"I don't feel and it feels great"

I found the Lonesome Crowded West in my car this morning. If you need to escape in America this is your song. Just get in your car and drive.

I agree with this. So should you.

Phrases from Battle Hymn of the Republic I like.

the glory of the coming of the Lord
where the grapes of wrath are stored
His terrible swift sword
the dim and flaring lamps
burnished rows of steel
the trumpet that shall never call retreat
a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me
He is Succour to the brave

Where we are.

The difference between Germany and Spain, when you get down to it, is that Germans work for companies which provide goods and services that the rest of the world wants. In doing so, they make good money, which they save up. That’s how they became rich. The Spanish, by contrast, have massive unemployment, and most of the country’s GDP growth in recent years has come from the construction industry. Their main export is tourism, if that counts as an export, and the main way that Spaniards have become rich in recent years is by sitting back and watching the value of their real estate grow exponentially.

The U.S., going forwards, needs to be less like Spain and more like Germany. So let’s not subsidize housing. That way lies fiscal disaster.
-Felix Salmon

Gold

Are you concerned about the IRS reading this and demanding their 16 percent?
This year I’ve made $225 in prostitution, so if I declared that on my taxes, that would fall under the $600 you’re allowed to make outside of your general work. But I don’t mind if they want a piece when I’m getting a piece.

More Facts about Things

Nothing is straightforward in this debate: some studies show that the Neanderthal population of Europe was always tiny, containing a maximum of only 3,500 females in the whole of the continent at any one time between thirty-five thousand and seventy thousand years ago, thus making it a very fragile group already on the brink of extinction. The arrival of modern man might therefore have had little or nothing to do with their disappearance—or conversely might indeed have been the final straw, if the groups competed for resources or if the disease hypothesis stands. On the other hand, there is suggestive evidence, published in the Journal of Anthropological Science in May 2009, that modern humans butchered Neanderthals and made necklaces from their teeth; modern human flint tool marks on Neanderthal bones provoke chilling speculations.
-Cro-Magnon,BN

What social work is like in Knifecrime Island

Underneath the window, in the corner of the common room of this charity, there was a tattered, torn and worn blue bulky armchair. It had spent over a decade supporting the weight and inertia of a variety of young people. It’s torn,worn and tattered complexion resembled that of many of the service users who wallowed away the days ensconced between its arm rests.
-Winston Smith

So this happened

According to Wikipedia:

Unit 684 was an expendable and unorthodox South Korean "black ops" team whose mission was to kill North Korea's premier Kim Il-sung

The unit was set up by the Chief of Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) on the orders of President Park Chung-hee. The Defense Ministry said the unit in question was a detachment of the ROK Air Force’s Squadron 2325, which recruited 31 convicted Death Row criminals on April 1, 1968 for a 'deep penetration' mission - one that was essentially a suicide mission, but which promised the convicts/victims their freedom and a new start if they achieved the mission's aim. Faced with the alternative, they accepted, and Unit 684 was born.

Mimicking North Korea's Unit 124, which had earlier failed to assassinate the South Korean President, Unit 684 was made up of 31 men, and the Unit's mission was to assassinate the then-leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung.

The number of the unit, 684, stands for April 1968 when the unit was founded. The members, being expendable, were harshly trained on the remote deserted island of Silmido in the Yellow Sea, off the coast of Incheon.

After about three years of rigorous training, during which seven died, Unit 684 set off in rubber inflatable boats towards North Korea on their mission. However, en route, it was terminated, and the members forcibly turned back by their instructors, as the Korean governments were now looking towards a peaceful reunification.

In August 1971, the KCIA canceled the mission for good, ordering the instructors to terminate all Unit 684 trainees, and erase all evidence of the project.[citation needed] Before they could be murdered, the Unit 684 members rose up to kill their overseers.[citation needed]

They then attempted to make their way to the Blue House (South Korean President's House) in a rebellion. Most of them, however, committed suicide with hand grenades when roadblocked, and confronted by government troops, before they could cross the Han River.[citation needed] The survivors were sentenced to death by a military tribunal.
-Wikipedia

From the NYT in 2004:

No official data exist. But according to lawmakers who have pushed for compensation for the former spies, more than 7,700 men crossed the border on secret missions from 1953 to 1972. About 5,300 are believed not to have made it back.

A movie based on Unit 684:

Friday

I’m increasingly convinced that citing complexity in these things is mostly a thumb-sucking, multisyllabic way of saying something is hard. And yes, deepwater drilling is hard. But so was shallow water drilling. And so were the first high-pressure land wells. Throwing in complexity doesn’t really add much to the discussion. You would be better to talk about generational changes in related extraction technology, and whether that technology is up to the task of producing oil predictably and safely.

In a recent magazine article, Brian Eno announced "the death of uncool": "We're living in a stylistic tropics," he declared-- an evolutionary hot zone of subgenre crossbreeding and mutation in which no one fad can gain dominance.



The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal-like properties of coastlines.[1][2] It was first observed by Lewis Fry Richardson.

More concretely, the length of the coastline depends on the method used to measure it. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and below, there is no obvious limit to the size of the smallest feature that should not be measured around, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass. Various approximations exist when specific assumptions are made about minimum feature size.

For practical considerations, an appropriate choice of minimum feature size is on the order of the units being used to measure. If a coastline is measured in miles, then small variations much smaller than one mile are easily ignored. To measure the coastline in inches, tiny variations of the size of inches must be considered. However, at scales on the order of inches various arbitrary and non-fractal assumptions must be made, such as where an estuary joins the sea, or where in a broad tidal flat the coastline measurements ought to be taken.

