Monthly Archives: January 2009
How to rescind a bonus
NYT: “The time to say ‘no bonuses’ has come and gone,” said Brian Foley, an executive compensation consultant in White Plains. “The horse is out of the barn and over the horizon.” Feh. If the administration says OK, then, no more TARP funds for you, the offending institutions will quickly find ways to claw those [...]
There oughta be a law
NYT: “When not paid by the hour, lawyers’ approach to their work changes….”
“Mortgaging our children’s future”
is a bad idea. Think rent. It’s time to retire fire that phrase.
loosenukes.com
Dr. A. Q. Khan has a website? (Demoing a nuclear “football.”) See also: “Protecting sources and methods” and “Rollup,” “Markets in everything.” (SC@NYer)
Pesky dialectics
Dan Froomkin, “Return to the Moral High Ground,” White House Watch, WP (23 Jan ’09): Dana Priest writes in The Washington Post: “President Obama yesterday eliminated the most controversial tools employed by his predecessor against terrorism suspects. With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President [...]
Whiter shade of gray
For decades, NYC’s politics have been twisted like a Moebius strip (i.e., one-sided) around real-estate developers; through every trend, the NYT has indulged in coke-fueled cheerleading binges and breathtaking sins of omission, breezily drifting whichever way the wind blew. Now, in its own words, comes the beginning of endgame of its abject inability to utter [...]
permanentrepublicanmajority.tar.gz
It’s starting to seem like Obama understands very well how to disassemble the GOP’s famously disciplined “noise machine,” which amounted to little—maybe nothing—more than an ad-hoc monopoly on a speaking like a sovereign. Exhibit A: the Murdoch-owned NY Post (Hurt, “Prez Zings GOP Foe in a $timulating Talk,” 23 Jan ’09) tries to find its [...]
Internet you can wrap your fish in
Literally literally: Next up: acid-free papers printed with soy-based inks for kindling fires, lining catboxes, house-training dogs, packing dishes, papier-mâché, &c. See also: “‘I always wished the Times was printed on plexi…”
All quiet on all fronts
Get Your War on… …gives peace a chance ahead of schedule.
Male fantasies
Rush Limbaugh provides a vital comms link to the diving bell USGOP currently plumbing many of the same socio-psychic depths that Klaus Theweleit explored in his brilliant book Male Fantasies (Vol. 1). Spake the blimp: “We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles [...]
Bring on the clowns [updated]
Felix Salmon: John Thain, “the super CEO who worked wonders at both Goldman Sachs and the NYSE—the man whose name was on the shortlist for every financial CEO job in America—is now a national laughingstock.” Could it be that the high-and-mighty poseurs who’ve been lording it over everyone else for the last several years might [...]
Executive summary
On GWB’s last day, the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file lists 2376 lines of disallows, including: Disallow: /911/911day/text Disallow: /911/heroes/text Disallow: /911/messages/text Disallow: /911/patriotism/text Disallow: /911/patriotism2/text Disallow: /911/progress/text Disallow: /911/remembrance/text Disallow: /911/response/text Disallow: /911/sept112002/text Disallow: /911/text Disallow: /homeland/progress/text Disallow: /homeland/stateandlocal/text Disallow: /homeland/states/text Disallow: /homeland/text Disallow: /judicial/text Disallow: /katrina/text Disallow: /liberation/text Disallow: /media/text Disallow: /messages/text Disallow: /national-anthem/text Disallow: [...]
Last days of disco
Exhumed as counterpoint for Murphy+Purdum+Sands, “Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House,” VF (Feb ’09). Leibovitz carries a whiff of Riefenstahl, doesn’t she?
Economy class
(salmon | dealbreaker)
Parliamentary democracy
[Rev. ed. 09-05-21: Seeqpod went bust; you can manually reconstruct this post yourself by finding a recording of Parliament’s “Chocolate City.”] See also: “Away from lands so battered and torn,” “Size matters.”
Turn gray
Scholars and Rogues, “The Gray Lady turns pasty white: Is the financial demise of The Times at hand?” (11 Nov ’08): Consider numbers we can all understand: In 2002, The Times’ stock price hit nearly $53. On Monday, the last line of a Forbes.com story relayed this telling stat: “Shares in the Times company fell [...]
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming
NYT notes our independent judiciary: In the last three months, courts or a tribunal have declared at least 24 detainees at Guantánamo Bay improperly held. Just in time!
Kill me now
Twenty years later, The Lancet informs us that: “Shock therapy”, or rapid mass privatisation, in the former Soviet bloc in the first half of the 1990s was responsible for the early deaths of 1m people. [...] An analysis of the 3m working-age men who died across the former communist countries of eastern Europe suggests at [...]
Bad old days
Rummaging through old audiostream URLs so I could listen to WFMU’s Glen Jones (sexually ambiguous, working-class Jersey faux shock jock—how can you go wrong?), a rotted link results in this unfortunate skeuomorph of a disconnected telephone number.
GWOT ca. 1974
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: The whole thing online for free. (Now Mr. Hollywood, that didn’t hurt so much, did it?) See also: “Minor detail,” “1974est guys in the room” [and “What a diff 24 years makes”].
Minor detail
In his State of the City address, NYC Mayor Bloomberg offers a litany of initiatives to deal with the impact of the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization on NYC. But what about the skyrocketing rents that have been sucking the lifeblood out of the city’s residents? Apparently, only public-housing residents and seniors are affected; [...]
Curse of the Black Stone