The Giant Pool of Money

It behooves you as a citizen --

-- stop giggling, I'm goddam serious. Citizenship comes with responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is to take time and learn about complicated Very Bad Things we need to deal with as a nation. The financial complicated Bad Thing is the current financial crisis. In an entertaining and marvelously clarifying podcast, Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson explain how this all came to be with the NPR show "The Giant Pool of Money."

Stream it over lunch, or go buy it for a buck on iTunes, dump it in the mp3 player. Get some knowledge while you're commuting to work, or instead of zoning out and surfing for Russian gun girl porn. You'll understand what happened, and even more importantly a.) be able to communicate what happened to your friends and b.) understand when a politician is full of crap when he talks about this particular Very Bad Thing.*


The same guys did a podcast about the recent stock market crash and Credit Default Swaps -- Another Frightening Show About the Economy. It's not up for purchase yet, but you can stream it.

Good citizenship in under an hour. How can you beat that?

Links:

The Giant Pool of Money

Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Their weekly podcast.









* One candidate is, indeed, full of crap, by the way. Blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the financial meltdown is like blaming the dead canary for the mine explosion. They were leading symptoms, not causes.

Air Quotes Are Dangerous Things

Gut reacton: Dude, those are actual living people you're talking about.

Setting aside the atypically far-right stance on abortion he took last night (he usually hedges his bets a bit better) what's kind of interesting here is that odds are, Senator McCain is blind to the emotional connotation of the air quotes. He wanted to highlight the word "health" -- like I just did right there -- banged out the air quotes and those combined with his really, really angry tone last night pushed the delivery into outright scorn.

You can see it happening, too. McCain think he has Obama, (based on a lie, but we'll let that ghost on by) but then Obama's giving one of his grown-up nuanced answers, which in McCain's head is "That sonuvabitch is trying to weasel out of the question like he always does and no one's going to notice-why-doesn't-anyone-notice-GAAARRGHHHH".

McCain monomaniacally goes after what he feels is the "weasel" part of Obama's argument, completely ignoring what the "weasel" part of the means to people in the sense of the larger argument.

Unfortunately, that part of the argument is the one that keeps a woman from dying in the delivery room against her will. Whoops.

And -- as is often ignored -- from a man's point of view: that part of the argument is the one that keeps your wife from dying in the delivery room because some asshole said she had to. Big fucking whoops.

According to a Time poll, "Health of the mother" along with exceptions for rape or incest victims jumps support for abortion rights from 46% to 86%. "Health of the mother" is one of the few terms which punches an empathic hole right through the walls of the abortion factions, because, well, see above.

Again, I don't actually believe McCain is openly scornful of the "health of the mother" in this issue, but his anger towards Obama made him seem so. It's fascinating -- in fiction we often create characters undone by a single, glaring flaw, for illustrative purposes. But here in the real world, we can see that every problem John McCain had in his presidential campaign was created by his lack of impulse control. A life, a character literally unravelled by his own anger.

I Only Learned One Thing From That Debate ...

... man, do I want to play poker against Senator McCain.

He's got a poker face like Mummenschanz.






(Mandatory bit credit: "Poker face like Mummenschanz" originated by DJ McCarthey, in reference to Ricky Bronson's gambling skills)

THIS is Why I'm Not Answering Your Goddam Phone Calls

The script for Episode #113 was completed this morning at roughly 8 am. Two episodes written in two weeks, without a staff.

And yes, that is Scotch. And no, I don't have a problem. I waited until 10 am.

Truth Invaders Web Game

A friend of mine, Jeremy Bernstein, is a writer/game designer living in LA; he's done some work in political games in the past with the aptly, if unimaginatively, named Redistricting Game (www.redistrictinggame.org). Now he's put together a game targeting all the dirty, dirty lies being spewed out of the presidential campaigns.

I'm fascinated by this stuff, because I'm always a little puzzled why we don't use the addictive nature of gaming more as part of an educational technique.

The game is called Truth Invaders, www.truthinvaders.com. If you enjoy it, let people know, 'cause this kind of thing is all the publicity it's gonna get.

And so we keep it participatory -- in the Comments, favorite computer/console game of the moment. Bonus points for obscurity or age.

QUARANTINE

Oh, so thaaaaat's what Cloverfield was trying to do.

It's been a damn long time since I've been in a packed theater where people screamed their asses off and cheered/fist-pumped/went NUTS when the survivors fought back. There was a moment, before the film began, when I dreaded the pack of teenage girls in front of me, and how they would destroy my moviegoing experience. The texting, the chatting ...

They maybe stopped crying in the parking lot. Maybe.

Pure pulp, and wonderfully made. You actually gave a damn what happened to these characters. Pipe was laid quite effectively, and there's a moment near the end where you think they're going to use the hoariest of movie tropes to get some information across, and they utterly subvert it.

Nice job, Dowdle Bothers.

Movie homepage here.

IP Piracy Economics

Via Ezra Klein, an interesting bit of research on the numbers behind the economic damage created by IP piracy. Or lack of same.

"The plural of anecdote is not ..."

Anime Bleg

A buddy's 15 year old niece has had her interest piqued by anime, and he's dinged me as a source. Although I have a few recommendations, I open the floor to recommendations of age-appropriate anime. Apparently, fantasy genre elements are a plus.

I am doing this on my blog, because walking into my local video store and saying "I'd like to buy some anime for a fifteen year old girl," is just not going to end well.

And A Magnum of Champagne for My New Friend Trixie

I'd been head down in the season finale script for the last few days, so I'd missed this. From Ezra Klein, noting National Review editor -- that's the editor -- Rich Lowry:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

Modern American Conservatives have sunk to the intellectual and emotional level of the guy who thinks the stripper really likes him.

Palin terrifies me. She is Warren Ellis' Smiler, in a way Bush never was. I cannot sense any core beliefs except ... well except nothing. All I can see is the winking, giggling folksy void. They tell her to spew some bullshit, and she salutes smartly and sells the hell out of it. Asked to go forth and spread old canards about Senator Obama being a "friend of terrorists", something she never seemed to show any interest in before, she does so not just efficiently but with a perky glee. The proper human response, when asked to say things like this about a political opponent and Senator of the United States is so fundamentally "fuck no" that it is the unheard test question immediately following "You're in the desert, you see a tortoise lying on its back, struggling, and you're not helping -- why is that?"

There's no shame, no consideration, no apparent native curiousity ... but even more creepily no resentment at being treated like a prop, no chafing at her handlers assuming she'll say absolutely anything they put in front of her. How can a human exist so fueled by hubris but without an ego? My lizard brain is screaming.

I understand how people can differ on tax policy, the proper balance between military action and diplomacy in world affairs, national health care, regulation ... but we must draw the line somewhere. Without some basic, fundamental standard of reality, even arbitraily selected, a man cannot walk the earth.

Now those people who are voting against Obama, or even for McCain and pretend to themselves that Palin isn't relevant, I kind of get that, and can respect it. But entertaining the idea that Governor Palin is either remotely qualifed or intellectually suited to be President requires an indulgence that in this complicated and dangerous world, we cannot as a society allow. It has crossed to an active harm, like peeing in the village water supply.







(Note for the metaphor impaired: I am not being sexist and saying Plain is a stripper. I'm saying Lowry is the kind of idiot who believes the stripper really likes him. If you feel that reflects poorly on strippers, go ask one,)

Ninja Cat

Long day at work, plus the fact Sarah Palin is considered for any office higher than Applebees Evening Hostess is depressing the hell out of me. Here,go "awww" and pretend it'll all be okay.



And just because I admire their ninja capitalist moxie: