Coulters Cleaning House Again...Who's Next? Maron Hits NYC, Head First Into the Hurricane....

Last night at ComixNY, Marc Maron talked up a seamless 55 minute set of pain and insight and commentary about the human condition, but mostly his condition. As he said, the pain is so palpable that it rolls out onto the first couple of rows of the club and doesn't dissipate into the funny till around row 3. This show was intense, passionate, real, and political...and he didn't really address politics directly at all; but then, I find everything to be political or to fall into the political pattern, and the big feeling of despair that has descended over so many of us. This is basic stuff about having your foundation torn apart and your world tipped over. Its also about the decisions that we make and what its like to grow up in this delicate world.
From Scottish haggis as Soylent Green, complete with
Charlton Heston on top of a truck, to the impossibilities involved in relationships and forging on in this life, it was an hour packed with some sort of hilarious dismay and common understanding of being thoughtful in a world that is moving a little too fast these days.
I'm looking for the one man show and book coming out of this evolving set...he is honing something with new takes on old bits and newer new bits, and its only a matter of time before some smart producer backs an off-Broadway show, and at least, that we hear him back on the radio full time!

Don't miss Marc and Sam Seder on Tuesdays doing their Vod-cast Marc Vs. Sam Show live at 11AM EST at Sam's page....available as a Vod-cast after the fact too!





Anne Coulter and her ilk want to clean things up...

This story is not about a specific smear job perpetuated on a kid, or some failed attempt to ruin the career and life of a candidate. Its more about the M$M giving time over and over again to a cabal who want to use the "news" pulpit to disseminate false information in service to their own bank-books and a doctrine that is built on corrupted theory and clearly not the laws of this country. It is about actions that are so far outside of what is socially acceptable, even in this time of mind numbing cacophony of information and entertainment, that has dulled the senses and lowered our standards of what we put up with.
This is about about the putrid atmosphere that we are living in, where any pundit can do the equivalent of yelling fire in a movie theater and then claim that it was only their free speech talking. Its about harassing small children, sick people, and small sick children.

Our Constitutional rights take for granted that we are not animals. We are free to speak within reason, yes, but where does reason end? Clearly, there are certain things that, when said, can be so deeply disturbing and meant to hurt, and cause anguish to other people on enough levels as to neuter any sort of response or action, that they incite to action others who are the lowest form of racist, bottom-base of our kind; the low hanging fruit, to quote a philosopher dressed in a comic's threads.....who would keep the muck of their slime-pit for themselves in the way that a certain cretin whines "mine, mine" from the bottom of it's pit.
This is why its not freedom of speech to hang nooses from whites-only trees, and this is why libel laws protect people who are wrongfully smeared publicly. This is also why reporters used to want to have real sources before they put stories on the air and in the newspaper. When did that become the exception rather than the rule? When did the likes of Anne Coulter become a pseudo-intelligencia specialist reporter, rather than a hack who should be working for the News of the World's alien abduction section?



We live among animals who lack basic evolutionary movement beyond instinctual knee-jerk separation based on superficial aspects of each other which might have, at some point in the prehistoric days, served a Darwinian purpose for breeding and tribal safety, but in this time of creature comforts and education, mean nothing more than one's protection from the sun and what size of nose or texture of hair they have...
The bible assumes that all humans are as out of control and...bad...as these people are in their do as I say sitcom foibles in the government. Why is it that the ones spewing the most vile concepts and values, are the ones most in need of the rules from an unseen father in the sky who offers an unseen reward to a chosen few? Yet those few seem to live most outside of any basic tenants of kindness and giving ever preached by any faith. Its almost as if the label if believer is more a label of one who needs that much structure or they might spin out of control and do horrible things....and they do horrible things.

from the Greenwich girl, Anne Coulter, who seemingly has never lived up to what shes wanted so badly, or gotten what shes needed in life,(why else is someone so snobby, elitist and in need of citing their college and brand over and over; jealousy makes for an ugly disposition.)

