Wise sayings

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If you must take drugs while having sex, use Ritalin.

Three times seven

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One minute ago, a little googoo turned 21.

As seen on Atrios

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This past week I read this widely discussed AIGFP resignation letter, published on the New York Times Op/Ed page, penned by some millionaire girly man named Jake DeSantis who thinks the world owes him a living. Maybe you did too.

Today Atrios linked to this commentary regarding Mr. Former AIGFP Executive Vice President DeSantis, penned by Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. It's a little long but worth a full read by anyone like me who needs help interpreting the meaning of atrocities committed by the free-lunch anarchists who have infested the corpse of our civil society for 30 years.

I don't have anything against the Times publishing the DeSantis letter --- just the opposite, in fact. But if they hired Taibbi to the editorial board I'd probably check the site once a week.

This burns-up me!

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This is an abominable idea, as well explained by this guy.

OK, the 2000 Three Stooges biopic was one thing. I don't know if it was any good, but I'd probably watch it. The intent of a biopic (other than to profit from the production) is at least to pay tribute to the subjects, and possibly to give modern audiences some insight into their sense of Duty and Humanity. But the idea of "recreating" the Three Stooges is so lame that not even Joe Besser would buy in, even if threatened with having shit slapped out of him by Kenneth MacDonald or being breathed on by a guy wearing a gorilla suit.

For starters, who is supposed to be the target market for a reinvention of the Stooge "franchise" --- Stooge fans?!? Every one of us will stay away and will warn everyone we know to do the same. The project is pre-moiderized in terms of profit potential.

Second, there is no way to duplicate the Stooge pace in a feature film format --- it's been tried and it failed every time. The world has enough Three Stooges feature films, such as The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. The Stooges' tautly plotted (or unplotted) action-packed scripts won't work in long form. Predictably, the one halfway decent idea the film developers toyed with --- packaging the film as four separate shorts --- was discarded: the script will now be "streamlined into a single narrative".

Third, it will be too violent and vulgar. Studio suits and focus groups will see to that. The Stooges were violent and vulgar, of course, but not too violent and vulgar. They produced family entertainment, at least for junior and pop if not necessarily for mom and sis.

Fourth, Hollywood will surely go all out with grotesque digital special effects in the upcoming 2010 atrocity, which will completely disrespect the craftsmanship that went into compiling the encyclopedia of hilarious analog special effects that the original Stooge crew developed using only basics such as invisible wires, dummies, fast-motion effects. The same goes for all those lovely, full-bodied audio slaps, cracks, thuds, glug-glugs, bonks, rusty hardware squeaks, nails being extracted from the skull or buttocks, and so on.

And finally, even assuming that Benicio del Toro (?!?), Sean Penn, and Jim Carrey (!!!) might be able to impersonate Moe, Larry, and Curly effectively, there is no way to recreate the contributions of the 4th -- nth stooges. I'm not talking about Shemp and his successors, but all the rest of the recurring cast, including Vernon Dent, Bud Jamison, Dudley Dickerson, Duke York, Christine McIntyre (the niece really was nice!), Emil Sitka, and the ever-renewable posse of dowager ladies and the gum-snapping vamps in shoulder pads.

So, even though I regret saying so, I sincerely hope this ill-advised Stooge-denigrating project by Peter and Bobby Farrelly (whoever the fuck they are) is plagued from start to finish by The Curse of King Rootin Tootin. I have a tapeworm and it's not even good enough for him!

That's some opinionifying

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I'm happy to beat a properly selected dead horse if it might help to tenderize the carcass for other critters to pick apart and digest. But I'm even happier when high-visibility media critics take center stage with their hobnailed boots.

Todd Gitlin at TPMCafe laughs at two puffinating "Timesmen" who, offended by President Obama's lack of deference toward their employer at the press conference last night, characterize him as some sort of "professor" boring the nation with his thoughtful answers to the media's ignorant questions.

Then this evening I discover that Jamison Foser of Media Matters scooped Gitlin by a whole 12 minutes. Apparently another "Timesman" also published some comments he intended to be withering about "Professor Barack Obama" (emphasis by the commentator) this morning. But it was a different guy, and a different Times: Andrew Malcolm of The Los Angeles Times. Now, Andrew Malcolm isn't just any full-of-shit corporate pundit --- his previous job was serving as Laura Bush's press secretary.

Corporate newspapers are like 21st century investment banks: hollow assets. We know what's keeping the banks alive, but it's a mystery to me what is keeping the newspapers alive.

