Seriously, fox news audience? Seriously?

Hysterical overreaction and evangelism collide!

A nice analogy

Since I gave Obama some grief over letting me drown my sorrows but not exhale them, let me highlight one of his good answers from today's Online Town Hall meeting in which he's arguing for his budget plan as a necessary investment. Here's a longer excerpt for context, with the highlight bolded:

I just want to remind you that the money that we are spending on education, on health care, and on energy -- if you added up all that increased money that we're spending, it still is not what's driving our long-term deficits. What's driving it is Medicare, Medicaid, a structural gap that we have because of the Bush tax cuts over the last several years that left us spending a lot more than we were saving.

And it's going to take us a while to dig our way out of that problem. But the way to dig our way out of that problem is not to shortchange investments in our people. A lot of -- I'll bet there are a bunch of families here who are making some tough choices right now, and who are scrimping a little bit and saving.

Now, somebody could make the same argument to you that folks are making to us with respect to the budget, which is, you can't afford to be sending your kids to college right now. That's fiscally irresponsible. You're taking out debt for your kids to get an education. It's better for you to just put them to work right now at a fast-food place, and they'll be bringing in a little bit of income. And maybe later they can go to college.

Well, most of us don't make that decision, because we understand that making the investment now will lead to greater opportunity, greater economic advancement later. Well, the same thing is true in our economy. We can't shortchange the investments that will allow us to grow in the future.

We're going to have to impose discipline and eliminate programs that don't work, and we're doing that. We're cutting this budget by $2 trillion. And we're cutting the deficit in half by the end of my first term.

But what we can't shortchange are those things that are going to allow us to grow long term. I don't want us to constrict and reduce our ambitions, and set our sights lower for our kids and the next generation, because we weren't willing to make those investments now. That's not how America works.

This is always the argument I try to make with respect to funding for education. For the life of me I can never understand why so many pro-business conservatives are anti-education. They certainly understand the concept of investment, but don't often take a very long-term view. And I suppose that's because spending to improve the workforce to grow our national economy 25 or 50 years down the road is too far detached from their purview. But to put some perspective on this, consider my favorite foil: defense spending. In 2008 we spent $666 billion (yes, 666) on defense and $45 billion on education. The thought experiment is: what is the per-dollar return on investment for each?

Boobs not Boobs!!! Er, I mean, uh, books not bombs.

Obama was a stoner too.

At the "Online Town Hall" Q&A with Obama today, he answered several questions submitted online that got the most votes as "good questions". The participation was nothing to sneer at:

92,925 people have submitted 104,127 questions and cast 3,606,830 votes"

As happened the last time they tried this Open For Questions model, many of the most popular questions were about the legalization and taxation of marijuana. To Obama's credit, although the moderator did not include the question he did not dodge it. To his discredit, he did not give a very thoughtful answer.

"I don't know what this says about our online audience, but..."

[mockingly] "No, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

It's easy and funny to dismiss the question's popularity as instigated by a bunch of dirty hippies and fifteen-year-olds (*), but that would be an odd anomaly among 100,000 questions that were, for the most part, posed in a serious and thoughtful way by engaged citizens (and I say that first-hand after voting on hundreds of them). Questions about legalization of marijuana were by far the most voted on, which is why they appeared at the top of the list. If the question deserves to be derided and dismissed, there were options to flag as inappropriate or simply to vote them bad questions that participants would have used. Instead, they were deemed good questions by as much as a 5:1 margin.

So, "what does this say about our audience" was exactly the right rhetorical question to ask. But the thoughtful answer is not "silly stoners, drugs are bad", but "hmm, maybe more Americans are interested in this question that we want to admit". (I won't bother getting into the arguments for legalization and the hypocrisy with respect to the drug alcohol, as these things are amply serviced in internets and college dorms everywhere.) While I realize legalization is political kryptonite, I thought the question deserved a more reasoned and respectful answer.

(*) To be fair, the voting internet demographic skews towards the young, educated [a laughable assertion in retrospect -ed.], and often irreverent (see Ron Paul online poll bombing, 2008 election). And if you look at the Gallup poll, favor for legalization is not yet the majority opinion. But it is headed that way along with the nation's generational, ideological, and religious shifts (go look at the breakdowns).