How disappointed her friends and family must be to see what a monster their daughter, sister, friend has become; that is, if she is able to have relationships. There is a certain Barbara Bush things to her, where she talks down to the little people. Those who think they are her "fans" or "in" on her blog, think again; you are all the little people in her world. She hangs with the Palm Beach and Greenwich crowd...you will never approach her golden palace.
She sits like an unsteady reptile, on high stools for uber leg exposure, dressed like the art whores of the NYC Soho gallery scene of the 80's, or like a Robert Palmer robot girl with that shiny stiffness, Adams apple bobbing....she is on TV sets, under lights, flipping golden hair, with the mocking surety of the truly weak who try too hard to seem assured. She doles out "truths" that are mind-bendingly, numbingly, obviously, as untrue as they are hurtful in a way meant to shred and destroy the opponent. If asked about confirmation or any basic reporting, she shrugs it off as opinion or puts it off, as in this-story-is-about-to-break-you'll-see...and by then, shes gone...not that any of the softball flirty pundits who always wanted to be with a real man before, would follow up anyway. Those soft white dough boys ask silly follow-ups in all seriousness, like this is a person who should be taken seriously.

This hard woman, who might surprise us all if she is able to have human relationships at all, beyond her fag-hag retinue with BFF-Drudge and his ilk, plys her trade in pure pulp shock, and uses what will plainly translate into book sales and money, to create publicity and an aura around herself of ...talent?...No, real talent comes out of substance, real life, and a feeling for the world and those who survive here. This smirking cretin has no substance at all.

There is a certain pure place that we all strive for in our own way, and there is something, through age and experience, that settles in each of us where the battle is clearly fought, less by tearing down your perceived opponent than by accepting yourself and others and looking at your own footprint in this life, and how much air you take up in any room. Its giving up the fight in favor of the battle, and natural empathy which cannot be developed or bought; its just there.
The kind of badness that Coulter represents is not only negative to the world and our development as human beings, but hurtful to the specific individuals that she attacks. These include children, widows, and whole groups of people who have lived through enough persecution to know bullshit when they see it. Strange that the real man in this tale ends up to be Donny Deutsch, but there you have it. Yeah, watch her backpedal frantically, but, its not gonna work this time. You may be able to get away with alot, but the Jews don't fuck around, girlie. She is exactly the sort of Nazi that we're all on the lookout for these days, Jews, half-Jews like me, and every other American of any ilk with an ounce of smarts or feeling for where humanity is heading.

Clearly Coulter is some sort of Sociopath. She seems to lack boundaries regarding what is appropriate in social interaction. I can see her watching herself and mocking and snickering, while she chips away at the lives of others and spreads her own brand of pain, all the while counting the dollars pouring in because shock sells.
Its a shame and it takes away from any discourse that we might have been able to have.

I've noticed that alot of us have rage-fatigue, and are feeling really used up and limp lately. How many times can you be smacked in the face before you just stay down? Maybe the devolving of the Bush administration came in a little too clearly, a little too extensive and huge. We could've guessed this string of events, but on 9-10 no one would have believed any of this...I can't believe alot of it now, even as I would believe anything these days.

Driftglass, one of the best writers on these internets, brings it home for me:

"And it reminded me that when I pause and take the time to open that clench of anger and the snark that fuels a lot of what I write and look inside, there in the center I find grief.

A sadness around which I have girded cleverness and rage....
Because it’s absolutely no fun loathing your leaders -- Honestly don't understand how the Right can grow so fat feasting on such a thin, bilious gruel decade after decade.

It is, in fact, just terribly sad to look out at your country and see an insane asylum.

Terribly sad to see monsters and madmen smashing the finest, most precious heirlooms in your country’s treasure house to atoms. And to see their followers in their millions clap and dance in the ruins as they do it....
I, too, so very much miss being able to look across the political divide and see anyone on the other side who has not been bred to believe that selfishness, mercilessness and misanthropy are virtues.

And when we talk of tolerance?