The C Word

It's later in the evening and Kurt is sitting in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, waiting for Courtney to buy dinner, which consists of cookies, fruit juice, and cigarettes. As he stares out the window, a large van pulls up and a guy in heavy metal gear gets out. He is wearing a Nirvana T-shirt.

"That guy has a Nirvana T-shirt," Kurt says rather sadly. The heavy-metal audience was not what he had in mind when he wrote "Smells Like Teen Spirit". "I'm used to it now, I guess," he says softly. "I've seen it a lot."
-Strange Love, Vanity Fair 1991

Got Nuffin

Mr Murdoch’s News Corp estimates that the marginal revenue from an occasional browser is less than one tenth of a penny a year. Even Group M, the media buying agency of WPP, the advertising group, argues in a research note that the bulk of news surfers are “useless tourists” who not only pay nothing but have little advertising potential.

“Free distribution of premium content is like eating your babies. You will give value away until you go bust,” writes Group M. It suggests avoiding a “permanent oversupply of digital inventory” on the open web by using a paywall to “lift the publisher out of remnant inventory and restore a much smaller but aggregated audience.”
-FT

This is the internet leaning across the table and whispering...Your Move.

Wednesday

Skyrocketing housing prices are an emotive issue in China, particularly in Beijing. Fresh university graduates make about 2,000-3,000 yuan a month if they are lucky enough to find a job. Their total income in a year (without spending) is not even enough to buy a toilet in an average-priced apartment. (See China's middle-classes lose property hope, Apr 23, 2010)

...However, as many analysts point out, keeping housing prices high is in the interests of local governments (to boost revenues from land sales) as well as for local officials (to collude with developers for kickbacks). Reducing housing prices may be impossible unless the central government finds a way to rein in local governments and officials.
-Asia Times, Prostitutes Blamed for Property Bulge

Q: Perhaps the most intriguing finding, at least for me, was the degree and consistency to which federal spending at the state level seemed to be connected with a decrease in corporate spending and employment. Did you suspect this was the case when you started the study?

A: We began by examining how the average firm in a chairman's state was impacted by his ascension. The idea was that this would provide a lower bound on the benefits from being politically connected. It was an enormous surprise, at least to us, to learn that the average firm in the chairman's state did not benefit at all from the increase in spending. Indeed, the firms significantly cut physical and R&D spending, reduce employment, and experience lower sales.

The results show up throughout the past 40 years, in large and small states, in large and small firms, and are most pronounced in geographically concentrated firms and within the industries that are the target of the spending.
-HBS, Stimulus Surprise

The most impressive aspect of the maize story is what it tells us about the capabilities of agriculturalists 9,000 years ago. These people were living in small groups and shifting their settlements seasonally. Yet they were able to transform a grass with many inconvenient, unwanted features into a high-yielding, easily harvested food crop. The domestication process must have occurred in many stages over a considerable length of time as many different, independent characteristics of the plant were modified.
-NYT, Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years

Who thought Joan Rivers could be interesting?

The Joan Rivers diet: You can eat anything you want before 3 p.m. and then nothing for the rest of the day. When she goes out to dinner, she puts a small pile of Altoids on the table next to her plate, which she eats one after another while barely touching her food.

...If Joan Rivers has a hard time taking a compliment, she has an even tougher time handing one out. “I will only praise someone who can’t take anything away from me,” she says with a mordant laugh.

...Though she calls herself an independent and voted for Obama, she is constitutionally Republican. Friends with Nancy Reagan. Thinks we should just bomb the shit out of Iran. Ambivalent about feminism. Detests whining and victimhood and laziness. Hated Precious. “I got very annoyed,” she says. “I thought, Oh, get a job! Stand up and get a job!”

...at one point, she sits down for an interview with the film critic Peter Travers and he asks her about her first trip to the festival. “Everyone here is an act-or,” she says. “ ‘Hi, I’m Deborah, and I am an act-or.’ Oh, fuck you. You are an actress.”

...“It’s like three weeks into the Bernie Madoff thing,” says Rivers. “I get there first, and there are two tables to pass before you get to our table. And one was like six Jewish ladies and the other was two Jewish couples. You could just tell. Very New York people. I grabbed the waitress and I say, ‘Please don’t say her name, because Mrs. Madoff doesn’t want people to know it’s her.’ I said it loud enough for the other tables to overhear it.” Marjorie, who has a Ruth Madoff aspect, takes the story from here. “I walk in and they are all staring at me. And I look over at Joan to see what the problem is and she says, ‘Ruthie! Sit here!’ At which point the entire place is stunned speechless. Forks suspended in midair.”

...A few days after 9/11, she called and asked me if I wanted to meet her for lunch at Windows on the Ground. She pushes as far as she can as soon as she can. It’s compulsive.

...When the man leaves, Joan says, “We were on the DMZ line between North and South Korea. It was very scary but it was fabulous. Patience Cleveland was pregnant and was trying to have an abortion. We took hot sea baths in Japan. We got these two crazy marines to ride us over bumpy terrain in Korea. Nothing worked. And she went back to New York, went to a Chinese restaurant on West 46th Street and went down into the basement and got an abortion.”

Michael Stern says, “A Chinese restaurant? Did they do it with MSG?”

Rivers pauses for a nanosecond—wait for it—and finds the line. “Bite down on this egg roll.”
-NYMAG

Paying Mental Rent to Corporate Presidents

Lost Reactions

I have taken a creative writing class or two (can you tell?) and do you know this thing they teach you? "Don't end your story with all your characters being dead." It is like cheating. It is worse than cheating! It is the wussiest thing a writer can do. And these smug dickheads went ahead and did it.

