Posts Tagged ‘law’
Four More
* So the claim is that the top-notch sociology students of America are unfamiliar with (and probably not of) the urban poor and they will learn empathy and be introduced to poor people through a made-up TV program. That seems a little broken.
* Some modest proposals for Arizona lawmakers.
* At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time. Did you hear about the plot to rig global interest rates? The $137 million fine for bilking needy schools and cities? The ingenious plan to suck multiple fees out of the unemployment checks of jobless workers? Take your eyes off them for 10 seconds and guaranteed, they’ll be into some shit again: This bank is like the world’s worst-behaved teenager, taking your car and running over kittens and fire hydrants on the way to Vegas for the weekend, maxing out your credit cards in the three days you spend at your aunt’s funeral. They’re out of control, yet they’ll never do time or go out of business, because the government remains creepily committed to their survival, like overindulgent parents who refuse to believe their 40-year-old live-at-home son could possibly be responsible for those dead hookers in the backyard.
* And a brief history of female away team members: Redskirts.
This Was Monday
* All these worlds are yours, except Kepler 10-b. Attempt no landings there.
* Autonomous organization: In urban N.J. areas, few residents disrespect unwritten rule of reserving snow-cleared parking spots.
* Matt Taibbi gets introspective.
For my part, as a member of the political media, and a vitriol-spewing one at that, the Tucson shooting immediately made me ask myself the question: do I personally do anything to add to this obvious problem of a hypercharged, rhetorically overheated political atmosphere? And the unfortunate answer I came up with was, maybe. I’ve always told myself that what I do is different from what someone like Rush does, because I don’t target classes of people and try not to exempt anyone (even myself) from criticism, or favor either party.
I’ve also counted on the belief that anyone who’s willing to devote the mental energy to even follow whatever wild rhetoric I’m using is probably also smart enough to tell the difference between reality and hyperbole. I also hope that anyone reading my articles will get the underlying message that I’m pretty sure — I hope I’m sure, anyway — I’m conveying at all times, i.e. that violence is irresponsible, that we should use our brains instead of baseball bats to solve problems, etc.
But while I tell myself all these things, I also know that I would never talk to my wife or my mother the way I talk to Lloyd Blankfein. Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner.
To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.
* The University of California Student Association responds to news of an additional half-billion dollars in cuts to education in California.
* Short film of the night: “Three Minutes.”
* Infographic of the night: Dexter’s victims.
Select Links While I’m Away (Part 1)
* The team behind Logicomix explains structuralism.
* It really does look like health care will pass. The CBO score is good. The left is (mostly) happy again. The votes are (mostly) there. Insurance companies keep turning out to be totally terrible. Rahm is stretching for his totally undeserved victory lap. Alterman says Kucinich gets a victory lap too. Steve Benen thinks we all get one. Hooray!
* Obama Economic Team Outlook Presumes No Job Growth For All of 2010. Yes, we … oh, forget it.
* 1st Lt. Dan Choi arrested after chaining himself to the White House fence in DADT protest.
* Shrinking Detroit Back to Greatness.
* A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving. Wow. More here.
* More March Madness: America’s Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tournament.
* NC-Sen: Richard “Dick” Burr still leads his opponents but remains under 50%. This is winnable.
* The Hobbit begins filming in June.
* Viacom is suing Google for hosting videos it uploaded to Google. (via and via) Related: When Wells Fargo sued itself.
* Please be advised Avatar is the work of the devil.
* Okay, fine, one more. That’s what Bea said.
Saturday!
* io9’s 20 best science fiction books of the 2000s. I say any list missing The Years of Rice and Salt, Accelerando, *and* Cloud Atlas is pretty deeply suspect.
* A federal judge has halted implementation of the ban on funding for ACORN on the grounds that the law is a bill of attainder.
* “Those scores on the prestigious test are in the same range as would be expected from children who never attended school and simply guessed at the answers,” said Robert Bobb, emergency financial manager of Detroit Public Schools, during a press conference Tuesday.
* David Rakoff’s oral history of the Gore presidency. A nice idea whose execution is marred by some badly forced jokes and a total inability to write like Jon Stewart, Josh Marshall, or anybody else.
* And the Morning News has your photos of abandoned shopping malls.
Monday Night 2
Monday night 2!
* 61 Essential Postmodern Reads: An Annotated List. (Absalom, Absalom!? Hamlet? Really?)
* Nature’s right to exist comes to Shapleigh, Maine. Via MeFi.
* The Harvard Crimson reports that Henry Louis Gates was apparently arrested yesterday for trying to break into his own home. Post-racial America is awesome. (via SEK)
* Also from SEK: scientific proof Powerpoint sucks.
* Inside Blackwater, the corporation so evil they forgot to give it a non-evil name.
Friday!
Friday.
* How to score 1830 points in a single turn of Scrabble.
* A recent study has proved scientifically that we’re all dicks.
You might expect that being prompted (primed) to think of yourself as a good person would make you more altruistic or moral — but, in fact, the exact opposite appears to be the case. Primed to think about what a good person you are, your most likely reaction is to think you’ve paid your morality dues and go on about your business.
* Universities during the meltdown.
Since most American colleges have an endowment less than 1 percent the size of Harvard’s, most do not have Harvard’s problem. But they have other problems. The sources of income on which they depend—tuition revenue (at private colleges) and state appropriations (at public colleges), as well as annual alumni contributions (at both)—are under pressure too. Everyone knows about the competitive frenzy to get into a few highly ranked colleges, but in fact most of the 1,500 private colleges in the United States do not attract significantly more applicants than they can enroll. On the contrary, they struggle to meet enrollment targets, especially now that families in economic distress are turning to public institutions, which tend to be cheaper.[2]
* Glenn Greenwald’s three laws of actually existing media bias.
(1) Any policy that Beltway elites dislike is demonized as coming from “the Left” or — in this case (following Karl Rove) — the “hard Left.”
(2) Nobody is more opposed to transparency and disclosure of government secrets than establishment “journalists.”
(3) The single most sacred Beltway belief is that elites are exempt from the rule of law.
Going After AIG
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is apparently going after the AIG bonuses. He’s already got some details on who got paid:
The highest bonus was $6.4 million, and six other employees received more than $4 million, according to Mr. Cuomo. Fifteen other people received bonuses of more than $2 million, and 51 people received bonuses between $1 million and $2 million, Mr. Cuomo said. Eleven of those who received “retention” bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at A.I.G., including one who received $4.6 million, he said.
Meanwhile, Josh Marshall has been looking into various claims that failure to pay the bonuses could constitute a “default event” under the ISDA Master Agreement that would trigger AIG’s trillion-dollar liabilities immediately. Sounds as if that’s not probably not the case, though Geithner may have been fooled. (Or “fooled.”)
When are these people going to jail?