The sickening collapse of professional journalism

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In a comment on my previous post, the prolific contributor "Anonymous" raised a point that I consider central to any understanding of our current (i.e., since 1979) epoch: the utter failure of professional journalism to do its job. I've had a hard time writing clearly and concisely about this topic due to the enormity of the development, which unfolded before my eyes at the same time I was learning and practicing the fundamentals of journalism as a simple country editor and, later, a graduate journalism student.

The failure of professional journalism has been even more pernicious than the plague of Reaganomics and modern Republicanism --- even though it is largely a product of same. A robust, independent journalism sector could have informed (and outraged) the public about the rapid and unprecedented "acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex." But didn't. It still doesn't. Journalism failed all of us by becoming part of the problem. Professional, independent journalism is central to the nation's ability to self-govern because it is supposed to "have our backs" and sound an early warning to massive abuses of political and economic power. I think this idea was in Jefferson's mind when he wrote:

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

I am revisiting the issue this afternoon after reading this column, As Seen On Eschaton, in which Washington Post reporter Chris Mooney does a gentlemanly job of laying into George Will's global warming denial nonsense as a vehicle for a valuable, concise critique professional journalism. Mooney politely chastises his profession for failing to applying sufficient critical rigor in analyzing the pseudo-scientific claims of ideological bullshit artists who run political and media interference for entrenched interests. Hooray for Mooney!

Last post on AIGFP

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People with more expertise and better analytical skills than me have gotten to the heart of the AIGFP Bonus Baby Affair, as I understand it, much more directly than I was able to. So this will be my last word on the AIGFP bonuses, at least for this week.

My concern about a retroactive targeted tax on the unethical bonuses, such as the one passed in the House today, would be its constitutionality. According to this authority, a Harvard law professor named Laurence Tribe, a tax of this sort could be crafted to comply with the Constitution. However, the first and only commenter on the Atlantic article in which Tribe is quoted suggests some chilling hypotheticals that could emerge from such a legal precedent, causing me to rethink my position on the Bonus Baby tax.

So here's an alternative approach I'd like to see, which differs somewhat from my previous suggestion. I'd like to hear President Obama say something along the lines of "OK, ya know, fuck it --- keep your bonuses. You're gonna need every cent of them when we turn the Justice Department, the SEC, and the FBI loose on your asses to fine out exactly what you've been up to for the past 10 years. And Geithner, Summers: clean out your desks by close of business tomorrow and return your keys to the four huge Secret Service brothers who will escort you to the parking lot."

Nothing will change until RICO Act investigations are initiated and the institutions of our Reaganomics-based phony economy are dismantled with extreme prejudice, brick by brick. At the moment, the count on Obama appears to be 0-2, and he's already fouled off a few. I really hope he's just presenting the illusion of impotence to fake us all out, just for dramatic effect before he pounds one out of the park.

Update before I'm done writing: OK, statements like this "Geithner is doing an outstanding job" shit from Obama on Jay Leno tonight are making me nervous. Fouled another one off; count remains at 0-2....

Drop in a bucket

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LuMac wonders aloud (email-wise, at least):

I... wonder what this relatively little (dollar wise, not symbolic wise) spat is distracting us from.

He is referring to the "mounting populist backlash" about the AIGFP retention bonuses that were given to executives after they had already bolted from the organization. I take his point, but I don't think the dollar amount of this corporate stunt-looting exhibition is relevant, and likewise I don't think it will really distract us from issues that schmucks like this want us distracted from.

First point: I agree that the dollar amount of the bonuses is trivial when compared with a trillion dollars or two. But in the case of a bankruptcy, a broken contract, a burglary, shoplifting --- whatever --- the law doesn't make many distinctions in how the loser or the guilty party is treated based on the amount of property involved. There are distinctions between "petty" and "grand", and undoubtedly some other ones I'm not aware of, but I find it unlikely that the courts are often admonished to look the other way because the value of property involved is trivial. No: these Bonus Babies are in fact being awarded mindblowing amounts of money for a highly visible and destructive failure in competence and ethics. If we're going to make financial comparisons, these bonuses amount to 10, 20, or more years of income even for a family earning $100,000 annually. The idea that the Bonus Babies are contractually entitled to these awards should be declared officially ludicrous by AIG shareholders and all parties who hold effectively void AIG contracts or the worthless "investment products" created by AIGFP. It is highly unlikely that the IRS, the Justice Department, the SEC, etc., could not find a large handful of airtight legal reasons to "abrogate" the AIGFP performance and retention bonuses; all they need are some facts and figures to wave in front of a few warty, sweating bankers sitting on card table chairs under bright lights.