-GWKR

Think of it like this. You’re a ghost but you don’t want to move on. So you create this dream world where things are different for you. Have a bad relationship with your dad? Now you can redeem yourself a bit by having a great relationship with your son? Looking for revenge because a con man indirectly killed your parents? How about, this time, you use your street-smart powers for good and be a cop?

Oh, sort of like Mulholland Drive?-AWL

The most striking moment of the final episode was when Locke tells Jack, quite sincerely, that he does not in fact have a son. The question remains how the different universes fit together or interact and in some manner it seems they do. The final episode is extremely effective in bringing out the dreamy and speculative tones of many of the previous episodes.-MR

So late to this party, not even on tumblr.

Since educated white people can’t make fun of poor, uneducated minorities on a regular basis, juggalos have emerged as the perfect punching bag for ‘people who we know we are better than.-HRO

Wooden Churches in the Russian North

Via

Still in love with this movie

telling the tale

Drinking and drugging seem like perfectly acceptable substitutes for understanding your deficiencies and taking steps to correct oft made mistakes. Compound a profoundly negative view of humanity with laziness and an inability to make plans beyond dinner. Circle around the block to where I live right about now. Envy, the "hedonic treadmill" may be a fantastic way to move forward except it kind of sort of caused you to think you could just stop living. The first advice from any party with a job and a sense of purpose and a modicum of self respect, responsibility, patriotic duty and honor to their lineage would be to tell you to go fuck yourself, grow up and stop being a faggot. Not a faggot in the redneck/frat/bro category of contemporary language but a failure of all masculine conventions of pre-modern history. The diffuculty in knowing that its all an illusion and will stop suddenly is that you see know sense in slowing down. Better off to jam on the gas and get the biggest thrill watching the blah blah cliche cliche appology to reader, fuck. I'm just saying I want a job and don't want to fail at it.

Information you should have known.

When men imagine what living in a polygynous society might be like, they imagine themselves married to several wives. What they don’t realize, however, is that, more than likely, they would be left without any wife in a polygynous society. Polygynous marriage in a polygynous society is always limited to a minority of men. If 50% of men have two wives each, then the other 50% cannot have any wives. If 25% of men have four wives each, then the other 75% cannot have any wives. When women imagine what living in a polygynous society might be like, they imagine themselves having to share their current, no-good loser of a husband with other women. What they don’t realize is that they could be sharing Matt Damon or Bill Gates with other women.
-Via, The Browser

I think this is reflective of what I mean when I say I would have like to be very rich in 1894 (in America!!!) rather than today. Although I would be open to recieving great wealth sometime this weekend.

Straight out of compton a great son named Ice Cube

Finally.

So he's a Libertarian. Jesus... is he named after Ayn Rand?
Although it makes complete sense that Rand Paul would have been named after Ayn Rand he was not. Rand was born "Randal Paul," which was later shortened to Randy. When he got married, his wife started calling him "Rand." However, Rand is a big fan of Ayn Rand. She is one of his favorite novelists. He also loves Dostoevsky.

Looting Pt. II

Federal tax law does put a cap on pension payouts, currently $195,000 a year. Congress set this cap, which has risen with inflation, more than 30 years ago to keep employers from turning their pension funds into abusive tax shelters.

But New York State found a way around it. In 1997, lawmakers created a safe-harbor mechanism allowing retirees to collect bigger pensions legally — a second pool of money called the Excess Benefit Fund.

...Mr. Tassone said the only reason he joined the police force was the promise of a full pension after just 20 years, and it would have been wrong for the state or city to go back on the promise after using it to recruit him.

...Yonkers still offers full pensions to police after 20 years, but just in theory. For the moment, the city is too broke to send any new cadets to the police academy, and retirees are not being replaced.

Oh.

The New York State constitution bars public employers from slowing the rate at which workers build up their pensions over the course of their careers. That degree of protection contrasts sharply with the private sector, where companies can generally change the rate at which workers build their benefits at any time. Furthermore, as companies have reduced pensions substantially over the last two decades, states and cities have embellished theirs with sweeteners like inflation adjustments and lower retirement ages that appealed to unions and their members, who vote.

Census data from 2008 shows that the typical state or municipal pension is substantially richer than the typical company pension — $15,941 versus $7,904 — for retirees aged 65 and older. By tradition, public employees have said they accepted lower salaries in exchange for better benefits, but the Census data show this has not been true for a number of years. In 2008 the median pay for a worker in the private sector was $39,877, compared with $45,124 for a state or local employee. The data show broad national aggregates that do not try to compare similar occupations.

Meanwhile in Paul Krugman's reality

...the truth is that policy makers aren’t doing too much; they’re doing too little. Recent data don’t suggest that America is heading for a Greece-style collapse of investor confidence. Instead, they suggest that we may be heading for a Japan-style lost decade, trapped in a prolonged era of high unemployment and slow growth.

Never mind that Japan has the highest debt to GDP ratio in the developed world. How high did unemployment ever get in Japan during the early 90s? 5%? Fiscal stimulus is necessary until the bond market collapses and central bank is called on to start buying JGBs. After a couple years of hyperinflation and social collapse...BAM! Prosperity ensues. They obviously don't teach you these things at your freshwater economics schools.

oh

Fifteen states, including New York and California, now operate under union-backed state laws mandating that seniority, or “last in/first out,” determines layoffs. These quality-blind layoffs could force a new generation of teachers, like those recruited by Teach for America, out of classrooms in the coming months.