I don't expect Obama to expend political capital arguing the issue (and by his tone I don't suspect he supports it privately anyway) but at some point the government is going to have to acknowledge that this is very much a mainstream concept. Hopefully they ease federal intervention enough that states like CA and OR can lead the way in proving or disproving the pros and cons.

Heh heh.

Seen outside a Chicago hotel.

Why is it called conventional "wisdom"?

When I read the ill-intended comments recently made by NY Attorney General Cuomo, they struck me as incredibly inappropriate and unfit to the officiation of justice:

Cuomo won a legal ruling last week that entitles him to publicly identify the bonus recipients. But he held off revealing the names after Liddy said some employees had received threats.

The attorney general said Monday that he wouldn't release the names of people who returned their bonuses.

"If a person returns the money, I don't believe there's a public interest in releasing their name."

An AG using the threat of mob action? How is this not extralegal extortion? In any case, as more information has come to light, it's clear that the general understanding of the AIG bonus situation which led to such unbridled outrage (myself included) was ill-informed, misdirected, and unfairly demagogued.

In brief, many of the remaining AIG-FP employees had nothing to do with the CDS shitpile, and were receiving not performance bonuses but retainers designed to keep them from leaving to find new work until they had dismantled their portfolio. Whether the size of the retainers was appropriate or deserved, or whether new people without conflicts of interest should have been brought in to unwind the business, is certainly up for debate. But the existence of these bonus payments, fair or not, is a consequence of the government's response to AIG's risk, and the decision to honor the contracts was made in consultation with the Fed and was at least tacitly endorsed by the Treasury. And so it seems a particularly dishonorable decision to bend to the gale-force political wind rather than explain the particulars of the decision and manage the fact that many of the same douchebags that got rich burying our economy are going to get rich exhuming it.

A telling exchange at last night's press conference has been widely misread as a nice zinger by Obama:

Q: But on AIG, why did you wait -- why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage? It seems like the action is coming out of New York and the attorney general's office. It took you days to come public with Secretary Geithner and say, look, we're outraged. Why did it take so long?

OBAMA: It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak.

Bullshit. That was indeed an artful dodge, but the reason it took a couple of days is because that was how long they needed to sort out the political triage over bonuses they already knew were coming. Bernanke knew, Geither knew, Liddy knew, and anyone with a five minute attention span could understand the argument for paying them. They just weren't prepared for the ferocity of the backlash and came to a poor decision to stoke it rather than quash it.

The weakness in that decision is made plain by a letter of resignation to Mr. Liddy. It underscores the gulf in understanding between the mob and the Adminstration (a gulf which Obama, as Jesus H. Moses, has both the ability and responsibility to bridge). Some excerpts:

"I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

"After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company

"I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid.

"At no time during the past six months that you have been leading A.I.G. did you ask us to revise, renegotiate or break these contracts — until several hours before your appearance last week before Congress.

"As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

"Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored. They are now angry about having been misled by A.I.G.’s promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you."

No one should shed a tear for Mr. DeSantis. He's rich as fuck, and while he claims he "never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps" the amount of money raked in by AIG-FP suggests that even their janitors were probably getting some CDS gravy:

The unit’s revenue rose to $3.26 billion in 2005 from $737 million in 1999. Operating income at the unit also grew, rising to 17.5 percent of A.I.G.’s overall operating income in 2005, compared with 4.2 percent in 1999. Profit margins on the business were enormous. In 2002, operating income was 44 percent of revenue; in 2005, it reached 83 percent.

Who knows if this guy and others in AIG-FP are as blameless as they would like us to believe. It makes little difference when the common understanding of this situation is still so far off from reality.

Update: Wonkette sheds no tears:

"we are forced to conclude that this gentleman’s hard-earned $742,006.40 in bonus money should go to the purchase of a giant bag of dicks for him to eat."

Awesome

Colbert v. Steele rap battle.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Michael Steele's Rap Battle Response
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

Hey Mike Steele gonna steal the mic,
with a flow so rich it'll get a tax hike.
Droppin' rhymes so fine they'll make you blush,
and beats so fat you could call them Rush.

Oh say can you see by your mom's ugly face,
we won't need Scalia to rule on this case.
The chairman is missin', call Nancy Grace,
and crank up the right-wing Republican bass.

