Class

Awesome. Smoke 'em out of their mansions. About fucking time.

Nice speech by the Pres

...but why is there only one ship looking for and attempting to study what constitutes the vast majority of the spill, i.e. the so-called underwater "plume?"

Update: make that plural, 10 miles long by 3 miles wide, underwater plumes. Not that BP finds it "relevant." An oxygen-free ocean looking about the same from a CNN helicopter as an ocean with life in it, after all.

Beyond Propoganda...3.5 million gallons/day

That's Big Government Business for you, cheating when they can't get handouts (more whistle-blower video here), just a bunch of criminally rich crack fiends. Multiply the above by at least two, and that's just if they're telling the truth, all of a sudden. Update: They were not. The reason for delaying release of this video now seems clear: we're talking more than ten times more oil than they claimed, 84,000 barrels a day (not 5,000), or, an Exxon Valdez spill every four days. It's the third week now, with no end in sight.

They've been using unprecedented amounts of untested chemical compound dispersant to make the spill look smaller on the surface, while nobody knows how much is still moving underwater, or where. Such reckless poisoning and dishonesty alone should be cause for criminal charges.

You have to laugh at all these eggheads trying to figure out the real numbers...from this short video clip, which somehow BP alone controls the rest of but just prefers not to share. Doesn't the government have any submarines, with cameras? That's legally our oil...it's certainly our nation's (and the world's) economy and ecosystem that is at stake...How long do we just keep trusting BP to (mis)handle it? Ridiculous.

Before...After

Courtesy of personal customer tribute, here. More detail here.

Halliburton, corporatist par excellence

The cause of this soon-to-be unprecedented tragedy now understood most likely to have been Halliburton, criminal corporate mafia, blood-sucking monolith, evil failure. Apparently that cement has to be mixed with a very specific amount of water in order to cure properly; who would've thought?!

No time like the present for some blind chemical experiments!

"They're talking about using dispersants in the deep water where the oil is coming out that would prevent it from hitting shore, but would actually put it into the water column and possibly force it to the bottom of the ocean," said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network.

"The environmental impact of that is totally unknown. It could end up killing everything at the bottom of the ocean."

Patchwork blocks

The real deal, 3" thick:

from university to corporation...

"This is a corporation...We are not trying to develop student's value systems or go in for that 'expand their minds' bullshit."

bloodwood

One of a dozen recent projects...








Custom-made for a kitchen in California, with double mortise-tenon joinery allowing smaller board to be removable from top (with handle), and sit flush when set. And yes, obviously with a hidden cleat.

For more: GreenRiverWoods.Etsy.com

Reading a little Roland Barthes this morning...

From The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1957-1979), upon going to hear Billy Graham's troup attempt its great "MyCarthyist" "awakening" and "conversion" of "atheist"("Communist") Paris:

Billy Graham makes us wait for him [...] We recognize in this first phase of the ceremony that great sociological recourse of Expectation which Mauss has studied and of which Paris has already had a very up-to-date example in the hypnotism séances of Le Grand Robert. Here, too, the Mage's appearance was postponed as long as possible, and by repeated false starts the public was wrought up to that troubled curiosity which is quite ready to see in fact what it is being made to wait for. Here, from the first minute, Billy Graham is presented as a veritable prophet, into whom we beg the Spirit of God to consent to descend, on this very evening in particular: it is an Inspired Being who will speak, the public is invited to teh spectacle of a possession: we are asked in advance to take Billy Graham's speeches quite literally for divine words.

If God is really speaking through Dr. Graham's mouth, it must be acknowledged that God is quite stupid: the Message stuns us by its platitude, its childishness. In any case, assuredly, God is no longer a Thomist, He shrinks from logic: the Message is constituted by an outburst of discontinuous affirmations, without any kind of link, each of which has no content that is not tautological (God is God). The merest Marist brother, the most academic pastor would figure as decadent intellectuals next to Dr. Graham.[...] Billy Graham's manner breaks with a whole tradition of the sermon, Catholic or Protestant, inherited from ancient culture, a tradition which is that of a requirement to persuade. Western Christianity has always submitted for its exposition to the general context of Aristotelian thought, has always consented to deal with reason, even when accrediting the irrationality of faith. Breaking with centuries of humanism (even if the forms may have been hollow and petrified, the concern for the subjective Other has rarely been absent from Christian didacticism), Dr. Graham brings us a method of magical transformation: he substitutes suggestion for persuasion: the pressure of the delivery, the systematic eviction of any rational content from the proposition, the incessant break of logical links, the verbal repetitions, the grandioloquent designation of the Bible held at arm's length like the universal can opener of a quack peddler, and above all the absence of warmth, the manifest contempt for others, all these operations belong to the classic material of the music-hall hypnotist...(Billy Graham at the Vel' d'Hiv)

Poor tea-baggers...

Blah blah blah. And: haha.

Goldman Sachs is dead

Apparently the "make them eat shit and die" approach to finance just may be illegal. Watch the carnage in real time here. So will Rahm Emanuel have the balls to finally let Eric Holder out of his cage? It's now or never.

Simon Johnson, "Our Pecora Moment:"

We don’t know where and when, but the SEC action points in one direction only: Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman) in the witness box, while John Paulson (unindicted co-conspirator) waits in the on-deck circle.

Either Blankfein knew what was going on – and is therefore liable before the law – or he was clueless and therefore incompetent. Either way, the much vaunted risk management and control systems of Goldman, i.e., what is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening, are exposed to be what we have long here claimed: bunk (as I argued with Gerry Corrigan, former head of the NY Fed and long-time Goldman executive, before the Senate Banking Committee when we both testified on the Volcker Rules in February).

“Too big and complex to manage” is actually the best defense for Goldman’s executives and they should offer to break up the firm into smaller and more transparent pieces as a way to settle the firm’s liability with the SEC. The current management of Goldman – along with the team that ran the firm under Hank Paulson – have destroyed the value of an illustrious franchise. Goldman used to stand for something that customers felt they could trust; now it is just a sophisticated way of ripping them off.

John Paulson obviously knew what he was doing in helping to create the “designed to fail” securities – and the consequences this would have. If he cannot be convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud, then the law in this regard needs to be tightened significantly. (read more)

Update: Genuine populists out there (as opposed to those fringe radical dimwits identifying themselves with the name of a certain gay sex act) who maintain their righteous fury at the criminals in our financial industry (and recognize in decades of corrupt Republican policy the elitist big government corporatism that will never ever begin to resemble the source of any real change), should probably follow this man's advice and make some phone calls now. I did.

, yes.

On Mad Men:

...Mad Men is currently said to be the best and ‘smartest’ show on American TV. We’re doomed.

...The format of the show is to suspend a backstory and subplot from each diminutive stereotype, episode by episode, and sketch some quick pathos around the character to see if it can humanise him or her.

...Whether one finds all of this claustrophobic and ludicrous or tightly wound and compelling depends very heavily on one’s opinion of Don Draper. Draper, as written, is a kind of social savant. He knows how to act in every emergency. He deploys strategic fits of temper to attain his ends. He’s catnip to women. As played by Jon Hamm, though, his manner hardly matches his activities. Hamm looks perpetually wimpy and underslept. His face is powdered and doughy. He lacks command. He is witless. The pose that he’s best at, interestingly, is leaning back in his chair; it ought to be from superiority, but it looks as though he is trying to dodge a blow. Draper is supposed to have a deep secret, but it would make sense only if that secret were his weakness – fearfulness or femininity – instead of the show’s anticlimactic revelation that his mother was a whore and he picked up another man’s identity on the battlefield in Korea: bizarre Gothicisms that belong to some other series. One never sees hunger or anger in Hamm’s eyes, only the misery of the hunted fox. Either he is playing the hero as a schlub in deference to a 21st-century idea of masculinity as fundamentally hollow and sham, or he’s completely underequipped to convey male menace.

The most necessary thing that he can’t do is to justify viscerally why strong women keep falling for him, or why the competitive males in his office accept him as an Alpha. In the classic Hollywood cinema, there was a name for the role Hamm should be playing: the Mug, who seems OK at first but in the end has to give up the girl to Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy (excerpted from the LRB; read the whole thing here).

Without a doubt Mark Greif is one of the best critics writing today in the realm of cultural politics. He does know how to get under the skin of a certain (in my opinion) deserving audience, from which well-intentioned, occasionally complacent and uncritical liberals are certainly not excluded. Unlike some of his more transparently self-serving detractors, his thinking never seems forcibly dressed up or hiding in pedantries, backhanded, or boring. (Those with a less sympathetic politics would of course say just the opposite; they are unconvincing.) He may risk spawning a new class of careerist Bill Buckleys in reaction. I suppose worse things could be happening for our national dialogue (well, and are).

I particularly respect the integrity, intellectual honesty and class of Greif's response to Caleb Crain, regarding Greif's article "On Repressive Sentimentalism" (see the latest issue of n+1, number 9).

Just another woodworker, concerned about the truth of our economy

The "fourteenth banker" speaks out, his name also a reference to this must-read book.

I do like Simon Johnson

His latest, on the essential site for all things marginally progressive but still mainstream acceptable economic: The Baseline Scenario

Dodd in a tough spot

He clearly wants to be *perceived* as doing the right thing, at least...while Ted Kaufman is relentless in showing things as they actually *are*.

