January 2009
66 posts
Roly Poly by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys,...
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The Moral Hazard of the “Bad Bank” →
Barry Ritholtz has some excellent pointers for Tim Geithner.
Bush War on Roquefort Raises a Stink in France
Edward Cody in WaPo:
In its final days, the Bush administration imposed a 300 percent duty on Roquefort, in effect closing off the U.S. market. Americans, it declared, will no longer get to taste the creamy concoction that, in its authentic, most glorious form, comes with an odor of wet sheep and veins of blue mold that go perfectly with rye bread and coarse red wine.
…
Besides, they...
1981 tv segment predicting that the internet will... →
(via johncarney:abangupjob)
Most interesting question I have been asked today
Are you good at Minesweeper?
Police in Nigeria are holding a goat on suspicion... →
“The group of vigilante men came to report that while they were on patrol they saw some hoodlums attempting to rob a car. They pursued them. However one of them escaped while the other turned into a goat,” Kwara state police spokesman Tunde Mohammed told Reuters by telephone.
via Nora.
“But in the end, my project, in its broader aims, was a failure. Because no...”
– Rich Cohen, Becoming Adolf. This is the first work by Rich Cohen I remember reading since Tough Jews, which is also recommended.
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Trash the euro? →
This is effectively a response to the Bloomberg quote from earlier today about the probability of the euro collapsing, although it was written by Barry Eichengreen in 2007. He says that adoption of the euro is irreversible:
[I]f a participating member state now decided to leave the euro area, no such precommitment would be possible. The very motivation for leaving would be to change the parity....
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“Prices [of Greek, Spanish and Italian government bonds] now reflect odds of...”
– Bloomberg
Iceland’s Government Collapses →
“Fully 84% of the public wants more money spent by the federal government — and...”
– Pollster Frank Luntz - Infrastructure: It’s Job 1 to Americans (via southpol) And only 1% see the hypocrisy…
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“Maybe I have missed it, but I have yet to see an article written or any...”
– Mark Cuban
“Barack Obama will have spent his first several days in office issuing a series...”
– Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
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$1.2 Million Spent On John Thain's Office →
This is just unreal.
The biggest piece of the spending spree: $800,000 to hire famed celebrity designer Michael Smith, who is currently redesigning the White House for the Obama family for just $100,000.
“Bad judgement” doesn’t even begin to describe spending ANYTHING on this in a year like 2008. Unreal.
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Our Plan To Fix The New York Times →
I, for one, would pay $80 a year for online access to the Times. I really don’t want to see a world with only AP and Reuters stories and no context. Related: a 2009 resolution is to pay less attention to ‘news’ as it happens and more to evaluations of events when they can be understood in context. More Salon, Mother Jones and Vanity Fair; less breaking news.
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Today is a good day to dream.
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“The four million slaves that Lincoln freed are now nearly ten million freemen....”
– Booker T. Washington, February 15, 1899, via Juan Cole’s post on three speeches worth remembering this weekend. The others are by Lincoln and Obama.
Reading the play-by-play and looking at some crazy cell phone photos of the US Airways flight to the Hudson River and I’m thinking this might actually be good publicity for US Airways. Check out the t-shirt.
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“The North Korean military declared an ‘all-out confrontational...”
– Choe Sang-Hun Oh, good.
“I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush...”
– Paul Krugman (via azspot)
WatchWhy we know less than ever about the world. “Is this distorted world view what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world?”
The 10 most unethical people in business →
2. David Colby. Colby, the former CFO of Wellpoint, was caught carrying on multiple affairs, even once texting “ABORT!!” to one of his many girlfriends after discovering she was pregnant. He carried on relationships with over 30 women and proposed to at least 12 of them.
Watchjeffmiller:
“Just brace for impact.”
Wow. Somebody give this guy a jacket.
This is so Hitchcock.
There's a commercial airliner floating in the...
WTF
Eric Holder confronts the ticking time bomb...
southpol:
Well, I’m not sure if he confronted it, but he was certainly confronted with it. And he said the right things in this actual universe (the one that isn’t an episode of 24):
John Cornyn, repeatedly invoking the “ticking time bomb scenario,” attempted to box Eric Holder into a corner on waterboarding. Cornyn’s hypothetical relied on the false premise that the only way to stop an...
“A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the word you first...”
– Burt Bacharach True for me.
I watched Slumdog Millionaire last night and thought it was good but overrated. Tyler Cowen is right that this is a good review.
Steve Jobs is taking a leave of absence until...
I wonder if he’ll come back.
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“The federal government already has run up a record deficit of $485.2 billion in...”
– Treasury: deficit hits new record in just 3 months
I say Tim Geithner gets confirmed
despite this illegal housekeeper employment news.
Update: link.
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“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But...”
– Richard Feynman
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Frank Rich: Eight Years of Madoffs →
In the old Pat Moynihan phrase, the Bush years have “defined deviancy down” in terms of how low a standard of ethical behavior we now tolerate as the norm from public officials.
“Ask anyone over 25 what digit they use to ring a doorbell and most people will...”
– Texting a signal of wider trends - BBC NEWS (via superamit)