We are told to fuck tolerance.

Step by unholy step, theirs has become a Party and a Movement that makes an outright sociopath like Ann Coulter their Goddess, and uses “tolerance” as a smirking, eye-rolling epithet....Hey, dickhead: tolerance doesn’t mean I have to love you or agree with you. It means that my vision of democratic civilization demands that I make allowances for people I do not love, and with whom I do not agree.

It means that some of my tax dollars will go towards paving and grading the roads that allow you to drive in safety and comfort from your doublewide in Swinefuck all the way to the Pixley Bijou so you can see “The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause” in Dolby on the Big Screen.

And it means that some of your taxes will go to pay for public defenders, health insurance, and a measure of security for the elderly, the weak, the poor and whole lot of other people you despise for various reasons....

The question is, how is it possible on the eve of the turnaround, that the network news and talk shows still have a spot for her and that O'Reilly and Limbaugh and Malkin and their ilk, still spew their filth daily?
Ratings be damned! Tucker Carlson has a tiny audience...too tiny to warrant his continued spot in the prime news-time of MSNBC early evenings interspersed with Chris Matthews...it reruns, 2 times, no less! and he is who invites his "great friend" Coulter onto our airwaves...He is who elevated the absolutely talentless Willie Giest from hack producer to television personality of the most base and frat boy extreme.

Ive been waiting for this change for so long...So, why is it so hard to get the programmers to at least cut out the wingnuttia? The American people turn on what is on. If we dont let the programmers know that we have had enough, how can we expect it to get better?
What information do we get from Coulter's book tour? What does anyone gain from Coulter getting on TV and calling all democrats stupid? The fact that there is a market for this indicates less that humans are into this sort of thing, and more that the education system is fucked in this country, and the media follows suit, so this is all that people have access to if there is no regulation...and then it sells, and around we go!
viewerservices@msnbc.com
Tucker@msnbc.com
Dan Abrams stays out of the contact whirl over at the home ship at MSNBC, but Im sure that Viewer Services gets to him...these are his decisions after all.





Drifty is a gift...and I hope that he realizes that there are people out there of the same mind...even though I myself have been planning my semi-retreat from the grid with my chickens and some plans of solar panels and my healthy-so-far Artesian well. When I see the cruelness of human discourse these days I go limp...when I see how hard people in the real world are struggling, I cant find my breath....I don't understand why things happen the way they do, but I do know that alot of what is going on is manipulated and planned. I don't mean that in a tin foil hat sort of way, but in a deliberate, blatant, we-are-doing-this-to-you-and-you-have-no-way-out, sort of way.

Its kindly grandpa Reagan standing there reading his cards saying"why would corporations need regulation? They have ethics, They can police themselves."
Like, yeah, we are all grownups here, no one is reaching under the stall of anyones potty in this place... Then come to find that just about everyone has one hand or another under the stall door somewhere for something.... But the die is cast and we cant go back....

Yeah, there is plenty to worry about..plenty...
as long as Condi Rice is scouring the planet for more feathers to ruffle. I don't know what to say about it anymore, except, enjoy the ride. Its gonna be nothing if not interesting.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Ann Coulter...Fund Raising and Hype...Carville, Clinton, Barak, and Pelosi...The Beat Goes on....