Everybody knows that the most spectacular robbery of all times is unfolding in front of us. The U.S. Treasury is being looted by people who have mounds of money and influence that they simply assume they will get their way in the end. And why not? It now appears that people in Obama's Treasury Department and the Senate are complicit in granting these toads whatever wish is their command.

This kind of thing has been happening for decades, but somehow it has never initiated a critical mass of public fury. Mike Milken became the first superstar performance artist of financial fraud during the '80s, and the son of a sitting vice president --- Neil Bush --- was up to his eyeballs in the savings and loan collapse in the late 1980s. Financial crime sprees have been swept under the rug for 30 years, and I never sensed significant public outrage about it. But never has the pure cause-and-effect of it been this naked, and never has the economic collateral damage aproached these levels (with more to come, surely). One hopeful sign, to me at least, is that even the corporate media may be losing its ability to obscure these facts now, possibly because there are legions of unemployed, underemployed, and just plain scared and angry people who have ample time to watch Stewart and Colbert every night, and are motivated to make noise about it.

Second point: I don't believe that Bonusgate (let me be the first to use the term, thank you very much) is going to distract many of the key stakeholders in the U.S. economy for very long. I don't remember a more unstable political or legal situation since the Watergate era. The current epoch differs from 1973 because there is a large, educated, highly motivated segment of the population with powerful research and communication tools. The public was never in such a strong position to pressure both their elected officials and, even more importantly in my opinion, the corporate press. Information wants to be free: if the media don't release it to the public, then it will find its way to us (and eventually the media) via independent web-based journalists and bloggers. And I don't mean bloggers like me --- I mean bloggers who are working economists, attorneys, IT specialists, and reporters.

The sanctity of contracts [updated]

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Today on All Things Considered I heard some New York Times reporter named "Andrew Ross Sorkin" try packaging a lame apologia for criminally incompetent executives as good old American contrarian horse-sense. His point seems to be that the government can't just "rip up contracts" because we have laws, and therefore AIGFP retention bonuses (for example) "must" be paid if we (we-who, he didn't say) are to retain the fabric of trust in society. Or something.

To her credit, ATC co-host Melissa Block quizzed this fool about the difference between ripping up AIGFP executive bonus contracts and ripping up union contracts as part of the in-progress auto industry bailout. But I wish she would have told him that nobody is literally expecting the government to "rip up contracts." By failing to follow up insistently to question Sorkin's premise, she allowed him to waste 3 minutes of my time in the car that I could have been listening to "Playground Psychotics." Meanwhile, Sorkin explained to all us rubes that "we" really need to keep these AIGFP execs on board because they're the only ones how know how to "unwind" the exotic derivative securities that they conjured. Yes: they need to be paid excessive bonuses in addition to their salaries so they will continue to do the jobs they are contractually obligated to perform.

See, the way I process this in my cinder of a brain, I am convinced that both parties to an emploment contract need to honor said contract. Therefore, before we hear any more horseshit like this from reporter Sorkin, he needs to employ the Google, Nexis and Lexis, his telephone, and his Outlook address book to find out for the American public (who is an 80 percent majority shareholder in AIG) whether the AIGFP bonus recipients did in fact fulfill the terms of their contract. If he's too frightened, lazy, or unskilled to do that, then he could at least check TPM a few times a day to keep up with the facts of the story... just for appearances.

When it's time to unwind" the AIGFP mystery securities portfolio for real, we AIG majority shareholders won't need to pamper and coax reporter Sorkin's smarmy MBA pals to do that job. We will go to the real experts: auditors, bank examiners, criminal investigators, and federal prosecutors.

Update: that cute little Ezra Klein addressed a similar topic today, referencing Sorkin's NYT column as source material. There's a bit of ambiguity in his point, however, possibly due to the lack of vetting his text through a simple country editor. To make up for the ambiguity, there are a number of interesting remarks in the comments thread below the post. No, we can't confiscate money from a small, specific group of people without any valid legal framework. Yes, there are many possible ways to approach the quashing of the AIGFP bonuses, such as legislation about executive bonuses working in corporations that have accepted TARP funds or giving AIG a friendly reminder that they're fucking bankrupt and must settle up with a long line of customers and shareholders before making good on contracts that rewarded gross mismanagement or worse. One commenter suggests freezing the accounts out of which executive bonuses are to be paid pending the outcome of a fraud investigation; I like that one.