...If unions are the Democratic Party’s base, then teachers’ unions are the base of the base. The two national teachers’ unions — the American Federation of Teachers and the larger National Education Association — together have more than 4.6 million members. That is roughly a quarter of all the union members in the country.

On the other side of the fire door, I encounter about a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their school day at about 8:30. Others wander the halls. Instead of the matching pension contributions paid to the charter teachers that cost the school $193 per student on the public-school side, the union contract provides a pension plan that is now costing the city $2,605 per year per pupil. All fringe benefits, including pensions and health insurance, cost $1,341 per student on the charter side, but $5,316 on this side. For the public-school teachers to attend a group meeting after hours with the principal (as happens at least once a week on the charter side) would cost $41.98 extra per hour for each attendee, and attendance would still be voluntary. Teachers are not obligated to receive phone calls from students or parents at home. Although the city’s records on spending per student generally and in any particular school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that it costs at least $19,358 per year to educate each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.

...To take one representative example, 51 percent of the third-grade students in the public school last year were reading at grade level, 49 percent were reading below grade level and none were reading above. In the charter, 72 percent were at grade level, 5 percent were reading below level and 23 percent were reading above level. In math, the charter third graders tied for top performing school in the state, surpassing such high-end public school districts as Scarsdale.

...“Deliberately or not, President Obama, whom I supported, has shifted the focus from resources and innovation and collaboration to blaming it all on dedicated teachers,” Weingarten says.

Thursday

1. "Well, Stuart, I can see how this would be frustrating, but unless there is an obvious health and safety issue such as an exposed electricity socket or a faulty smoke alarm, then we have no right to tell our residents how to keep their rooms. We need to be very careful here as there is a danger of imposing our own value system on to the residents. What you perceive to be tidy and clean is subjective and their living standards, as long as it doensn't impede on anyone else, are also valid," stated the Senior Manager. She's paid a significant salary from the state coffers to peddle the ideology of moral relativism.
2. But be clear what people like me have done in Thailand now. They have subverted democracy with a military coup and a refusal to accept the result of the subsequent election. And they have shot people that have disagreed with them. An American equivalent would be if (say) the Tea Party (displacing its predecessor Republican Party) won the US Presidential elections and – like many demagogues – turned out to be modestly corrupt. In response a coup was organised by the displaced elites (Democrats and non-Tea Party Republicans) and Tea Party protestors were subsequently shot in the street.In most civilised countries the actions of the past-elites would be called Treason. In America the military leaders of any such attempted coup would be court-martialled and receive the death penalty. What is more – even as someone who opposes the death penalty I would shed no tears... the alternatives are Hobbsian.And that is where people like me have got to in Thailand which is a rather sobering thought indeed.
3. Manufacturers of gambling games have apparently known the rewarding effects of near misses all along, and they design slot machines in such a way as to exploit the cognitive distortions of gamblers. Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves. The gambler who nearly hits the jackpot will therefore want to continue playing, because he thinks he has a good chance of winning.
4. Why electric cars suck and you won't enjoy driving in the future.
5. I enjoy looking at this person naked.

good sentence

How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud?-MR

Best Skateboard Video

Tim and Eric - Roger of the Month Mar 2010 - Outro Video from Roger Skateboards on Vimeo.

A Nicer Guy

"When Mr. Stanford surrendered to authorities, he was a healthy 59-year-old man," Stanford's Houston-based lawyer, Robert Bennett, wrote in a brief on which Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz consulted.

"Mr. Stanford's pretrial incarceration has reduced him to a wreck of a man: he has suffered potentially life-impairing illnesses; he has been so savagely beaten that he has lost all feeling in the right side of his face and has lost near-field vision in his right eye," Bennett said.

Saying their client had neither the motive to flee nor the means, having been declared "indigent" by court, Stanford's lawyers urged that he be placed under house arrest at the home of his fiancee's sister, with an ankle bracelet and other travel restrictions.

-Savagely beaten Stanford asks to be freed, Reuters

Iceland

Picture this scene. You are a few 100 meters from a tall cliff. Straight ahead is an extremely attractive waterfall. Other slender waterfalls flow over the cliff to your left. To the right you look across flat farmland with Icelandic horses grazing, and out over the ocean to the jagged Westerman Islands. Beyond that is Surtsey, which didn’t even exist until 1963. Above the cliffs you see a dazzling glacier, and the sort of oddly shaped clouds that you see in northern regions. Cute puffin birds circle around. Over-arching the entire scene is a huge rainbow with more colors than I recall seeing in any other rainbow. Oh, and one other thing, if that’s not enough there was also a colossal tower of ash rising above the glacier-caped volcano, no more than a few miles away.
-Scott Sumner on Iceland

monday

Showing a computer chart to a visitor, Mr. Narang zeroes in on one stock that had recently been a winner for the firm. Which stock? Mr. Narang clicks on the chart to bring up the ticker symbol: NETL. What’s that? Mr. Narang clicks a few more times and answers slowly: “NetLogic Microsystems.” He shrugs. “Never heard of it,” he says.
-Fast Traders are Scrutinized, NYT

"...a quarter of American households have no net savings whatsoever. Even the median net worth of the wealthiest age group, those within a decade of retirement, was just $254,000, according to a Federal Reserve survey conducted when stock values were near their peak and homes more valuable. Meanwhile, the percentage of disposable income being ploughed back into savings is a paltry 2.7 per cent."