You better get a voucher cause your rhymes are failin',
Your game's a dyin' moose and I'm Sarah Palin.
You're gonna disappear like the middle class,
I'll take a penny out my loafer, put the rest up your ass.

Put down the Sword of Demagogocles

Obama pays a timely visit to Leno, and puts a downpayment on proper communication by adding some much needed context to the AIG clusterfuck.

Now, the question is, who in their right mind, when your company is going bust, decides we're going to be paying a whole bunch of bonuses to people? And that, I think, speaks to a broader culture that existed on Wall Street, where I think people just had this general attitude of entitlement, where, we must be the best and the brightest, we deserve $10 million or $50 million or $100 million dollar payouts.

And as little as I like Leno, he hit all the right questions.

- Let me ask you about this. I know you are angry –- because, you know, doing what I do, you kind of study body language a little bit. And you looked very angry about these bonuses. [...] Tell people what happened.

- Now, I heard them say, well, one of the problems is it's contractual and if we don't pay these bonuses, well, they can sue us. All the time people say, so sue me. [...] I mean, the federal government is in debt a trillion dollars. We're broke -- sue us.

- Before the break I mentioned that they had just passed this new bill which will tax them 90 percent -- and I said it was frightening to me as an American that Congress, whoever, could decide, I don't like that group, let's pass a law and tax them at 90 percent.

- I just read today about Merrill Lynch. They handed out $3.6 billion -- it's not even million anymore, it's billions in bonuses. I know it would make me feel good -- shouldn't somebody go to jail?

- Now, Treasury Secretary Geithner, he seems to be taking a little bit of heat here. How is he holding up with this?

- Well, when will the money -- this money was given out to the banks. I would have thought by this time it would have sort of trickled down to Main Street, to people wanting to get loans -- I mean, it all went out there months and months ago. Where is it?

Wallpapering over a thumb in a dike

So if you were following the stimulus/TARP legistative process at all, you may have also been tracking the evolution of amendments on compensation restrictions on the bailees' employees. If so, you will recall that all the measures with teeth were either voted down or watered down, with the final version neutered in conference. As was speculated at the time, and recently confirmed, this was done at the behest of the folks at Treasury.

And so we have arrived, on the battered end of the AIG inquiry, at an opportunity for mea culpas and earnest, well-contemplated corrective action.

Mr. Geithner, would you care to comment?

"... what we did is just express concern about the vulnerability of a specific part of this provision, the legal challenge, as you would expect us to do, that's part of the legislative process, but again, his bill also has this very important provision that allows us to go back and see if we can recoup these payments and we're going to explore that, but in any case we're going to make sure that the American people are compensated for any payments we can recoup."

Wrong answer. The correct answer was, "we asked for the provision to be disabled because we wanted to limit Congress' ability to meddle with compensation contracts. [support for justification or retraction of this position goes here]"

Mr. President?

"Today's vote rightly reflects the outrage that so many feel over the lavish bonuses that AIG provided its employees at the expense of the taxpayers who have kept this failed company afloat. Now this legislation moves to the Senate, and I look forward to receiving a final product that will serve as a strong signal to the executives who run these firms that such compensation will not be tolerated."

Wrong answer. The legislation he is referring to is the one that

would levy a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at companies that have received at least $5 billion in government bailout money.

The correct answer was, "Treasury fucked up and I'll take responsibility for that. [explanation for Treasury's actions goes here]. But we can't start writing blanket punitive tax provisions without a great deal of forethought, because we don't really know who that is going to affect and whether it is going to be appropriate in all cases, and even where it is appropriate there are any number of ways for compensation to be designed around such provisions. Let's not get lost in the rabbit holes. Our fundamental displeasure has to do with those responsible for the crisis and to that end we are cracking heads at the ratings agencies, we are fully reviewing the failure of the regulatory policy, and we are unleashing the DOJ for a full investigation of the units at AIG and any other company who may be liable in either criminal or civil court. Those found guilty will have their assets seized and will be thrown into a federal fuck-me-in-the-ass prison."

This would then be followed with an expanded explanation of why you can't get into the practice of legislating, on a purely reactive basis, compensation adjustments or any other such functions that are properly served by the process of bankruptcy. In other words, employees with compensation contracts have a claim on the company just like any other creditor. Then they wind up with fuck all to show for it because they're pretty far above the liquidity waterline on the creditor hierarchy.

