I’ve been insisting that the total cost of the financial sector bailout will run $3 trillion or more. Turns out that despite a lack of any expertise other than a deeply held and absolute cynicism about Republican governance and financiers of any stripe, I’m in good company. David Leonhardt is pretty sure we’ll get . . . → Read More: In which BTC News, despite flying blind, is proved right on the bailout
|
|||
|
There are, to be sure, stark differences between Barack Obama and George Bush. Obama has a pretty good jump shot, for one. And he’s never formally been a cheerleader. It turns out they they have more in common than one might think, and in the unlikely territory of social philosophy. Back in February of 2005, Bush was out on the Nebraska leg of his Let’s Nuke Social Security” tour. At a stop in Omaha, he had an encounter with a woman called Mary Mornin (it’s Mornin in America!). During the course of their brief and breezy conversation, Mrs. Mornin mentioned that she worked three jobs to make ends meet for her family. Bush responded in classic fashion.
That’s great! No sleep, never sees her kids … man, that’s livin’. Continue reading Obama joins Bush in applauding American servitude As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed. It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage of every federal legislative budget appropriation for graft. Americans prefer to call it “waste,” but basically it’s accepted that a piece of every legislative pie gets stolen. Maybe it’s 10%, maybe more, maybe less. We’ll say 10% because that’s easy to work with. Cynics would therefore expect that at least $75 billion of the banks/Wall Street bailout money will be “wasted.” Well, the cynics are wrong; they’re thinking too small. For perhaps the first time in US history, every penny of a multi-billion dollar appropriation is earmarked for theft. The reason we mention the Soviet Union is that the entire empire got stolen when it was taken private, and we may very well be topping the dollar value of those stolen assets with the $750 billion theft underway as we speak; it’s almost certain we will by the time the bailout ends, a few years and a few trillion dollars from now. Continue reading The single biggest bit of graft since the Soviet Union was sold It’s been a month now since I stopped smoking. While I insist on preserving the option of becoming insufferable about it, I haven’t exercised it yet. My motivation for quitting was aggravation and cost. I still enjoyed smoking, and presume that I would now if I started again; the problem was that I couldn’t . . . → Read More: The smoking lamp is now extinguished I have lived in Los Angeles for a very short time, most of that in Santa Monica, which likes to think it isn’t LA. In that short time, I have not actually learned to love LA, partly because I haven’t seen that much of it and partly because in almost every respect, Southern California . . . → Read More: Things I love about Los Angeles The press are beginning to notice that they didn’t notice the flames lapping at the financial nation’s ankles these past several years. This is something of a ritual; and a bit of a peculiar one at that, since newspapers have always been much better at reporting what has already happened than what is about . . . → Read More: No one knew the crash was coming except the people who knew Speaking of the Junior League … it may well be the downturn in shopping by consumers whose ears are bleeding from the din of credit card creditors calling night and day that turns what is now termed a “steep recession” into something that everyone can recognize for what it is, which would be a . . . → Read More: It was the failure to shop that made the Great Depression great A Bridge of Years, by Robert Charles Wilson Science fiction, almost by definition, takes place in the realm of the odd, using any number of tricks and speculations with the setting. And it’s enjoyable enough, but it’s only part of the story. Action stories and geeky masturbation have given the genre a certain reputation, but it’s a great vehicle to look at people too. Robert Charles Wilson and Lucius Shepard are two authors that will take science fictional props and use them as tools to delve into the sensitive realm of spirit, telling astute human dramas rather than just blowing stuff up with ray guns. Wilson is one of my favorites: he can consistently put human nature up against a vast weird universe and make me come out caring. Shepard’s no slouch here either, but in Life During Wartime it’s as if he couldn’t decide to go with science fiction or magic realism, short fiction or long, and the choices didn’t quite work out. We can put Watchmen (soon to be a major motion picture!) under this umbrella too: it similarly brings comic book fantasy down to a realisitic human scale, and is the poster child for comics as literature. If superhero realism has been done to death since, Watchmen is still one of the first, and maybe the best. Continue reading Realism in the Fantastic – More Book Reviews It’s a story that would easily fit on these pages, so I won’t call it long, just private. The conclusion to it is me making a CD for someone I met through the Junior League of Los Angeles. If you know me, and you know the Junior League, you will know as well how . . . → Read More: In which we make a list of situationally perfect tunes (Junior League edition) I’ve been browsing the somewhat peculiar music collection at the main branch of the Santa Monica public library. I’ve come to trust, more or less, the music buyer’s taste in popular music, but have noted a number of quirks, a la the Girls. There’s a group called the Beta Band which is represented by . . . → Read More: Six Indigo Girls titles and no Velvet Underground? That’s fishy. |
|
||
|
Copyright © 2012 BTC News: If It Says ‘News,’ It Must Be True - All Rights Reserved |
|||