The Tax Policy Center calculates that getting budget deficits to 3 per cent of output through taxing only the well-off would see top marginal rates more than double to 77 per cent.
-FT

Speaking of regrettable lines: Why the heck did I bring up my wife in connection with "freedom from porn?" I was trying to say it's a canard that porn somehow harms families, or something terrible and shameful, so I mentioned the other half of my family.
-GWKR

Taken case by case, many of these policy choices are perfectly defensible. Taken as a whole, they suggest a system that only knows how to move in one direction. If consolidation creates a crisis, the answer is further consolidation. If economic centralization has unintended consequences, then you need political centralization to clean up the mess. If a government conspicuously fails to prevent a terrorist attack or a real estate bubble, then obviously it needs to be given more powers to prevent the next one, or the one after that.
-NYT

Breaking Bad

"Darth Vader had responsibilities. He was responsible for the Death Star."

You saw this coming, we didn’t. In fact, you’ve been ahead on a lot of things. Aeronautics, teenagers, the negro market.

“Do you know why I don’t go to McCann?”
“Because there are people out there who buy things, people like you and me, and something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that, but you do. And that’s very valuable.”

Dean Baker suggests you go fuck yourself.

The deficit hawks tell us we can’t fix our health care system. What they actually mean is that they don’t want to confront the powerful interest groups that cause the United States to pay two or three times as much per person – with no obvious benefit – as people in other wealthy countries. It is easy to devise mechanisms that will get our costs more in line with other countries (e.g. this or this).

Because such measures threaten the incomes of powerful interest groups the politicians won’t push them. And, because they have not been endorsed by enough elite economists (you know, the folks that couldn’t $8 trillion housing bubble) elite journalists will not talk about them either. Instead, they will blame ordinary workers for thinking that they should be able to get a decent retirement and have the same sort of health care coverage as people in every other wealthy country.

How are we alive today pt. II?

When he stopped there was a considerable silence. I then asked: "Where is the strategic reserve?" and, breaking into French, which I used indifferently (in every sense): "Ou est la masse de manoeuvre?" General Gamelin turned to me and, whith a shake of the head and a shrug, said: "Aucune." There was another long pause. Outside in the garden of the Quai d'Orsay clouds of smoke arose from long bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheel-barrows of archives on to them. Already therefore the evacuation of Paris was being prepared.

- Winston Churchill liveblogs WWII, May 16 1940 via Brad Delong

How are we alive today?

Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.

"He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.

"This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." The man could not be sedated, added the farmer, because it might have distorted the experiment.

...On the frozen fields at Pingfan, prisoners were led out with bare arms and drenched with cold water to accelerate the freezing process.

Their arms were then hit with a stick. If they gave off a hard, hollow ring, the freezing process was complete. Separately, naked men and women were subjected to freezing temperatures and then defrosted to study the effects of rotting and gangrene on the flesh.

People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death like a cat in a washing machine. To study the effects of untreated venereal disease, male and female "logs" were deliberately infected with syphilis.

...One victim, Huang Yuefeng, aged 28, had no idea that by pulling his dead friend's socks on his feet before burying him he would be contaminated.

All he knew was that the dead were all around him, covered in purple splotches and lying in their own vomit. Yuefeng was lucky: he was removed from a quarantine centre by a friendly doctor and nursed back to health.

But four relatives died. Yuefeng told Time magazine: "I hate the Japanese so much that I cannot live with them under the same sky."

Items Saturday

Regionality has been stripped away from most American women. Most girls these days just look like they came out of The Hills-John Carney

What visitors will find is a nation of First World amenities and infrastructure, and a place where optimism is perennially tested by unresolved Third World issues of poverty, crime, inflation, and racial tension. Already the undisputed economic engine of Africa—it accounts for 39 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's gross domestic product—South Africa still labors with plenty of fiscal shortcomings. One of them is that the recession did bite at least a little. Unemployment, which had been trending downward since 2006, rose in 2009 to 24 percent from 22 percent in 2008, throwing tens of thousands of mostly poor and middle-class black South Africans out of work.

...The country already generates two-thirds of the continent's electricity. Once a nation of tariffs, South Africa has liberalized its trade policies with its African neighbors; in 2008 it did $104.7 billion in business with the 46 other nations of sub-Saharan Africa.

The mines Malema would nationalize sit on huge reserves: South Africa has 90 percent of the world's platinum, 80 percent of its manganese, 73 percent of its chrome, and 41 percent of its gold, according to government estimates. South African farmers account for 8 percent of the country's exports and help feed Africa and the world. Roughly twice the size of Texas, South Africa also can boast a first-world freeway system, world-class banking and telecommunications systems, and a stock market that has attracted $41 billion in investments from the U.S., according to government data.
-South Africa: A Big Bounce from the World Cup

Earlier generations of women politicians (Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, up to a point even Hillary Clinton) were what is usually referred to as "phallic" women: they acted as "iron ladies" who imitated and tried to outdo male authority, to be "more men than men themselves." ...Jacques-Alain Miller pointed out how Sarah Palin, on the contrary, proudly displays her femininity and motherhood. She has a "castrating" effect on her male opponents not by way of being more manly than them, but by using the ultimate feminine weapon, the sarcastic put-down of male authority -- she knows that male "phallic" authority is a posture, a semblance to be exploited and mocked. Recall how she mocked Obama as a "community organizer," exploiting the fact that there was something sterile in Obama's physical appearance, with his diluted black skin, slender features, and big ears. Here we have "post-feminist" femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, prim teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the "first dude" as a phallic toy. The message is that she "has it all" -- and that, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who had realized this Left-liberal dream...No wonder that the Palin effect is one of false liberation: drill, baby, drill!