Similarly, you cannot decide to avoid the receivership solution (i.e. bankruptcy or temporary nationalization), in favor of bankrolling AIG to allow it to remain in business long enough to self-administer their own receivership, and then turn around and get pissy that they've made their own decisions about which creditors are most important and at what rate they are going to get paid out. Specifically, if they turn around and pay out $13B in the direction of their most pressing material obligation (Goldman Sachs) at 100 cents on the dollar, you cannot get pissy that Goldman Sachs should have shouldered some of the loss. You acted to keep AIG operating as a solvent business entity! If you want their creditors to share the burden, and to sort out which employees are vital to orderly receivership and which are to be pariahed, that's what fucking bankruptcy is for!

What a colossal waste of an opportunity for Obama to serve his role as communicator. He is clearly up to the challenge. I have heard the argument that the American people are too stupid to understand the details. And I disagree: they are even dumber than that. But communication is one of Obama's great gifts, and where the details are not understood the honesty of giving it to us straight, as promised, is missed only by those whose minds are already made up. Instead, the post- AIG bonus fiasco (I swear to God I'll pistol whip the first guy that says "bonus-gate") scorecard reads: (1) evasive non-answer from Treasury, (1) useless but thoroughly demagogued tax penalty, (0) attempts to explain the current plan and alternative options.

Boomtown

(CC: C. Johnson)

Some illuminating bits from [AIG CEO] Liddy's testimony to Congress today. In short, the fury is justified but is not warranted at current levels.

• Liddy came out of retirement to volunteer for the cleanup job, at $1/year, after the previous CEO was ousted.
  
• The "architects" of AIGFP's CDS shop (Cassano et al.) are gone.
  
• AIGFP has several derivative trades in addition to CDS (oil, currency, etc).
  
• All AIGFP employees are due to lose their jobs when they've wound down their portfolio. The retention bonuses are intended to keep them on board until that gets done.
  
• Some of the already-exited employees receiving retention bonuses received them as per contract which stipulated if they successfully wound down their business portfolios they would continue to receive the retention bonuses.
  
• There were zero performance bonuses paid out to the AIGFP division.
  
• The morning of the hearing, Liddy has asked AIGFP to pay back at least 50% of the bonuses, and 100% for the senior executives; he fears the bonuses will be paid back along with letters of resignation.
  
• Liddy implies the risk of not paying the bonuses is "cross-default" of the $1.6 trillion in remaining AIGFP obligations when the employees walk out of the job. In other words, he doesn't think it's worth the risk to replace everybody when, at fault or not, they are the most qualified to undo their own work.
  
• The decision to pay the bonuses was made with the consent of the Federal Reserve. It remains to be discovered whether and when this was communicated to Treasury.
  
• Liddy asserted that Geithner was made aware of the bonuses only one week prior to his conversation with Liddy last week.
  
• The taxpayer AIG exposure thus far adds up to $170B, but what is currently owed to the US Gov't by AIG is $40B from the Fed and $40B from TARP.
  
• They have also previously sold off troubled assets at 40-60 cents on the dollar to the Fed. The Fed then holds a long-term position on these investments with the intent of eventually making money on them.
  
• The professed AIG exit plan essentially amounts to a self-administered bankruptcy proceeding. They intend to sell off strong business components, market willing, to repay the TARP and Fed loans.

It's not unreasonable to rail against the astronomical eight-figure compensation of Wall Street types (and to contrast the vitriol coming from the GOP over union auto workers costing $40 an hour). And to be sure, some of the people getting retained are the baddies, and are getting millions of dollars to undo their damage. But to a large extent, the rage expended over this bonus boondoggle could have been avoided with the help of more effective communication from AIG to the Executive and from the Executive to AIG's owners, the taxpayers.

Today in Futility

Three-card Geithner:

Acknowledging "considerable outrage" about the bonus payments, Geithner said AIG will pay the Treasury an amount equal to the bonuses, and the Treasury will deduct that amount from the $30 billion in government assistance that will soon go to the company.

Well, whoopdie-doo!

This is obvious, but bears reiterating; instead of bankrolling AIG with an additional $30B, we're going to give them $29.835B... because of the bonuses... that have already been direct-deposited. This non-agression against AIGFP employees will not stand, man.

