I hope he’s right:
Second, on the question of the environment. There is no question that the internal combustion engine is at the heart of the climate crisis. But getting rid of Detroit won’t get rid of cars. More to the point of creativity — one of the things about crisis is that it opens opportunities […]
Eighteen years ago I got my first introduction to the world of high finance from Michael Lewis’ awesome memoir Liar’s Poker.
Lewis has just written what is likely the most telling and poignant account of how Wall Street played Russian roulette and we all lost.
Michael O’Hare:
General Motors proposes that the public lend it some dozens of billions of dollars more, and Obama seems to think it’s a good idea. Sad to see the new guy pooch a big decision so early.
Detroit is certainly hurting, and the people who live there and near other plants deserve help, perhaps with bus […]
Bucephalus Bouncing Ball. It gets better and better as the years pass.
(via Waxy)
I marvel at how well Barack Obama performs. For quite a few years now, the bar for American performance has been lowered in so many ways.
“Heckuva job, Brownie.”
“12 mpg.”
“Performing non-performing loans.”
Performance once meant to enact or do. It can also mean to act only formally – to “go through the motions” or simulate an action. […]
there is a part of the u.s. government that helps control the complex machine that is the u.s. economy. that part of the u.s. government is missing. let’s see if the rest of the machine is able to operate without it.
John Cassidy on Soros on our current systemic failure:
Outside the idealized world of Lucas’s theory, knowledge is imperfect, people stick to wrongheaded ideas, and there is no agreed version of how the economy works. In these circumstances, Soros rightly points out, economic expectations, even biased ones, can help to determine economic fundamentals.
As in:
Until last summer, […]
Paul Krugman:
How did we get to this point? It’s the culmination of many past betrayals.
First of all, we have the Republican Study Committee blowing things up with a complete nonsense proposal — solving the crisis with a holiday on capital gains taxes. How is that possible? Well, if a party runs on economic nonsense for […]
Glenn Greenwald is not feeling it:
What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism — where they reaped tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles were paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes […]
I guess the plan is to use the U.S. armed forces to deter creditors from collecting.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb channels Socrates to disparage (now obviously flawed) financial models and the abuse of statistics in general:
Go to a bookstore, and look at the business shelves: you will find plenty of books telling you how to make your first million, or your first quarter-billion, etc. You will not be likely to find a […]
this is one of the most compact representations of our financial crisis I’ve come across:
it’s over a year old. i’m sorry i hadn’t seen it until now. (Thanks, Ron.)
michel de broin: superficial
keywords: consciousness, man-in-the-natural-world
Anthony Wilson is killing me softly with his words.
from
In the summer of 2002, Mexico became a democracy, again. Via a peaceful transfer of power, the PRI lost control over the executive branch for the first time in 70 years. No such transition can take place without a significant cultural shift: the kind represented by the 2000 film La Ley de Herodes. Though quite dark […]
very rarely will i have the kind of nightmare i just had now. a prolonged, disinterested narrative set in a post-apocalyptic city where zombies (they sleep during the day) and vigilantes (there is no law) set each scene in motion.
all dreams are a response to the gaps that form during the waking hours. yesterday, […]
While on a garden tour it occurred to me that gardens have four components: sight, smell, temperature and time. Time, because as living organisms, they look, smell and affect the air differently depending on their life cycle.
weeks later: and there’s a fifth element, perhaps. they either contribute or take away from their ecosystem. the invasive […]
Nick Dewar on petroleum identity politics
Christoph Niemann on upside down loans
SpaceCollective
Jen Stark
Noriko Ambe
Seeing is believing. I am watching a movie on hulu with limited commercial interruptions. It really works. Now, if only they added an EQ to boost the audio…
Gone Baby Gone is a chilling exploration of moral reasoning, as sober as the law and as tender as prayer. It poses a seemingly simple question: is it ever just to take the law into one’s own hands? (No.) But in answering the question it pokes holes in every argument tendered, especially the notion that […]
Incisive letter from a reader of Talking Points Memo.
Concession stand sales spike with screenings of Pineapple Express.
I love this illusion.
From a recent post on Slashdot:
…”Batman can’t really afford to lose. Losing means death — or at least not being able to be Batman anymore.”
I had never thought of it before, but, yes, the implicit pleasure in any such masked hero movie is that he cannot lose. Losing means either death or being unmasked […]
It had been at least a dozen years since I last saw Paris is Burning and it was even better than I remembered it. A clear portrait of a powerful culture, the movie is tightly structured with brilliant, pithy interviews. One of the most important movies I’ve seen and one I will revisit every decade.
from Wired:
For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
Almost everything I get paid to do, I learned to […]
What happened next in the life of a small-time revolutionary after he was given $25 million and was repatriated to the U.S. with a new identity, might make for quite a show:
The hunt for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed involved the entire American intelligence establishment, with its billion-dollar arrays of spy satellites and global eavesdropping net. But […]
Newsweek via Schneier on Security:
Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain’s version of the National Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as “one corner” of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation and political instability. That in turn is only one of […]
More on the previous:
Scientists say conservation efforts that reduce conflicts between humans and animals could play a key role in limiting future outbreaks.
While looking at Taryn Simon’s photographs of “the hidden and unfamiliar,” I read:
In the United States, all living white tigers are the result of selective inbreeding to artificially create the genetic conditions that lead to white fur, ice-blue eyes and a pink nose. Kenny was born to a breeder in Bentonville, Arkansas on February 3, […]
Mass rituals have always lived beside – if not in a healthy opposition to – idol worship.
In the communal rite, everyone participates and is transported. The ego belongs to the group.
Before an altar, the ego is projected into an abstraction.
The movie camera – television, film – continues in this tradition of idol […]
I stupidly watched a Soviet science-fiction movie from the mid 80s this morning. We don’t get to see very many in-depth expressions of such a vastly different political reality.
Will Chinese movies ever shock American sensibilities? I don’t think so. My guess is that the American point-of-view is now so universal that no mass-market film […]
Matthew Yglesias:
Trying to do a piece of extended drama that embodied the values of pragmatic progressive reformism would be impossible. The results, if serious and true to the spirit, would be deadly dull. Moderate optimism about human nature and the possibility for change is, if done in an entertaining way, the stuff of light romantic […]
Nathan Rabin:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: politics and good intentions have ruined more filmmakers than drugs and money combined. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. That goes double if the knowledge involved is political in nature.
Two unrelated quotes. Both are interesting.
One:
When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.
“In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories,” Eagleman explained. “And […]
I would pay $150 - $200 for a scarf that looks like this:
While reading Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs I thought: what if, by chance, there had been no such collision? Would they have evolved into something more like “us”?
The dinosaurs had a good run: 62 million years. What would another 50 million have done for them?
Then again, you could say they never […]