-Slavoj Žižek on Sarah Palin via MR

!

But for the black child market to clear, prices must fall further
-Markets in Everything-Discount Babies

In the Land of Brooklyn

Tattoos (expensive). Beer (cheap). Bike (fixed gear).

I think if I could insert this picture into 1960 (my American social history is Mad Men) the world of 2010 would not exist. Kennedy and Khruschev would have incinerated the West to keep this from happening.

Items Wednesday

"He said almost exactly the same sort of things about John Gutfreund, after Gutfreund had given him a sweet deal to rescue Salomon Brothers from oblivion. The moment Warren was forced to choose between Gutfreund and his money, he chose his money.

...Be careful not to say or do anything now that will constrain our ability, after this crisis has passed, to do whatever we want."
-Blaming Merill, Michael Lewis

"The only mark-to-market on home loans that I have ever seen was for super jumbo loans ($1 million and up).

Bank regulators generally allow banks to aggregate reasonably-sized home loans into “homogeneous risk pools.” And rather than mark an individual performing home loan to market, they might insist that the bank create a provision for homogeneous pool losses. Those provisions have tended to run anywhere from 0.25% to say 3.0% of the pool and are based on past loss history. Obviously looking in the rear view mirror these days doesn’t help very much. Moreover, that percentage provision in the sand states is typically less than the legal and brokerage costs of a foreclosure sale. So this provisioning works if:(i) only a few mortgages in the pool default, and (ii) if the historical underwriting Loan-to-Values(LTVs) aren’t breached by declining real estate values. But if the mortgages in these pools are highly correlated (which they are), then LTV-breaching declines in home values will create bank charge-offs that tend to look like a steep step function, e.g. a 3% historical charge-off rate goes right to say a 20%-30% OREO loss rate.

So you are correct. Many home loans may be paying for now but are significantly impaired. Even if the average home loan underwriting at inception was a relatively conservative 70-80% LTV (which was the exception as the market got exuberant), loans in markets that have experienced 40%+ price declines (sand states)have significant unrecognized impairment losses."

-Comment from Negative Equity Data Point of the Day, Felix Salmon

PAUL: It's not easy. You're starting to be a man, to be macho. Actually,
that was one of the things that brought John and me very close together:
He lost his mum when he was 17. Our way of facing it at that age was to
laugh at it--not in our hearts but on the surface. It was sort of a wink
thing between us. When someone would say, "And how's your mother?" John
would say, "She died." We'd know that that person would become incredibly
embarrassed and we'd almost have a joke with it. After a few years, the
pain subsided a bit. It was a bond between us, actually; quite a big one,
as I recall. We came together professionally afterward. And as we became
a writing team, I think it helped our intimacy and our trust in each
other. Eventually, we were pretty good mates--until the Beatles started
to split up and Yoko came into it.

-1984 Paul McCartney Interview

If a movie doesn't hook Cowen, he reads a book outside while his wife remains in her seat. Most recent movie they both left: "Greenberg," starring Ben Stiller.
-My Tyler Cowen obsession, Wapo Edition

Bret Easton Ellis, author of the 1998 book Glamorama, about a dimwitted male model who finds himself embroiled in a terrorist ring with roots in the fashion industry, sued Ben Stiller following the release of Zoolander (2001), citing copyright infringement. The case was later settled out of court.
-IMDB

"But even more than on Horehound, Mosshart stays within White's freaked-out range, each singer firing off one outrageous non sequitur after another. Together, they sound like two feral cats circling each other outside a dumpster, trying to figure out whether to fuck or fight."

You want to fuck and fight
In the basement
The kid wanna fuck and fight
In the basement
Got a rattle snake on in the basement
The young snake's got my name

Questions

How did the central banks of the EU member countries form the ECB? Why are their still national central banks in the EU?

If you traveled back in time and wanted to become a great general what items excluding weaponry would give you the advantage over Julius Ceasar or Napoleon?

How much information will employers be able to gather on prospective employees in 100 years? Will legislation restrict information gathering? (What if an otherwise unimpeachable new hire would be determined to have a 90% chance of become an alcoholic after 5 years on the job, could you discriminated against him?)

Cultural Homogenity

"...though I would hardly call Fight Club a “feminist” movie (barely any women in it), it’s definitely a critique of a patriarchal values. The basic idea is to describe the existence of people who attempt to actually perform the kind of masculinity that’s nominally valorized in our culture and portray that performance as a form of mental illness."-Matt Yglesias

Why isn't that fucking Hollywood futures market happening? Felix Salmon comments.

Charlie Munger 1994

The first question is, "What is the nature of the stock market?" And that gets you directly to this efficient market theory that got to be the rage—a total rage—long after I graduated from law school.

And it's rather interesting because one of the greatest economists of the world is a substantial shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway and has been for a long time. His textbook always taught that the stock market was perfectly efficient and that nobody could beat it. But his own money went into Berkshire and made him wealthy. So, like Pascal in his famous wager, he hedged his bet.

...But he was, by and large, operating when the world was in shell shock from the 1930s—which was the worst contraction in the English-speaking world in about 600 years. Wheat in Liverpool, I believe, got down to something like a 600-year low, adjusted for inflation. People were so shell-shocked for a long time thereafter that Ben Graham could run his Geiger counter over this detritus from the collapse of the 1930s and find things selling below their working capital per share and so on.