This is not what accountability looks like. I dare say Geithner is going to be tell us first-hand what accountability looks like in short order.

Breaking the Font Barrier

Kudos to Arianna and her Huffington Post, which has so quickly become the internet's leading innovator in GIANT FONT.

Apart from their font wont, the value added by this net-famous news aggregator was best summed up by Jack Donaghy,

"Thank you for telling me what I already know. You should work for the Huffington Post."

The AIG backlash is Obama's fault

And I don't say that sarcastically.

The functional role of the President has two facets: the inward-facing policy-making, organizational, delegational role of the executive, and the outward-facing leadership of the people. With respect to the financial crisis it's difficult to say whether Obama is failing in his policy role, because he is failing in his nation-leading role.

The burden is on Obama to explain and persuade the public on any of his policies, and that is particularly true of the financial bailouts. It is perplexing that for all the lip service given to transparent government by this administration, the Treasury's approach has been an exercise in vagary.

So while I am somewhat comforted by the fact that AIG is getting the message,

Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn't show up at all.

ultimately the responsibility for this unleashed fury falls squarely at Obama's feet.

It may very well be the case the the employees in AIG's financial products group are not the same folks that tanked their otherwise healthy company with their malpractice (I swear to God I'll pistol whip the next guy that says "shenanigans"). Maybe it is the same people, in which case the beef ought to be over why they weren't fired when we bought the company. A common argument seems to be that they have built-in job security because they're the only ones who understand their complicated derivative products well enough to unwind them and shut down the operation, but I call bullshit on these suicide belt scenarios.

This is all besides the point, though, as it is nothing but useless speculation about what exactly is going on. No one seems to know. Not we, the rubes, not the markets, not even our representatives. Says Rep. Brad Miller:

"I don't feel a lot of confidence in all of this, because I don't have much idea what they're doing ... I'm a fairly conscientious member of the Financial Services Committee, and I haven't found out."

The crickets are chirping, Mr. Obama. Unflattering theories are being formed in your stead.

Is water wet?

The Obama administration is increasingly concerned about a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street, worried that anger at financial institutions could also end up being directed at Congress and the White House ... [link]

Naw... Ya think? It's not like Congress or the Treasury could have conceived of safeguards to prevent bonuses brazen cash grabs by Merril Lynch, AIG, et al.

Lawrence H. Summers, [doucher, -ed.] director of the president’s National Economic Council, described it as “outrageous” on “This Week” on ABC — marks the latest effort by the White House to distance itself from abuses that could feed potentially disruptive public anger.

Right. The abuses they have no responsibility for. If you drop a duece in the middle of a crowded room, it doesn't make it any less your excrement if you stand in the corner and hold your breath. Go clean your shit up.

Has there ever been a bigger group of ineffectual, narcissistic losers than the lot in Congress? Every last one of them (Feingold excluded) and every financial executive deserves to be cold-cocked by each American whose job, house, or retirement they are collectively responsible for losing, and by every American who has been adversely affected by the fallout. Which is to say, every one of us.

Demonstration of populist backlash.

If we're going to coddle the Dow like it's the goddamned baby jesus, is it too much to ask to get some fucking heads on some fucking pikes to sate the rest of us? I want their pants pulled down in public while they're forced to hand out their ill-beggoten fortunes dollar by dollar to professional welfarists and malodorous Frenchmen.

Of course, one could make an argument that those Americans who are too stupid to manage their own budget, irrespective of any recession, should also get lined up for a pimp slap. And I think that's about right. But it's axiomatic that there is an abundance of stupid people anywhere you care to go. You can set your clock to it, and I dare say you can design your policy around it. The same goes for financial regulation -- it is guaranteed that the market will follow not the spirit of the law, but the letter of the law, if even then only up to the level of enforcement and punitive risk.

These are first principles, and I cannot fathom why that fact is lost on policy makers. Our government seems to operate by default on benefits of the doubt (see SEC, re: Madoff), when it seems to me they ought to be operating on assumptions of doubt. It is not the chaste for which laws are necessary.

It is the free marketeers who ought to understand this better than anyone. As the current crisis has ably demonstrated, they understood it perfectly.

