In an excellent oral history of the Bush administration, a hole that reveals yet more holes:
November 1, 2001 A presidential executive order exempts presidents, vice presidents, and their designees from provisions of the 1978 Presidential Records Act and permits unclassified archived materials to be kept sealed in perpetuity, rather than being released after 12 years, [...]
48.mp3 6/30/2008
77.mp3 12/26/2008
Skaters Jump in as Foreclosures Drain the Pool
Some skateboarders use realty tracking sites like realquest.com and realtor.com to find foreclosed houses with pools, while others trawl through satellite images from Google Earth. On the Web site skateandannoy.com, where skaters trade tips about how to find and drain abandoned pools, one poster wrote about the current [...]
Roger Muraro plays “Le Baiser de l’Enfant Jésus Part 1″ by Olivier Messiaen:
from Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus.
Erik Satie:
gymnopédie no. 1
gymnopédie no. 2
gymnopédie no. 3
The New York Times:
WaMu’s retail mortgage office in Downey, Calif., specialized in selling option ARMs to Latino customers who spoke little English and depended on advice from real estate brokers, according to a former sales agent who requested anonymity because he was still in the mortgage business.
According to that agent, WaMu turned real estate agents [...]
Juan Williams gets on the mic. His pitch rises. He begins by invoking the incoming president then picks up steam, listing parties looking to exploit the financial crisis. Then, he simply states large numbers. He closes by citing, once again, the incoming president.
He would tie the special interests to the president-elect, not with arguments but [...]
A funny analogy from a thrilling book:
To assume…that derivatives cannot be influential because they exist in virtual space and therefore do not produce anything material or real is as unsound as assuming that religion must be historically inconsequential because, after all, God doesn’t really exist.
(Thank you! Mark)
Martin Wolf via Paul Krugman:
The third and most important lesson is that one should not treat the economy as a morality tale. In the 1930s, two opposing ideological visions were on offer: the Austrian; and the socialist. The Austrians – Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek – argued that a purging of the excesses [...]
Nothing novel here, except, maybe, the source. A Financial Times editorial:
The humbling of the financial sector should put an end to a bonus culture that rewards recklessness. It should also bring to a close the two decades in which investment banking and its associated industries have absorbed disproportionate numbers of skilled graduates. From now on, [...]
Paul Krugman:
In recent years the finance sector accounted for 8 percent of America’s G.D.P., up from less than 5 percent a generation earlier. If that extra 3 percent was money for nothing — and it probably was — we’re talking about $400 billion a year in waste, fraud and abuse.
Similar to Denis Darzacq, the photographic art of Li Wei.
Documenting Denis Darzacq’s process.
Markets need trust as much as they do liquidity. If Bush and Cheney aren’t perceived as being clean, how much confidence can investors have in their reforms?
The Rap on Bush and Cheney, Bill Saporito, July 14, 2002.
What they inspired, we now know, was a crime spree.
Just watched the depressing, almost cynical There Will Be Blood. Hard not to think of it in context of Madoff and Dreier and Lehman, et al. The money for nothing crowd.
From blubber to barrels. Fortunes made out of the richness of the earth and the poverty of men. Centuries of taking out without putting [...]
On the local NPR station today a reporter called this weekend’s celebrations around the Virgen de Guadalupe a “Latino holiday.” Incorrect. It’s exclusively a Mexican holiday. Likewise, praying to the Virgen de la Caridad is a Cuban tradition. La Virgen del Carmen: Guatemalan. La Virgen del Trono: Nicaraguan. Etc.
And then in an article published today [...]
Josh Marshall speculates on the Republican senators’ tactical reasoning:
Senate Republicans are following this course for three key reasons — first is payback against a major industrial union; second is payback against states like Michigan and Ohio who have been moving away from the GOP; third is the desire to advantage Japanese auto manufacturers who disproportionately [...]
The U.S. Senate is the most powerful legislative body in the nation if the not the world. One hundred American senators are entrusted with protecting and advancing the liberty and prosperity of hundreds of millions.
So what do the most powerful Republican politicians of our time choose to do at this time of almost incomprehensible economic [...]
Michael Lewis from the same piece as the previous quote:
And if the law ever declared formally that Jonathan Lebed didn’t break it, the S.E.C. would be faced with an impossible situation: millions of small investors plugging their portfolios with abandon, becoming in essence professional financial analysts, generating embarrassing little explosions of unreality in every [...]
Jonathan Lebed, age 14, circa 2000:
”People who trade stocks, trade based on what they feel will move and they can trade for profit. Nobody makes investment decisions based on reading financial filings. Whether a company is making millions or losing millions, it has no impact on the price of the stock. Whether it is analysts, [...]
Imi Hwangbo.
I just heard a memory from 20 years ago: a gymnasium filled with teenage boys chanting “Regis! Regis! Regis!” for the home team.
Apropos of “people…heavily discount the future relative to the present,” I am reminded of all the ways in which this limitation impairs our decisions, from how we address global warming to our credit card purchases.
As we age, we travel through time. I am now meeting the me I would become. My debts? I sent those [...]
The BBC: “US chemical firm Dow Chemical will cut 5,000 jobs and close 20 plants in an attempt to cut costs. maintain recent profit margins.”
From the same 1988 essay I keep citing, a statement that could have been written this summer in reference to the wealth that is being destroyed: “The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning point.”
Then again, it’s easier to be “prophetic” with opaque [...]
A few months ago I made the not very original observation that the era we are leaving (from Reagan to Bush II, from junk bonds to synthetic cdo’s) was partly shaped by the idea that simulation could supplant reality.
(An infamous example from 2004: ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own [...]
Imagine if the financial meltdown had happened last summer, with the election a year away.
Music I have been listening to a great deal lately:
Not in love (as suggested by Nightvision)
Hello it’s me