You know the thing about people who abuse and kill animals? Do I have to go into the psychological implications of this? Do we want another psycho in the white house?...As if he has a chance anyway....
This group is really rich...really fine...and the array of interesting tidbits that keep coming out of them are just like little gifts on an otherwise cloudy day.
I probably shouldn't be so empathetic as to think of what it might be like for a dog to travel in a crate on top of a car for 12 hours ,"enjoying the fresh air" to the point where it craps all over the car. It was an Irish Setter no less, and the story seems to indicate that the Romney's left it up there for the whole drive. I don't even go 10 miles with my dogs inside the car without stopping and walking them around a little. Oh, I suppose that if its a long trip, like up to Cape Cod, I might stop just 2 times, but I walk them and give them water. Even when I was a little kid, my Mom was like that, and she is from a farm in the mid-west and from Massachusetts with a hunter/commercial fisherman brother, so its not a cultural animal treatment thing. Its an empathy thing. And what of the hundred kids crammed in that vehicle without a rest stop? Or was it just too much trouble to let the dog out when the kids needed a bathroom break? Did the kids even get a bathroom break before old Mitt had to hose down old Seamus? Sheesh! (and luckily ABC news has provided us with an article that studies what it might be like for a dog on the roof of a car traveling 55 MPH for 12 hours...thanks guys...I'm sure that no animals were harmed in the making of this article...except for the mice used in place of the dog!...Warning: this article made me actually nauseous.)
Is this who should be deciding what to do with any living thing...much less soldier's lives and the care of the citizens of this country??...nope, I think thats pretty much that for Mitt...Bye bye, been good to know ya...and too bad we didn't get to go into the Mormon thing more; I was really looking forward to it.

Ive been receiving alot of emails from different groups and candidates...first, while still reeling from the letter written on behalf of felon Scooter Libby by James Carville and Mary Matalin, about how much they pity his family and whatever...No sooner had I worked myself into a froth over that when I got a Carville email with the subject line "Lemmings," referring to the republicans who are being sent to the slaughter in the November '07 elections. Looking at his lizardly picture and trying to expunge my mind of the image of him and Mary in bed, I was thinking about the Hillary people and anyone else who looks at this guy and thinks that he is really a democrat or someone who maybe has the best interest of this country, and what we supposedly stand for, in mind. What a disgusting way to end the origami fun-filled weekend.
On Monday, Barak wanted to know what inspires me, but attached to my inspiration story getting published on his website was some mention of a donation, and he is not my candidate, so...
Tuesday Bill Clinton wanted to know if I was "Having Fun Yet?" Because presidential campaigns should be fun! So, on the heels of the Sopranos spoof, whats in store? Oops...better chip in to find out. Donate today to see some more of that great film quality work that they put up on YouTube last week....Hilarious!!
Wednesday I was engulfed with fury at MSNBC and all the other major news organizations for giving that psycho Anne Coulter any more time than the initial 15 minutes she deserved so many years ago. Chris Matthews Hardball report was all about the "Smoking Hardball Plaza show" in which Chris wished M-Ann and Elizabeth Edwards had been oil wrestling naked..but more on that later. Oh whatever, more on that now!
I was disgusted by how flirty and slimy the drooling Chris Matthews was with the boyish Ann Coulter, as she tried to justify her continuous shilling for publicity on the back of tragedies that she couldn't possibly understand. Some day it may come to her, and some day she may suddenly see herself as she actually looks, with that horrible snooty tone in her voice and that pseudo-intellectual bullshit ivy league thing; someday she may just realize that it all mean nothing if you are a horrible, cold, person. But Chris Matthews, well hes all over the map, and he is studying himself pretty damned closely all the time. His wife must have kicked him in the balls for that little performance, because he tore out of the gate in the next couple of shows to discredit La Coulter and her way of doing things. I blame MSNBC, Dan Abrams, and Matthews himself for pandering to the lowest common denominator in trying to get ratings. If you want better ratings then get some other sharp, humorous guys on air, who are like Keith Olbermann. Hey, heres an idea, how 'bout Marc Maron? How 'bout even Rosie O'Donnell? How 'bout just about anyone but the same old crap that you've been doing over and over....