Get Yer Populist Rocks Off Here

Cramer gets crucified on The Daily Show.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Yer doin it wrong.

Always sobering to remember just how much we spend on the military in this country. It puts into an absurd perspective these petulant debates over something like social security, which is budgeted at just 1.5% of military spending. Of course, space lasers are critical to the security of this nation's elderly.

(Chart copped from NYT)

That said, this makes no fucking sense to me:

The budget plan projects the deficit falling to $1.17 trillion in 2010 and down to Mr. Obama’s goal of $533 billion in 2013, then increasing again to $712 billion by 2019. Mr. Obama takes credit for $2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years, three quarters of which comes from lower expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan and most of the rest from tax increases on the wealthy and revenue from a market-based cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Is this a joke? Just balance the fucker already.

Signs of the Hypocralypse

Former Senator John Sununu laments the cost of the bailout, leading to some obvious comparisons to the unpaid cost of Bush's trillion dollar wars and tax cuts. It's an interesting exchange featuring a Republican debating in good faith. Yeah, bizarre. It will be good to have honest critics from both sides on the ARRA oversight panel. I wouldn't trust congressional Dems to tie their shoes by themselves without losing their laces.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

John Sununu

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

Bonus Feynman

The Feynman book also reminded me of an anecdote from his youth in the biography Genius by James Gleick, that left such an impression on me 15 years ago that I was able to track it down after thumbing through a few books. Here it is, for your edification:

I said, "I haven't the slightest idea what kind of bird it is."

He says, "It's a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you anything!"

But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: "See that bird?" he says. "It's a Spencer's warbler." (I knew he didn't know the real name.) "Well, in Italian, it's a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it's a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it's a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it's a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing - that's what counts."

(Creative Commons) by: Noël Zia Lee

Feynman on ... everything

Just finished up The Character of Physical Law, which is a transcription in book form of a series of lectures given by Richard Feynman at Cornell in 1964, and televised by the BBC. It's a layman-level monologue on physics that is as interesting, entertaining, and highly recommendable as are all things Feynman.

I'll share a passage here that I was particularly struck by. This excerpt follows a discussion of the unlikely and propitious ability of hydrogen and helium to generate all of the other elements; this is given as an "illustration of the fact that an understanding of the physical laws does not necessarily give you an understanding of things of significance". He proceeds to paint a hierarchy of everything, beginning at the nuclear level and the fundamental laws of physics, and which we will pick up near the end:

As we go up in this hierarchy of complexity, we get to things like muscle twitch, or nerve impulse, which is an enormously complicated thing in the physical world, invovling an organization of matter in a very elaborate complexity. Then come things like 'frog'.

And then we go on, we come to things like evil, and beauty, and hope...

Which end is nearer to God, if I may use a religious metaphor? Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? I think that the right way, of course, is to say that what we have to look at is the whole structural interconnection of the thing; and that all the sciences, and not just the sciences but all the efforts of intellectual kinds, are an endeavour to see the connections of the hierarchies, to connect beauty to history, to connect history to man's psychology, man's psychology to the workings of the brain, the brain to the neural impulse, the neural impulse to the chemistry, and so forth, up and down, both ways. And today we cannot, and it is no use making believe that we can, draw carefully a line all the way from one end of this thing to the other, because we have only just begun to see that there is this relative hierarchy.

And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake. And to stand with evil and beauty and hope, or to stand with the fundamental laws, hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world, with that aspect alone, is a mistake. It is not sensible for the ones who specialize at one end, and the ones who specialize at the other end, to have such disregard for each other. They don't actually, but people say they do. The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies.

Madtown Lost and Found

Seen in a bus shelter:

Only in Madison.

Peanut Head

What is it with peanut executives and their ridiculous hair? Side-parted puff tops shall henceforth be known as "peanut head".

Right: Stewart Parnell, owner of Peanut Corp and peanut head, and willful salmonella slinger. Left: Peanut Corp's peanut-headed lackey, Linus P. Mackincoif.

(Via Boing Boing)

Adventures in Advertising

Nice superbowl we had there last night. Well done, NFL -- the sporting event, that is, not the Bruce Springsteen Smithsonian exhibit. The commericals were unremarkable, save the Budweiser spots...