How to pay AIGFP bonuses and live happily ever after

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I wish I could take credit for the following brilliance, but in fact it came from one Lucious MacAdoo or someone very much like him.

We're told that AIG Financial Products (AIGFP) is contractually obligated to pay almost half a billion dollars in bonuses to AIGFP execs and other "key personnel", and that there is nothing Uncle Sam can do about it even though the U.S. Treasury owns 80 percent of the corporation's necrotic corpus. Josh Marshall took aim at that concept today with bullshit detector blazing. Meanwhile, NPR dutifully spent the day explaining to us rubes that not even the federal government can force a corporation to "abrogate" a contract. (Inexplicably, NPR did not tell us why it's possible for a corporation to abrogate its contracts with unions and pensioners.)

Enter Lucious with a fine idea, possibly overheard from his own id: force the AIGFP execs to accept their bonuses in the form of the "innovative financial products" they created. In my opinion, this would represent the most elegant solution to any problem ever conceived since the dawn of human history. Think of how easily these wizards could sell their bonus portfolios at huge profits on the unregulated open market for financial derivatives, then spend the proceeds on goods and services crafted by American workers who, early every Saturday morning, spring out of bed and drive to big box stores to purchase massive amounts of swag using credit cards that are readily available with no questions asked.

Snapshot [updated]

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Iron Post, Urbana, Illinois, about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, 11 March 2009. This is the 14-piece Parkland College In Your Ear Big Band, halfway through their first set. Big bands don't tour much because they're expensive and, presumably, don't attract enough revenue to cover decent salaries. The name-brand ones mainly play at festivals and otherwise mostly just stick to recording. Not sure why big band economics worked out OK during the '30s and '40s, but not any more for celebrity acts. But who needs celebrities when you can see a pickup community group open their chops once a month for the low low admission price of $2? These gentlemen and ladies play Basie-esque charts and, every now and then, some '70s-vintage fusion stuff arranged for a big, mostly unplugged group. The band includes veteran schoolteachers, university jazz faculty, regular old college students, a few talented high school kids, and stray community members who have been doing it for years.

In the photo I tried to capture the early spring sunset colors streaming in through the west windows, silhouetting the director while showing the band. But with an iPhone camera there was no hope of that --- it would be a tough exposure to balance manually using any camera without lighting the group from in front. Still, the handsome devil with the vintage silver Chu Berry tenor shows up OK.

And in case you might wonder why they call the place "The Iron Post," I assume it's because there's one in plain view no matter what direction you look in --- usually right in front of your bean.

Update: that's right, I can't count --- 5 reeds + 8 horns + 3 rhythm = 16 pieces. Sheesh....

Wise sayings

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It is highly probable that the Dow Jones Industrial Average will fall by 500 points tomorrow.

Somatic delusions

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From the Mind Hacks blog, here is an excerpt from the case history of a somatic delusion I'd prefer never to experience:

From September, [the patient] felt that “there is another lower jaw with teeth between the real upper jaw and real lower jaw, and there is another tongue between the false lower jaw and the real lower jaw”; “the teeth on the false lower jaw are growing steadily”; “I try to cut the false teeth off with the real teeth, but the false teeth do not stop growing”; “the false teeth melt into holes in the false lower jaw, but later grow again from those holes”; “something like spaghetti is coming into and going out from the holes” and “the false lower jaw rolls up and is coming into the throat.”

Yeesh. The Mind Hacks article indicates that a "somatic delusion" is a persistent distorted perception or awareness of one's own body. Through a brain scan, the patient was found to have reduced blood flow in the parietal lobe, which helps to provide a person's own "body image." The Mind Hacks writeup can be found here.

Diagram of everything (DOE) [updated]

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I'd say almost everything loves a good Theory Of Everything (TOE). I do. I even like a good Theory Of Theories Of Everything, and accordingly have started formulating one. It is inspired by the brilliance of David Deutsch's The Fabric Of Reality. Deutsch, an Oxford physicist, was "the first person to formulate a specifically quantum computational algorithm," but surprisingly and happily to me, his TOE is not anchored solely in physics.