By yesterday Michael Moore was shilling for Democracy for America and asking "whats the problem?" ( oh and, go see his movie to find out!!...Im all for that!) If you have to be shown in easy dramatizations and diagrams...The problem?
Well, the problem that us lemmings seem to be unable to inspirationally put into words in all of these emails is that we are in this fucking war until April '08 at the soonest. This is what I'm hearing...and I'm mad. They mean that the pullout wont even start till April '08, realistically. It will then take months and months, and probably years into forever to play out fully.
Is it possible that the republicans, the lying, thieving lot of them, could possibly parlay the clear democratic inaction into so much disgruntled nonsense that they manage a third party switcheroo again? Is it possible that just in the delivery of the news on their intentions in this matter, that they are fucking up yet again?
Well, this is what Ive heard: if we were to go for impeachment, we really don't have the votes, so we would be doing what we are doing with hearings and investigations right now. The impeachment and also the criminal charges come later....yeah, but why all of the CRAP from the likes of Pelosi, who sent me a mail a couple of weeks ago after not blocking the surge that said something like "VICTORY!" in the subject line.
We made a grand statement that day...but for god's sake, why aren't these people screaming this from the rooftops, leaking pictures and video, linking the war and the republican votes FOR THE SURGE to so many ills right here at home?
Jesus, if the health care system is lacking, and we know that the veterans administration is all but unable to handle what they've got coming home now, what will we do in the years to come with all of the surge soldiers who have been thrown on the fire in the interest of a plan which is clearly not working?
How is it that Carville even has a job with Hillary or is even hired as a democratic pundit when he is clearly married to the other party? How come he has access to my email address? If he wasn't such a scary creature I would say to keep an eye out for him to end up as the next Chris Matthews in pundit-land.
It is so disingenuous for these characters to email and continually ask for money while trying to parse the situation in cheery terms. It all looks the same to me and I dont even want to know what they have to say...its all the same and in the end they want more money to do the same. Thats why I am supporting one candidate and my own causes. I wont give any money to the Democratic party, nor will I spread donations around so that our beautiful field can explore itself.
I have an idea. lets all pool our money and hire Pixar (uh-oh, is that Disney?...well, some other big company like that!) to make a film that shows in easy animation with no subterfuge, what is going on in the world and what it means to each of us. No one with a career, ego, or financial stake in any of this should be allowed to participate. The we should pay to place it in all airplanes, at the end of all checkout counters instead of the stupid Swanson cooking tips, and on big screens from Times Square to the Mall of America and back again. The we should merchandise it to MacDonalds and Starbucks...This is gonna take big money; more than Die-Hard 6!...Money talks, and we'll need lots of it folks, but maybe less than Bloomberg would need to win the primary, much less the election. The war will only be won in simple terms with pictures and singalongs....
Oh, and we'll need our own NASCAR team too! But it will have to be cloaked in the movie theme to be allowed into the hallowed halls of the Marlboro team or the Disney team...wouldn't want to make a political statement at a sporting event. The large corporations own that arena...not much of a political statement anyway.


