April 2009
58 posts
Apocalypse now.
Remember when the Large Hadron Collider was nearing initialization and people started wondering out loud and then worrying a little bit and then sort of genuinely panicking in an escalating chorus of ill-informed paranoia to a refrain somewhere along the lines of OH MY GOD IT MIGHT TURN INTO A BLACK HOLE AND EAT US ALL ALIVE despite the calm reassurances of the scientific community that the...
March 2009
78 posts
“If you are a student of means or ability, or both, there has never been a better...”
– Robert A. Sevier, a college enrollment consultant, quoted in the New York Times in an article entitled “Paying in Full as the Ticket Into Colleges”.
And the rich get richer.
Very interesting.
During eight years of Bush, New York Times columnist and Nobel economist Paul Krugman was considered by the very serious people who preside over Washington discourse to be a shrill, loony, academic leftist.
But now that Bush is gone and Krugman is attacking our new socialist president the very serious people have put him on the cover of Newsweek.
How is babby formed?
My Manhattan Project: How I helped build the bomb... →
Pretty fascinating read by the Lehman engineer who first automated the collateralized mortgage obligation:
I made $125,000 in my bonus that year and bought an apartment on Gramercy Park. I had first-tier seats to the ballet, but I still rode my bike to work. The traders pocketed multiple millions. I wasn’t poor, but I wasn’t a plutocrat. I could live with myself. If there was a deception going...
“I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have...”
– Sen. Byron Dorgan on repealing Glass-Steagall in 1999, via cajunboy et al.
Asobi Seksu, “Thursday”
Headed on a...
Big Trouble →
Josh Marshall hits the nail on the head regarding today’s news that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (which insures 44 million Americans) abandoned its tradition of safe, low-yield bond investments in the late stages of the Bush administration in favor of riskier speculative investments:
One of the big drives behind Social Security privatization was the desire to find more...
Noted over vodka
My accidental attendance at this bar’s open mic night has taught me that a woman with a guitar enjoys the same competitive advantage over her male counterparts as does a woman with a digital camera and a blog.
Motorsport as cultural comparison
Europe has Formula One. The US has NASCAR.
Europe has Michael Schumacher. The US has Dale Earnhardt.
Europe has “Top Gear”. The US has “Pimp My Ride”.
Four Tet, “Slow Jam”
There are two...
Recessions are the new Lent.
During last night’s presidential press conference, Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, had this to ask the President:
Some have compared this financial crisis to a war, and in times of war past Presidents have called for some form of sacrifice. Some of your programs, whether for Main Street or Wall Street, have actually cushioned the blow for those that were...
“Once underground music stopped being about fat dudes hunched over their...”
– Twitter Get Off The Pot: OMG, It’s Kanye! OMG, I’m So Bored!
catbird: I know it’s only March, but I want to go ahead and award WhineyG the “best single sentence about music” writing award for 2009.
Obama Dials Down Wall Street Criticism →
I tweeted yesterday about how I worry whenever a Treasury secretary can have a conference call or a presser that results in an immediate market rebound. Today’s Journal validates my concern:
Bankers were shell-shocked, especially when Congress moved to heavily tax bonuses. When administration officials began calling them to talk about the next phase of the bailout, the bankers turned the...
When the chaos [of the 1907 bank crisis] began to shake the confidence of New York’s banks, the city’s most famous banker was out of town. J.P. Morgan, president of the eponymous J.P. Morgan & Co., was attending a church convention in Richmond, Virginia. Morgan was not only the city’s wealthiest and most well-connected banker, but he had experience with crisis—he helped...
“[Love is] like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of...”
– Slavoj Žižek. Not exactly Hallmark card material, but a decent summary at least of my last run-in with it.
A note on Marx.
I enjoy Marx. I find his theory enduringly relevant in a number of spheres, be it economic, aesthetic, or otherwise, and I spend a great deal of time with him. As a result, Marx often finds his way onto my blog.
Though each citation occasions a social experiment: I notice a measurable exodus of readers after each post, which is striking if one considers that a quote from David Harvey or...
“Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of...”
– Karl Marx, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”, Capital, vol. I.
Love and Death
Diane Keaton: Boris, let me show you how absurd your position is. Alright, let's say that there is no God and each man is free to do exactly as he chooses. Well, what prevents you from murdering somebody?
Woody Allen: Well, murder's immoral.
Keaton: Immorality is subjective.
Allen: Yes, but subjectivity is objective.
Keaton: Not in any rational scheme of perception.
Allen: Perception is irrational and implies imminence.
Keaton: The judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur, in the thing itself or of the thing itself.
Allen: Yeah, I've said that many times.
So Geithner’s plan is out, and a consensus is beginning to emerge: we’re fucked!
James Galbraith says “the Geithner plan is a Rube Goldberg device for shifting inevitable losses from the banks to the Treasury, preserving the big banks and their incumbent management in all their dysfunctional glory.”
Dean Baker notes that “house prices have another 20 percent to fall...
I was just reminded of a day in my high school AP government class, right before our junior year trip to Washington DC, when our teacher brought in a large tourist map of the nation’s capital to prepare us for the sights. After highlighting the various monuments, the museums, and the White House, he gestured toward the area between Constitution and Independence—the Capitol, the House...
Silver Jews — ‘Advice to the...
Peeing in the pool.
<head> <explode>
Apparently Jamie Wilkinson’s “Internet Famous” course at Parsons was just the beginning: this spring at Indiana University students can accrue four honest to God college credits upon successful completion of “CIT 499 Emerging Technologies”.
Of the course’s three primary objectives, one stands out in particular:...
“Writers are among the most backward sectors of the population when it comes to...”
– Walter Benjamin, A Critique of the Publishing Industry, brought to you by today’s report that the ABC News senior White House correspondent blocked a number of independent journalists from his Twitter feed because they were being mean.
It’s so comforting in these perilous times to know...
“By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a...”
– Matt Taibbi in the new issue of Rolling Stone. (via cajunboy, onefootinthegrave, ericmortensen, respondr, jhnbrssndn)
“I’ll leave to others the question of who knew or should have known that the...”
– Paul Krugman
Daniel Johnston — “Life in Vain”
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss...”
– Eleanor Roosevelt, via Surfstation.
Ladytron — “Tomorrow”
In The American Presidency, Alan Brinkley shares what might stand as the greatest act of political backhanding ever executed. The 1935 Revenue Act, with which Roosevelt planned to combat an “unjust concentration of wealth and power” by way of “very high taxes” on “vast fortunes” and “inherited economic power,” carried with it a tax increase on those...
“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working...”
– Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by way of amourousmusings, who reminded me today how much I love this passage.
kung fu grippe: sxsw09 →
Merlin Mann delivers a piece that makes you wish Tumblr’s “like” feature came with an optional exponent field, so as to communicate to the author that you’d liked it to the nth power.
It occurs to me
My commute is the only time during a typical day day when I see people I don’t work with. Yet this also means that when I move next week, reducing from 45 minutes to eight the amount of time it takes to travel to an office staffed exclusively by men, there will be only sixteen minutes in a given day when I’m exposed to members of the opposite sex.
I need to start taking lunch away...
“The truth is, that the soul which is pure at departing and draws after her no...”
– Plato, Phaedo. This quote seems pertinent to a recent study revealing that “terminally ill cancer patients who drew comfort from religion were far more likely to seek aggressive, life-prolonging care in the week before they died than were less religious patients and far more likely to want...
I’m far less concerned with how the...
Loudcrowd
A brief sampling of today’s news which serves to explain the many sleepless nights enjoyed over the past weeks and months by myself, Nabeel, Fareed, Jesse, Dan, Steve, Adam, Billy, Matt, and many others. It feels good to be live.
Wired: Loudcrowd Turns Music into Social Video Arcade
Venture Beat: Conduit Labs unveils Loudcrowd social music game site
Associated Press: Web world for music...
LA Times: Zionism is the Problem →
Ben Ehrenreich:
To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an...