Mark Steyn pens and excellent column, a snippet is here for your enjoyment:
In just about his last act as president, George W. Bush has declared Washington, D.C., a federal disaster area.
No, seriously. I’m not setting up some lame-o punchline here…
So what was it? An ice storm? A hurricane?
No, it’s the inauguration of his successor. The inauguration is scheduled to make landfall on Tuesday and wreak havoc all night long, as Category Five conga lines buckle highways round town, and emergency busboy crews find themselves overwhelmed as they struggle to clear drained champagne flutes…
“I don’t know if anybody’s ever done that,” said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary.
Indeed. One reason why nobody’s ever done that before is because a presidential inauguration is not (to be boringly technical about it) an “emergency.” It’s penciled in well in advance – in this case, so well in advance that for years Democrats have been driving around with “1-20-09″ bumper stickers on the back of their Priuses…
The proposition that a new federal administration is itself a federal emergency is almost too perfect an emblem of American government in the 21st century.
In other news, here’s an article which offers a glimpse of the American milk industry, which makes you realize they’re not too different from OPEC. With this little bonus:
WASHINGTON — A stimulus package may be a lifeline for the nation’s economy, but it could be a death sentence for a lot of cows.
Lawmakers are looking for ways to use the forthcoming stimulus bill to help dairy farmers, and the number one priority is to dampen milk supplies and prop up prices. Translation: reduce the nation’s dairy herd.
Yes. The wonderful people in Washington are working their little tails off to stimulate the economy by raising your milk prices. You’re welcome!
Elsewhere, one of my favorite finance-type bloggers offered up the Financial Modelers Manifesto.
It’s a different story with finance and economics, which are concerned with the mental world of monetary value. Financial theory has tried hard to emulate the style and elegance of physics in order to discover its own laws. But markets are made of people, who are influenced by events, by their ephemeral feelings about events and by their expectations of other people’s feelings. The truth is that there are no fundamental laws in finance. And even if there were, there is no way to run repeatable experiments to verify them.
Finally, Doug with a refreshed blog design (I like it) offers up video of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Gump. Errr, Forrest Button. Benrest Gumton? Foramin Bump? It makes me a little glad that I haven’t paid to see that new version yet.