Today I got a mail from what I thought was the Kucinich people asking for a donation in return for an Impeach Cheney cap. But no, it was a donation request that also offered a FREE IMPEACH CHENEY CAP which asks within itself at the People's Email network, or some such, for a donation in order to make caps for people who want them free, and to cover your's...but you don't have to. Heres the problem: besides that I dont wear caps, the thing seems to be purple and it has a pink question mark after the IMPEACH CHENEY part. Purple is a bad choice all around. Im not a hater of purple at all, but it doesn't go with everything and you're not gonna find alot of truckers wearing that particular shade. How bout basic black and let's lose the question mark. How about IMPEACH CHENEY FIRST!!
There you go.

I have alot of pictures of the fantastic origami weekend and also of the more fantastic Gay Pride Parade in NYC, and I will be posting them tonight or tomorrow depending on how my other work goes (and the fact that this Dell's cardreader is now not working, and I just don't have the time to search for the USB for the camera(s) involved.) have I mentioned lately how much I hate Dell, and how sorry I am that I gave them another chance?

Ann Coulter Calls My Johnny Edwards a Bad Name, A River Runs Through My Basement but This Time its Rapids, Krugman Tries to Explain the Crash....

Welcome to all of you Brilliant folks who are popping over in the hopes of the same sort of smart and concise opinion and reporting that you enjoy daily on Brilliant at Breakfast...well, all I have to say is....ha, ha, ha, ha!...lately its sort of catch as catch can round here ...but Im happy to have you all here and I hope you like my little corner of the blogosphere!
(... and, of course, thanks to my pal Jill for the link!)
Its casual Friday, as Sammy Seder would say, and it began awfully early with what can only be described as rapids pouring into my basement at a speed that I havent seen in the 13 years that Ive been trying to get control of this slanted cottage hanging onto a boulder in the woods.
I ran to the hardware store in time to get one of the last little floor pumps and the very last big shopvac (14 gallons.) Beggers cant be choosers, and all of my planning with Consumer Reports in hand flew out the window when I was faced with more water than Ive seen down there ever.
See, I have an installed sump pump but it is over on the high ground part of the basement so it has never been used in the small floods that I get with every rain. Today I felt like I was prepared except that there is still around 6 inches of ice over the outlet pipe, which was frozen in the ground anyway. So by the time I got the pump home and started pulling heavy soaked laundry around, the pump guys came and we spent a couple of hours hanging out and shooting the breeze about global warming, one guy's python, my basement snake, and the ins and outs of pumps and shop vacs. I ended up, after the level went below the pumps, vacuming up 5 full shopvacs full of water and mud. I also did a ton of laundry and dragged stuff outside for the dump run that is certainly coming.
The whole time I was listening to podcasts from this past week...and man, is that enough to turn me inside out....and I kept telling myself that maybe I should flee the old house in the woods where my father wants it made very clear that not only did grandpa lay the crazy stone paths and stairs back then in the 40's, but that my father himself helped...credit where credit is due, for sure...and to make it very, very clear that his BLOOD is in the stones. That refers less to the squished fingers of a 10 year old up here on weekends and more to some metaphorical importance in the correction email, just so I know.
So, I guess that the Stamford version of Holes had a big effect on him in the summers that he was here....But really to say nothing of my past 13 years here...and, yes, I just replaced most of the path...blood washed away perhaps?...and I for one am gonna move on to say that yes, we all had a terrible childhood, but Ive been here all alone with a kid, and for most of the time with a young kid and before that an infant, when the place was falling down....So if those summers drew blood, then these full time, 24/7, years and years must count towards hemorrhage?
BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME!! God, do I need a vacation and a shoulder to cry on today!

M-ann Coulter, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC,) saw fit to call my boy John Edwards a "Faggot!" All I can say M-ann, is that YOU WISH!! If I were a gay male cross dresser, as Coulter seems to be, I would hope that Johnny were gay too! But must the she-male use such crude wording? Where I cone from the word "faggot" refers to a particular brand of catty gay person...or its a straight putdown like the N-word if said by a basher.
I know that when these neocons talk they tend to trash the very thing that is their deepest secrets and fear, so I view this as another message in code from Coulter...and perhaps a cry for help.
It occurs to me that, all free speech aside, we might be in much better cultural shape if lying haters like Coulter were not given a platform. I needs to become a pathetic last choice to book these people. Again, I wonder what happened to striving for real intellect and well researched ideas....


I am becoming more and more troubled at the democratic leadership's non-action on hearings and the beginning of impeachment. There is so much evidence and no excuse to not get right on this. I'm tired of what looks one way or another and trying to seem bi-partisan....people are dying and every day there is another report about this administration ordering unprepared and untrained reservists to go over there...and that the "surge" is just bullshit.
The there is the reality of how we treat our injured service people and how much they are cutting out of their benefits. How can this be America?

And around, around goes Rudy Guilliani, with not one person asking him what hes gonna do when he cheats on his new wife and she kicks him out of the white house?!

And the money....Krugman has a good analysis of how screwed we are, and even as all the president's men go on in lockstep about the economy being so great (for rich stockholders,) and full of jobs (the new manufacturing sector in McDonald's!,) we really have alot to worry about.

