from China. On the other hand, of course, Taiwanese control most of the factories in China. It's complicated.
MEGAN: [Awkward segue alert] As complicated at Dina Mattos McGreevey's sex life?
MOE: Hey, good call. That conversation was certainly venturing into prurient and meaningless territory so I'm glad we can now focus our attention on The McGreevey-driver threesomes. I think my favorite part is that they were described as "intense" "hard-core consensual sex orgies".That sounds so...cardio! It's a good thing too I guess if they all started with get-togethers at T.G.I.Fridays.
MEGAN: Like, taking a date to TGI Fridays is so Jersey and let us not pretend that it is not because it is. Also, their intense 3-way orgies (which, can an orgy really only involve 3 people?) always involved one of the guys jacking off while one of them fucked Dina.
But what's sort of really interesting to me is that in earlier publications, he's said not to have started working for McGreevey until 2000, which throws off his timeline I think, and that Dina's divorce lawyer wants financial records about financial records and correspondence with McGreevey's rich boyfriend. Also, apparently, they're due in court soon to litigate over the money McGreevey is hiding from Matos so that he doesn't have to pay as much in child support and alimony. Fucker. Like, aren't gay men supposed to be the good ones?
MOE: Um yeah they shared a room at the TRUMP PLAZA in Atlantic City. Here is what I have to say about that; okay, there is a hotel room shortage in Atlantic City, sure. But if if you are the governor you get the "casino" rate and that is seventy bucks. "It became almost laughable — I would never have my own hotel room," Pedersen said. Okay, so a few things: what does this mean about Silda Spitzer? How long has the New York Post been sitting on this story just waiting for everyone to remember that they once for a brief moment cared about Dina Matos McGreevey?
MEGAN: I'm personally hoping that Silda's sunning herself on a beach somewhere foreign and being served tropical alcoholic beverages by inappropriately young but attractive cabana boys.
And that she and Eliot didn't fuck around with 3rd parties because it's one thing imagining Gay McGreevey jerking off and another entirely grosser thing to have to picture Eliot Spitzer in a wide variety of sexual situations
Excuse my while I go wash my brain out with bleach. Maybe you could talk about the financial markets and i'll try to think of something to say that makes it sound like my summer interning for the Bank of New York wasn't a complete waste of time for everyone involved?
MOE: Okay, well, the government is going to have to print money to bail out the banks because they made the financial instruments so complicated no one has a fucking clue how much, if anything, they're worth, and everything is so interconnected that it could all collapse like in the Asian Financial Crisis unless the Fed steps in and offers a quarter trillion dollars to save it. Or something.
Here it is explained by someone named Dave Wilson who is on some email list that my ex-boyfriend is on.

There's currently a kind of cascade failure happening throughout the financial community, spurred
both by extraordinary levels of borrowed money that was used to speculate (it's like those mortgages that were issued for 110% of the value of the house, except that type of "investment" has, unbeknownst to most people, actually been taking place in pretty much every investment sphere you can think of); if those speculative investments go South, investors have to come up with lots of cash, fast, (this is known as a margin call) meaning they wind up selling everything they own to raise cash, which then depresses the value of the stuff the investors had to sell (as well as similar stuff owned by others) since suddenly there's a lack of scarcity combined with a suspicion on the part of would-be buyers that perhaps this stuff is being dumped for reasons other than a need for quick cash...

Last fall, the former Treasury secretary confessed to Fortune magazine that until the mortgage storms broke over his head in the summer of 2007, he was unfamiliar with the kinds of complex mortgage structures with which Citi's own balance sheet was packed. Almost certainly, the gulf between competence and compensation on Wall Street has never been wider.

"Why not set an example of Bear Stearns, the guys who have this record of dog-eat-dog, we're brass knuckles, we're tough?" asked William A. Fleckenstein, president of Fleckenstein Capital in Issaquah, Wash., and co-author with Fred Sheehan of "Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve." "This is the perfect time to set an example, but they are not interested in setting an example. We are Bailout Nation."

• It is not the best time to visit the capital of Tibet. A peaceful monk-dominated demonstration gave way to angry looting/arson/chaos/etc. over the past few days, and now the streets of Lhasa are full of tanks and teargas and fires. Probably a hundred have died, which makes this worse than Tiananmen kinda. It's a good thing our government is so unpreoccupied and globally respected right now so we will be able to respond in a way that is decisive and credible and hopefully ends the violence soon! [NYT]
  
• China is blaming the Dalai Lama's "clique" for "masterminding" the riots from his exile in India. He's urging his clique not to resort to violence. [Reuters]
  
• Oh yeah, and China is also blaming Bjork. [NME]
  
• Our government gets to spy on us easier now, though not as easy as the Senate would have it. [Wash Post]
  
• Oh, yeah, and now the fuckers who brought civilization A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila care about democracy? [IAmTRex]
  
• Hugo Chavez did not declare war on Colombia. [Bloomberg]

• Bear Stearns is fucked. You care because: the whole time the investment bank was figuring out what to do with its massive holdings of subprime mortgages everyone was suddenly getting nervous about, the CEO was getting toked up, and also because, after their credit rating got downgraded today it borrowed $3 billion from JP Morgan, which in turn borrowed $3 billion from the Fed under some "Depression Era Law" or something like that, I really don't know Marin79 because I've been watching footage of whores all week, but the Fed thing is just the sort of unusual desperate measure that makes all those pricks on Wall Street feel really vulnerable all of a sudden, so...keep that in mind if you're looking to hate fuck. [WSJ]
• And that potsmoking CEO...is at a bridge tournament! [WSJ]
• "And ... And ... And! God! Has got! To be sick! Of this shit!" More on Obama's crazy but sometimes enjoyable pastor. [Fox News]
• ""The love of money as a possession...will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease." Hey look! Keynes was right about a lot of things, but not that. [Project Syndicate]
• Americans living in Asia are voting in huge margins for the candidate who spent his childhood in Asia, writes an American who lives in Asia! Identity politics: not just for poor folks and middle aged women! [WSJ]
• Chris Rock and Anthony Pellicano. Honestly, we didn't talk about this because I don't think Chris Rock is a rapist. Do you? Seriously. So anyway, he hired Pellicano. Not the classiest move, but whatever, he was afraid. There are these tapes. Pellicano is scum. The lady seems like she gives real rape victims a bad name. Also she wears white. I dunno, you discuss. [Gawker]
• Ashley Alexandra Dupre played Sandy in Grease. At some point, you won't care anymore. [Huffington Post]

• Read this new book on how comic book McCarthyism of the 1940s. [NYT]
• Find out more about the five year freeze on funding to the National Institute of Health I've been hearing so much about from doctors and scientists who, for whatever reason, do not trust the private sector to cough up money to research all the ways you might save lives. [Broken Pipeline]
• Borrow this book from the roommate I convinced to buy it and then maybe...
• FIND AN ACCOUNTANT OMG. Um, maybe I should actually do that one! Have a good weekend guys!
• Think of a funny comment re Bjork/Paul Janka/Ben Bernanke that will show up marin79 and also, "woodland creatures."