(Meanwhile, the GOP remains a bunch of corrupt, unimaginative liars as usual, cf. mealy-mouthed dipshit, Mitch McConnell. How anybody could mistake these violent, idiot-mob-inciting old wrinkled crooks for populists remains a mystery "new" democrats have yet to solve, apparently.)

Finally

Someone from the political class begins to sound like Matt Taibbi, on record, on the Senate floor. The only reason people are not mad as hell about the ongoing Wall Street fraud is because they haven't bothered finding out. Read Matt Taibbi. The more people know the angrier they get. Let's hope the tide is genuinely turning, and the rule of law won't be beaten any further back. Where does the buck stop? Via.

Sometimes, she just stares at the wall...

...Hoping for the sun to glint off her tags.

It all started when we brought home that laser-guided parking system as a toy for the cats.

for sale

The block, not the dog.

Credit where credit is due

John Cassidy has written what may be the one and only puff piece aspiring to respectability on Timothy Giethner that will have ever been historically conceivable.

Appearing as it does sometime before the long-term relentless rise of the real misery index threatens to become unavoidable "news" (if it ever will), but also before the crackhead mentality on Wall Street culminates in another shitstorm of future carbon credit-default swaps or something-else-backed-and-bundled-securities.

The cursory lip wagging Cassidy gives to dissenting views are even more remarkable for being followed by nothing more substantive than the sort of self-certain, vaguely dismissive ideological boiler-plate, generalities and defensive wound licking in the supposed court of public opinion we have come to expect, all while vainly wallowing in the bureaucrats lament of feeling himself fundamentally removed from such concerns, such inevitable collateral, if not realpolitik itself, altogether. In short, Geithner betrays himself as a well-intentioned, self-satisfied ideological conservative at heart. Another moderate Republican, not so much unwilling as developmentally unable to acknowledge, examine and replace the speculative-fed fantasy extortion machine that veneers the grotesque rotting foundation of our financial industry and entire economy. No news there, certainly. At least he doesn't pretend to be something he is not. A real Democrat, for instance.

So the stress tests were actually brilliant and really saved the day despite being so "tough" (8.9% unemployment, anyone?), some won-over speculators now swoon. Huh. One sentence from one article by Matt Taibbi is mentioned in passing, described as unrefined, and no explanation about *how* Goldman actually proves its "capitalized" strength "greater than international competitors" even attempted.

The article does nothing to persuade that Giethner ever was or ever will be the right person to seize what remains the only real political opportunity in half a century (to honestly confront and
change any of the institutionalized injustice, Fed subsidies, F.I. roulette, or for that matter concomitant class war now having all but killed the New Deal)...an historic gift now mostly squandered.

Nationalization might have worked but would have been quite difficult. No shit.

So he "saved" the financial industry (from symptoms of withdrawal, and now it's back to shooting heroin, with our blessing). Big whup. Encouraging higher unemployment and lower quality of life having been essential to the "success" of the F.I. since Reagan's handlers won their war against the unions; what matters most is larger historic context. Other signs of stability and new "growth" are not convincing at best, misleading and dangerously deluded at worst.

I'm sure Giethner's sense of being misunderappreciated is sincere, however comically out of touch and frankly, pathetic, and his actions well-thought-out and well-intentioned. His ideological sense of what's possible or ethically necessary remains thoroughly depressing, and
quite possibly without a future.

a rare political post

Seth Ackerman rightly underwhelmed at Ezra Klein's sense of history:

The Democrats shot their historical wad on health care by re-introducing Bob Dole’s bill from 1994 and justifying it as a free-market solution. How is that a “huge progressive victory”?

Taibbi on the continued reign of credit default swaps: "Jesus..."

James K. Galbraith: In Defense of Deficits

Richard Parker: Athens, The First Domino?

Moreover, unlike Wall Street bankers, Papandreou isn't asking for a bailout (let alone a bonus for himself or senior ministers); what he wants is help stabilizing the market for Greece's bonds. And unlike Wall Street in the fall of 2008, Athens isn't being frozen out of the credit markets; in fact, it is still able to borrow....

But Wall Street speculators have swarmed in, playing Greece, as the Financial Times put it, "like a piñata." The country's tiny bond market–barely a billion euros a day were trading in Athens in January–makes an easy and tempting target for traders with big bats; by attacking Greek bonds, the traders get to play on an increasingly pan-European volatility in bond and currency rates, thereby leveraging a little nation's problems into gigantic trading-floor gains. And thanks to the Obama administration's repeated refusal to limit such activities–despite pleas from our European allies since 2008 to jointly regulate global financial markets–what the traders are doing is legal. In fact, massive immediate trading profits are the means by which banks like Goldman, Citi, JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank are rebuilding their balance sheets without providing the lending the real economies of America and Europe need to begin their recovery....