...In fact, any time anybody offers you anything with a big commission and a 200-page prospectus, don't buy it. Occasionally, you'll be wrong if you adopt "Munger's Rule". However, over a lifetime, you'll be a long way ahead—and you will miss a lot of unhappy experiences that might otherwise reduce your love for your fellow man.

fuck yeah urban decay

More from Detroit:

Fuck You Bands Who Released Better Albums Last Week

This pricey stuff makes me dizzy
I guess I've always been a delicate man
Takes me a day to remember a day
I didn't mean to let it get so far out of hand
I was a comfortable kid
But I don't think about it much anymore
Lay me on the table, put flowers in my mouth
And we can say that we invented a summer lovin' torture party
-The weakest link is Lemonworld, which trips itself up on too many thoughts. But the rest of this misery tour? Masterful.

Morbid Self Reflection-Myers Briggs Edition

INFP - "Questor". High capacity for caring. Calm and pleasant face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

This is better:
creative, smart, idealist, loner, attracted to sad things, disorganized, avoidant, can be overwhelmed by unpleasant feelings, prone to quitting, prone to feelings of loneliness, ambivalent of the rules, solitary, daydreams about people to maintain a sense of closeness, focus on fantasies, acts without planning, low self confidence, emotionally moody, can feel defective, prone to lateness, likes esoteric things, wounded at the core, feels shame, frequently losing things, prone to sadness, prone to dreaming about a rescuer, disorderly, observer, easily distracted, does not like crowds, can act without thinking, private, can feel uncomfortable around others, familiar with the darkside, hermit, more likely to support marijuana legalization, can sabotage self, likes the rain, sometimes can't control fearful thoughts, prone to crying, prone to regret, attracted to the counter culture, can be submissive, prone to feeling discouraged, frequently second guesses self, not punctual, not always prepared, can feel victimized, prone to confusion, prone to irresponsibility, can be pessimistic

Under extreme stress, fatigue or illness, the INFP's shadow may appear - a negative form of ESTJ. Example characteristics are:

• being very critical and find fault with almost everything
• doing things to excess - e.g.: eating, drinking or exercising
• becoming bossy or domineering and ignoring others' feelings
• being pedantic about unimportant details

More on Suicide Mountain...

Once morbid Japanese ripe for Death would dispatch themselves with a dagger, elaborately disemboweling themselves in a ritual of exquisite pain. Today such heroic acts of hara-kiri ("belly-cut") are rare. Suicide has gone cheap, and last week Japan's go-getting suicide tycoon, owl-eyed Jinnojo Hayashi, scored another coup. For the second time this year sensation-hungry tourists at his Suicide Point witnessed a triple plunge into the sulphur-stinking maw of Death.

suicide

"I've seen people put tape over their mouths, seen people drown themselves in a barrel of water, and some people jump into machinery," he said. "Sometimes people really want to hurt themselves or hurt the person who they think is at fault. Sometimes you see suicide notes that say, 'Well, this'll show you.' Of course, nobody shows anybody anything, because they're dead."

During his years at the Medical Examiner's Office, Frisino has become something of a scholar of suicide. "Even if a case is reported as a suicide by the police department, we go in with an open mind," he said. "We see far more deceased folks than any police officer on the beat."

He has learned that people who live on houseboats near the Aurora Bridge can recognize the sound of a body splashing into Lake Union. He has learned that the sooner he interviews a bereaved family, the more accurate the information will be, because they haven't had time to consult a lawyer or an insurance agent. And he's learned how to tell whether a hanging was a suicide or an erotic accident. "Look at the joist or whatever they've hung themselves on," he said. "If there are many notches in the wood, you've got yourself an autoerotic asphyxiation. Also, those people tend to put a towel around the rope, because if you go to work with lots of lines across your neck"—Frisino drew a forefinger across his throat and grinned—"people might ask: 'You wearing your tie a little tight these days, buddy?'"

...It takes only seven or eight pounds of tension on a cord to block the carotid artery in your neck. Meaning you can hang yourself while kneeling. Many prison "hangings" are really just prison "leanings forward."

...The world's most popular jump site is said to be Mount Mihara, a volcano on an island near Tokyo where a person can leap off the rim and directly into the lava.

Short Belgium

Yet Belgium is a mess. Its sovereign debt to GDP is 100%, up from a trough of 84% a few years ago, and its budget deficit is 5% of GDP. Belgium’s public debt is held abroad to the tune of 69% of GDP and its private sector foreign liabilities are another 162% of GDP, giving a total percentage of foreign credit dependence (charitably excluding inter-company borrowing) only surpassed by the UK and Ireland in the EU (where banks have huge FX liabilities) — see Figure 3. On these ratios, Belgium leaves the PIIGs at the starting block. And Belgium’s overall securitised debt burden (public and private) is only surpassed by that of Ireland (Figure 6).

To stabilise its public debt to GDP ratio, Belgium needs to run an annual primary surplus of 4% of GDP at today’s interest rates and would need an annual primary surplus of 5% if its bond yield rose to the same level as Spain’s. That compares with a current primary budget deficit of 1.3% of GDP.

And there is another special factor for Belgium. Political risks are high. There is no government, the last one having fallen on the usual linguistic sword a few weeks back, and no prospect of one for months. So far, markets, having little understanding of Belgium’s arcane and repetitive linguistic political crises, have cheerfully ignored this one too.

But this time, they are wrong. Unlike the Greeks, who seem to like being Greeks and being in Greece, Belgium is a country with a dearth of nationals proud to be Belgian and where growing swathes of the population want to be in another state of their own creation. This is not a good scenario for taking tough decisions on public debt at a national level and making the necessary political compromises (upon which, along with beer and chocolate, Belgium’s international reputation depends).