So I am overwhelmed between physical shutdown after the deluge, the sadness of just feeling stuff, anxiety about Peach in the tree and what would I do if I lose her, and Todd is maybe sick (though he uses so few words that its impossible to tell...and Enquiring minds need to know!)

Sunday is Origami day again at the Natural History Museum and I will have the whole day because my boys are taking morning and afternoon classes. I am definitely going to hit the evolution exhibit and take a ton of pictures so you all can see it....and then maybe if the dragon and mythological creatures exhibit isn't opened yet I will head to the village to bum around my old stomping grounds.

Here is Krugman for those of you trying to understand how Murtha could have caused the markets to crash!

March 2, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

The Big Meltdown

By PAUL KRUGMAN

FEB. 27, 2008

The great market meltdown of 2007 began exactly a year ago, with a 9 percent fall in the Shanghai market, followed by a 416-point slide in the Dow. But as in the previous global financial crisis, which began with the devaluation of Thailand’s currency in the summer of 1997, it took many months before people realized how far the damage would spread.

At the start, all sorts of implausible explanations were offered for the drop in U.S. stock prices. It was, some said, the fault of Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, as if his statement of the obvious — that the housing slump could possibly cause a recession — had been news to anyone. One Republican congressman blamed Representative John Murtha, claiming that his efforts to stop the “surge” in Iraq had somehow unnerved the markets.

Even blaming events in Shanghai for what happened in New York was foolish on its face, except to the extent that the slump in China — whose stock markets had a combined valuation of only about 5 percent of the U.S. markets’ valuation — served as a wake-up call for investors.

The truth is that efforts to pin the stock decline on any particular piece of news are a waste of time.

Wise analysts remember the classic study that Robert Shiller of Yale carried out during the market crash of Oct. 19, 1987. His conclusion? “No news story or rumor appearing on the 19th or over the preceding weekend was responsible.” In 2007, as in 1987, investors rushed for the exits not because of external events, but because they saw other investors doing the same.

What made the market so vulnerable to panic? It wasn’t so much a matter of irrational exuberance — although there was plenty of that, too — as it was a matter of irrational complacency.

After the bursting of the technology bubble of the 1990s failed to produce a global disaster, investors began to act as if nothing bad would ever happen again. Risk premiums — the extra return people demand when lending money to less than totally reliable borrowers — dwindled away.

For example, in the early years of the decade, high-yield corporate bonds (formerly known as junk bonds) were able to attract buyers only by offering interest rates eight to 10 percentage points higher than U.S. government bonds. By early 2007, that margin was down to little more than two percentage points.

For a while, growing complacency became a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the what-me-worry attitude spread, it became easier for questionable borrowers to roll over their debts, so default rates went down. Also, falling interest rates on risky bonds meant higher prices for those bonds, so those who owned such bonds experienced big capital gains, leading even more investors to conclude that risk was a thing of the past.

Sooner or later, however, reality was bound to intrude. By early 2007, the collapse of the U.S. housing boom had brought with it widespread defaults on subprime mortgages — loans to home buyers who fail to meet the strictest lending standards. Lenders insisted that this was an isolated problem, which wouldn’t spread to the rest of the market or to the real economy. But it did.

For a couple of months after the shock of Feb. 27, markets oscillated wildly, soaring on bits of apparent good news, then plunging again. But by late spring, it was clear that the self-reinforcing cycle of complacency had given way to a self-reinforcing cycle of anxiety.

There was still one big unknown: had large market players, hedge funds in particular, taken on so much leverage — borrowing to buy risky assets — that the falling prices of those assets would set off a chain reaction of defaults and bankruptcies? Now, as we survey the financial wreckage of a global recession, we know the answer.

In retrospect, the complacency of investors on the eve of the crisis seems puzzling. Why didn’t they see the risks?

Well, things always seem clearer with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, even pessimists were unsure of their ground. For example, Paul Krugman concluded a column published on March 2, 2007, which described how a financial meltdown might happen, by hedging his bets, declaring that: “I’m not saying that things will actually play out this way. But if we’re going to have a crisis, here’s how