Scrooge and a Big Bag of Christmas

Marron's Twelve Days of Christmas list for the global (but mostly US) economy, including 10 new Steve Jobses to rise and replace the fallen, 7 fed governors (we've been making do with 5 for the longest time) pushing for a 5% nominal GDP growth target, $3 trillion in budget cuts, and 2 new currencies (letting the Euro drop a couple countries).


Scrooge's name came from misreading the tombstone of Adam Smith's grandnephew? Are you sure this isn't a Dan Brown plot reject? If not, how about considering below the moral hazard of Scrooge:



In which a friend of mine tries to show a Pakistani a Currier and Ives Christmas, and ends up finding its deeper meaning with an Alaskan crab fisherman.


The First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints included this in their Christmas message:

This joyful season will bring to each of us a measure of happiness that corresponds to the degree in which we have turned our minds, feelings and actions to the spirit of Christmas.May this Christmas season be a time of prayers for peace, for the preservation of free principles, and for the protection of those who are far from us. Let it be a time of forgetting self and finding time for others. 

C. S. Lewis on two types of causality, that of work and that of prayer: "Prayers are not always -- in the crude, factual sense of the word -- "granted". This is not because prayer is a weaker kind of causality, but because it is a stronger kind."


Delicious satire: a response to Band Aid's "Do they know it's Christmas?" is found in Plaster Cast's "Yes, We Do." (HT: Blattman)

 they hoped their collaboration would free the Irishman and his friends to start looking for solutions to new and more important questions.
“Like Do they know about climate change in America? Or did Kim Jong-il have time to write down the abort codes for the nukes before he died? ..."
Gundane who went on to suggest that Africans were a lot like the Irish.“They made it through disasters like the potato blight and the invention of the Protestant church without forgetting Christmas – why did they think we would forget it?” ... 

Gundane said he hoped that his involvement with the song would turn him into an expert on British politics and economics in the same way ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ had turned Geldof and Bono into the world’s leading experts on Africa.“If I’m not sharing a platform with the Queen and David Cameron by this time next year; or headlining at Glastonbury, then I will have done something very wrong,” said Gundane.

For a limited time, free geeky comics for and about Christmas from Dork Tower.

Text of the Wondermark Scrooge comic:

Man 1 - I've finall done it, Morty! I've paid off the mortgage. Taken ten long years of scrimpin' an' savin', but I finally own the ol' hovel free and clear.Morty - Same here! It's a great feeling, innit?
Man 1 - Impossible! You've been delinquent for months!
Morty - Absolutely. But come Christmas morning, what do we see but Ebenezer Scrooge himself dancing down the avenue handing out candy and neck-rubs! We can't even get the "Lo" out of "Hello" before he's torn up our debt right there in the street!
Morty - Food poisoning. Totally insane. By noon his entire debtor roster is casually milling about his house, hoping to "accidentally" encounter him before he has an aneurysm. Barnes got a free car. Larry got Scrooge's own house! Just handed him the deed!
Man 1 - I ... I sold my own fillings to have that mortgage paid off by Christmas.
Morty - Then you should Totally come over. Scrooge gave us way too much figgy pudding.