A person's TOE is his or her religion, in a real sense. In fact, the religions I'm familiar with all purport to be TOEs, including atheism. They are explanatory with respect to their own limited vocabularies, and they either "cherry pick" their data to avoid paradoxes or try to resolve the paradoxes without substantively revising the core TOE. Deutsch's thesis departs from the single-principle approach: he believes that homo sapiens have now collectively formulated sufficient knowledge to prepare a very rough draft of a TOE, at least to the extent that we know approximately the theoretical ground it must encompass. Quantum physics (including Everett's many worlds interpretation) seems essential to any truly explanatory TOE, but so are (in Deutch's view) the fields of epistemology, computational theory, and evolutionary theory. My Theory of TOEs is that Deutsch is about right, except that I would consider substituting the term information theory in place of computational theory, because I suspect that the former may sufficiently encompass the latter while also leaving room for due consideration of aspects of consciousness such as memes and psychological archetypes. These last two items, among many others no doubt, should be important if core human phenomena like consciousness and religion are ever to be scientifically understood to any significant degree beyond their superficial mechanisms.

I am not educated or intelligent enough to contribute anything as sweeping as a TOE to the knowledge of the world. But I grow increasingly interested in sketching a Diagram Of Everything --- a DOE. As a Simple Country Editor, I am a generalist who finds it more interesting and useful to try diagramming the universe than to diagram sentences. I also have some smart friends who are good at both humoring me and, more importantly, helping me to test and evolve my DOE. So, to summarize, my Theory Of TOEs is characterized by the core conviction that, as Deutsch believes, a TOE must incorporate great swathes of information from multiple, partially exclusive domains of knowledge. A corollary to that conviction, for me, is that generalists may be in the best position to synthesize knowledge from the semi-separate domains without being distracted by the prejudices of scientific, academic, or philosophical specialization. Therefore, my shot at synthesis will take the form of a DOE, not a TOE. Specialists are as important to drafting a TOE as generalists are --- they are the ones who have to do the heavy lifting after outlier ideas start becoming more plausible in the face of implausible new scientific discoveries that don't fit our current conceits.

The hypothesis that drives the emergence of my DOE is that there are far fewer bright lines in the universe (i.e., multiverse) than we now assume. First and foremost, I am convinced at a deep intuitive level that there is no bright line between living and nonliving matter at any scale. If that hypothesis were testable and found to be verifiable, the implications would be staggering for theories of physics, evolution, and consciousness. The general hypothesis is, of course, not my own original formulation. But there are not currently many members of the scientific community (for understandable reasons) who are extended out on that limb, NSF-grantwise, to investigate StuporMundi's putatively crackpot hypothesis. I actually do not even find that discouraging.

I intend to use this blog to develop my DOE in the form of quanta (i.e., stand-alone tasty morsels) of speculation, cross-referenced to scientific literature. There will be no order to the presentation, but I will try to develop uniform keywords that may in good time be used to unify and edit the emerging diagram. And cheer up: I intend for the posts to be much shorter than this introductory one.

To close for now, for your consideration, here are two tasty morsels:

1. An NYROB review of The Superorganism, coauthored by Edward O. Wilson, in which ant colonies are revealed to have evolved essential aspects of civilization (namely agriculture and ranching) tens of millions of years before Zinjanthropus was even a gleam in his dad's eye. And even more awe-intriguing, the individuals coordinate their activity in a mode that a top-drawer giant like Wilson insists on referring to as a superorganism.

2. A BBC science and nature article on a new paper in the journal Current Biology which provides evidence that a cunning and aggressive chimp at a Swedish zoo has premeditated hundreds of instances of attempted assault and battery on zoo patrons. This unpleasant simian, named Santino, calmly stockpiles rocks before visiting hours, apparently anticipating his need to fling them at zoo visitors later when he knows he'll be all cheesed-off and territorial.

Both of the reviews linked above report findings which feed my conviction that the bright lines drawn by science --- maybe even all of them --- are myopic and smell of false pride. And one of them hints at why I am afraid that the Specialists Of The World (scientific and religious) are trained to stockpile rocks.

Update: I see in the AP version of the BBC chimp article, via this guy's blog, that zoo officials ended up castrating Santino in an effort to thwart his seasonal stone-throwing. The blogger, Mithras, notes his bemusement that "premeditated violence is the hallmark of human-like behavior". Zoo management had better hope that Santino isn't a capable enough planner to jack a chef knife and hunt down the motherfucker who ordered his sexual mutilation.

Wise sayings

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This edition of wise sayings is provided courtesy of Jean N., girl reporter. Take it away, Jean:

Too much sympathy makes everyone weaker.

Breaking!

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StuporMundi has returned to the World Wide Web. Please make a note of it. Thank you for your attention to this matter.