Osama's Doomsday Machine

Osama:  Ayman, it was your very own Humble Servant.

Ayman:  Verily?  You heeded the words of Lord Buffett?

Osama:  Verily I did.  I set a backup plan in motion -- a plan which, in all humility, was divine in inspiration.  It was as dazzling in its sweep as it was fearsome.  It was a plan which could not fail.  It was a plan which, Allah willing, may yet bring down the Great Satan and his jackal Vizier Bush, may he choke on a pretzel!

Ayman:  And pray tell, what are the Weapons, my Humble Servant?  How do they lay waste to the Infidels?

Osama:  They are abstractions, Ayman.  They are abstractions known as Derivatives, because they derive from other abstractions.  They are written in red ink on a veritable blizzard of parchment, the sum total of which is so enormous, so vast beyond imagining, as to manifest the Satanic power of inundation.  They contain within them the potency of the Great Flood of Gilgamesh!  They have the power, Allah willing, to fill the Great Canyon of the Infidel West with parchment, and to keep increasing still, flooding across the plains of Omaha itself, flooding the fabled Canyons of Glass and Steel -- until in the end the Great Satan himself drowns in his own bilious Flood of red ink!

And the worst, Ayman, the most toxic, the most virulent of the abstractions are those known as Swaps.

Ayman:  "Swaps?"  Swaps such as I have witnessed inside the Passion4Swinging portal?  Verily I tell you, my Humble Servant, that the images I have seen there are forever seared in my brain...

Osama:   No, Ayman, not that kind.  You consume far too much of that horny goatweed!

It is Credit Default Swaps to which I refer.  They are the deadliest of abstractions.  They are bombs of red ink.  They are the Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction against which the Sage inveighed, when no one listened!  No one except your Humble Servant.

And so I began.  And it was a mighty labor, Ayman.  I spent a year in bafflement seeking comprehension of these bombs of abstraction and the dungheap of usury upon which they rest.  They were fiendishly complex!  It was as though they had been designed with devious intent by Satan himself to surpass all human understanding, thereby to conceal the nefarious purpose of his handiwork!

Toward the end I was exhausted almost beyond enduring.  At night I dreamt the very dreams of the money-changers, in their own imagery and evil parlance!  But when inspiration came upon me at last, the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw clearly for the first time.  I came to understand Swaps.

And from that moment my plan became clear, my purpose steady, my task as plain as sunlight on water.  What I lacked was but a snare to draw the Infidels themselves into my scheme.

And it was easy, Ayman!  It was as easy as tricking a Kuwaiti by dragging a Petrodollar across his path!

Ayman:  So these Swaps are simple, you say.  You can then explain them to someone as dull-witted as your Humble Master?

Osama:  Yes, Ayman, I can.  Tell me:  when you purchased this safe house from the Qatari money-changer, did you purchase fire insurance to protect it?

Ayman:  Of course.  To do otherwise would be foolhardy.

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