Umm, Budweiser? Uh, how to put this ... What? The? Fuck? Which is the target market that enjoys equestrian love stories or touching Man/Clydesdale/Dalmation interactions featuring horse-drawn carriages? It's down to the Precious Moments folks now, is it? The incongruence of a Bud-, not Bud Light mind you, but an original-formula-Bud-drinking viewer watching such piffle and going "awwwww..." or "goddamn! look how strong and muscle-ey that horse is" ... was it lost on them, or are they like, operating on a whole 'nother plane of advert mindfuckery?

Listen up, Anheuser-Busch, your parameters are pretty narrow here. You make beer that tastes like piss unless it's cold enough to deaden the taste buds. Its best uses are: acclimating neophytes, boiling brats, situational ironic imbibing, and complementing the Ford F-150 in the defense of manhood. Miller pretty much hit the concept out of the park with their mandom-distilled "That's living the High-Life" commercials.

And don't go blaming your new euro-sissy parent company, InBev. You've been flogging these dog and pony soft-focus commercials longer than that. Just knock it off. It's upsetting me.

So in the spirit of brotherhood, here's a good pep-song for the Budweiser ad execs:

Dump Daschle

Obvious Harry Potter fan and nominee for Secretary of HHS, Tom Daschle, has a tax problem:

"When my accountant realized I would need to file amended returns, he suggested addressing another matter I had raised with him earlier in the year: whether the use of a car service offered to me by a close friend might be a tax issue."

Let me sympathize with the ruby-spectacled Daschle by recounting my own surprise and disappointment when an employer informed me I would owe tax on my use of a company car. So this is a perfectly reasonable oversight, since (a) this is obviously the first vehicle benefit Daschle, first elected to federal office in 1978, has ever had in his life, and (b) unlike my dutiful employer no one ever told him (or his accountant!) a vehicle and a driver were taxable benefits.

I have no doubt that if every senator who wanted to vote down Daschle's nomination on this issue had to undergo a thorough vetting of their own financial affairs, we wouldn't have heard peep about it. I'm much more interested in tax evasion through "legal" loopholes, like the use of off-shore accounts, than I am about the oversight of peripheral benefits. That's not to excuse it, but it's always amusing to hear a hypocrite yell "hypocrite!".

But don't fucking lie about it. Don't insult everyone's intelligence by feigning ignorance on a question you clearly knew the answer to. Don't try to whitewash the arrangement by referring to the political patron who's paying you $1,000,000 a year to be an "advisory board member" of his investment group as "a close friend". Such pusillanimous use of plausible deniability earns you a hearty Fuck You and makes your nomination deserving of a heave-ho from B.O.

Update: Here is a more substantive rejection of Daschle as Sec'HHS.

Update II: The NYT concurs.

Update III: Daschle withdraws his nomination.

POTUS, and sometime mysogynist, Barry Obama

Jessica Simpson gets called out by the leader of the free world:

... when Lauer held up a recent issue of Us Weekly, noting that Obama's face had been cut off on the cover, bumped by a photo of Jessica Simpson, Obama quipped, "Who's in a weight battle apparently."

Ugh. Hopefully the First Lady chews him out for that one.

UPDATE: My bad. I thought he saw her, um, new figure and made that comment, but in fact he was just noting the giant block lettering that said "WEIGHT BATTLE". That one's on the magazine. Mysogynists.

Lowery for the Save

I didn't get too stressed about Obama picking Rick Warren for the invocation. He's certainly not unique in being an anti-gay Christian leader, and I chalked it up to Obama's deliberate inclusiveness / an obvious evangelical pander (take your pick). Then again, I never had occasion to listen to his tripe before. What a no-talent ass-clown jesus-hack. Could he possibly have been more smug and self-aware in invoking "God"? If you haven't yet had the displeasure, here's his invocation:

Followed by a chuckle-headed oath of office by Obama and Roberts, and a clunky poem, the inauguration was decidely flat. Luckily for America, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery's benediction infused the whole affair with lyrical warmth and spirituality and humor:

Reflections of History

President Obama's election means many things to many people, but this pair of photos captures a poignant connection to a more transformative era of civil rights advancement in the US.

The "black power" salute of US athletes
Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics.

Smith, Carlos, and wives embracing during the inauguration.
(via The Big Picture, photo credits: Boston Globe/Stan Grossfeld)