Every political crisis brings Belgium close to the cliff edge of being no more — at least as we now know it. It would be unwise to bet the house on this crisis being the ultimate one, but prudent to bet on it being the beginning of the endgame for Belgium.

-FT Alphaville

Related...

The Marriage Market

So what are the economics? Presumably a proposal "out of the blue" is more likely to be accepted, and offered, when there is potential disagreement about the correct "market prices" of various potential partners. A lower status man might try to snare a higher-quality woman, perhaps by catching her off-guard, or he might be trying to signal, with his daring and panache, that he is higher status after all.

The most likely ones to accept such proposals are women who are unsure of their "quality," either on the mating market or in unmarried life. Accepting the proposal takes on one kind of risk but relieves the woman of another.

-MR

Items Wedesday

"The whole concept of the American Newsweekly is dated and unnecessary, because anyone who vaguely gives a shit about anything has already heard all the dumb national news and the one international story allowed each week and the pointless retread of whatever pop-culture or sports thing and the already-discredited New Study Proves It linking blueberries to obesity and handjobs to breast cancer, etc. There is No Point to getting an even more dumbed-down version in a flimsy glossy magazine barely held together with a couple of allergy and erectile-dysfunction ads."



"Art House Director"

"Farmers irrigate crops with wastewater across the developing world, but nowhere else on the scale of Mezquital Valley, researchers say. The 350 square miles of the valley’s irrigated fields lie at the end of a crisscross of tunnels, rivers, lakes, dams and reservoirs that date from the 14th century, when the Aztecs settled on an island amid lakes and engineered the first network of dikes and dams to control the floodwaters."

"Codes of the Underworld"-Dude could have just talked to Tarantino.

An old man ruins a great newspaper

On February 4, 2008, News Corp. released its quarterly earnings for the first time as the official owner of Dow Jones. The company reported a 24 percent increase in operating profit, though its net income rose only fractionally—just 1 percent. Thomson strolled by Brauchli's office and said, in a stage whisper, “Operating profit, operating profit, operating profit.” Brauchli was initially puzzled but then realized that Thomson must be referring to the earnings release. Brauchli brought Thomson into his office and explained that the Journal always emphasized net income first in its stories, since that figure took into account taxes, depreciation, and all the other costs that affected a business's performance, and the paper considered it the most important figure in a company's earnings release. Any other number allowed a corporation to include or exclude various charges and other figures that could make the earnings appear rosier. “Oh, don't change the standard, then,” Thomson replied. “Just be consistent.” The following day, Brauchli was amused to see that the New York Post's story on the topic led with a “record” increase in operating income.

-The Man Who Tried to Manage Murdoch

Nu Metal Sunday Morning

From Wikipedia-

During the performance, the band members seem to become angry over something, although it is unclear as to what that is. They then leave the studio before finishing the song, leaving some of the staff members confused. Jonathan is seen getting into his car with paparazzi surrounding him. He then gets out and swings a baseball bat at one of the cameras. Fieldy and Head give their car to a homeless man (portrayed by Pharcyde rapper Tre Hardson) and Munky and David exit their car to leave it crashing and exploding into a storm drain. All band members meet up and then walk to a crowded party which features Eminem, MMA fighter Tito Ortiz, Limp Bizkit vocalist Fred Durst and Orgy vocalist Jay Gordon.

Felix Salmon on Rubin

There's this:

I’d love to know what kind of dangerous market uncertainty Rubin was worried about: maybe the danger that senior Goldman Sachs derivatives traders would no longer be able to afford their fourth house?

Oh and suck my dick Mr. Fmr. Sec. Chairman.

• He epitomized the way in which traders ousted investment bankers and turned investment banks into systemically-dangerous institutions by making them much larger than they had ever been in the past.
• For all his vocal bellyaching about tail risk, he ultimately made his money as an arbitrageur, making leveraged bets that something with a 95% chance of happening was, indeed, going to happen. That’s a strategy which works until it doesn’t — but by the time it failed, Rubin had moved on to greater things.
• He was one of those senior men at investment banks who encouraged risk-taking without understanding the risks which were being taken.
• He was perfectly happy to see Larry Summers cheer on the single most disastrous deregulation of derivatives ever, the CFMA.
• He allowed the illegal creation of Citigroup with a nod and a wink, knowing that Gramm-Leach-Bliley was just around the corner and would make Citigroup legal in retrospect.
• He then collected his just rewards in the form of $126 million in pay from Citi, for a job which even Weisberg admits involved no managerial responsibility.
• He turned the job of Treasury secretary into a job where the first priority was to make Wall Street happy, asking for nothing but cheap debt in return.
• He institutionalized and epitomized the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington and back again.
• He set himself up as a wise expert on risk, even as he had no idea what risks his own company was running.
• He took on a job with significant power, but ducked any responsibility which might normally go with such power.
• He specifically refused to take any responsibility for his recommendations to Weill and Prince on the subject of risk-taking.
• He failed to push Prince to put in place any kind of succession plan, thereby creating a horrible vacuum at the top of Citigroup just as strong leadership was desperately needed.
• He’s slippery and unapologetic in hindsight.

Just think of this Cypress Hill song and replace PIG with Rubin

Markets in Everything: Zimbabwe Edition

Unfortunately, irrigation pipes are no longer owned by anyone, so they are being dug up for scrap in a free-for-all. Some are even melted down to make coffin handles, one of the few growth industries left in the country.

Items Saturday

In 1940 there were only 13 democracies in the world.

98% of Greek pool owners lied on their taxes.

Unrelated from The Road Warrior:



I went here today. I should have tipped.

Zooey