The Blackstone Group pirates an ft.com subscription to the tune of “thousands of articles a day” for six years.
Monthly Archives: January 2009
How to rescind a bonus
under economics, finance, government
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 bonuses back.
There oughta be a law
under 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
under government, law
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 George W. Bush had defined it.... “While Obama says he has no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad, the notion that a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war was halted by executive order in the Oval Office.” [Emphasis added]
If this executive order has any meaning beyond a simple statement of Obama’s preferred approach within a legitimate policy context, then a subsequent president can disagree—and the notion that a president can circumvent long-standing U.S. laws simply by declaring war will be restored by executive order. The solution to this dilemma is to punish those who break the rules in order to steal the game. If Obama doesn’t have the stomach to do so, there’s a simple solution: permanent staycations for Bush admin alumni. The US has outsourced just about everything else—why not outsource justice?
Whiter shade of gray
under architecture, finance, government, media, neighborhood, urban
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 a single meaningful truth on the subject of real estate. Of its proud new 52-story HQ,
the Times Company would sell the 19 floors it currently uses in the building but not the 6 floors it leases to other tenants. The Times Company would continue to occupy and manage its floors and would have the right to buy back the space at a predetermined price when a 10-year lease expires.
See also: “Turn gray,” “Minor detail.”
permanentrepublicanmajority.tar.gz
under media
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 voice—that is, it reads like a third-rate college paper—in its writeup of Obama stepping on Rush Limbaugh. The blimp is a former product of GOP media consultant Roger Ailes, now the head of Fox News—and a Murdoch employee. As Murdoch recognizes that Obama gets this, we’ll see his empire’s “politics” do a 180.
See also: “From the archives,” “How to build your own noise machine at home.”
Internet you can wrap your fish in
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…”
When worlds just barely bump into each other
Encyclopedia Britannica kisses and makes up with “user-generated content.”
(This supposed to be a titanic historic-epistemological battle, but, like many such battles, it turns out to be a policy decision.)
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 ... because his father was black.” I’ve seen Atwaterian arguments that the GOP’s policies are masked mutations of the racism at the heart of the so-called Southern Strategy; that may be so, but social conservatives’ misogyny (think “Slick Willie”) is, shall we say, abysmal. Less interesting than who would win the fight between imaginary women and phantasmic blacks over who’s on top in the infernal imaginings of modern American conservatives is the fact that gender (i.e., women) and race (i.e., blacks) are conflated—and have been for a very long time, if you think about it.
(dkos)
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 be due some disrespect? And not the tawdry kind, where past-due fratboys hidden in the crowd sheepishly bark out some term of abuse. I mean something a bit more saturnalian.
Time to bone up on the Bakhtin, kids.
[Update: Completely unrelated to FT et al. taking an interest in Merrill paying out US$3–4B in, as a BofA spokesbot put it, “year-end incentives” a month early and just days before the BofA “merger.”]
Executive summary
under government, privacy, security, trend
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: /president/fallatwhitehouse/text
On BHO’s first day, the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file is (in toto):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/
See also: “Fox on Pox [updox].”
(kottke)
Last days of disco
under art, government
!["[G W] Bush and his inner circle," vanity fair, 12/2001](http://b1ff.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bush-oral-history-0902-01.jpg)
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?
Parliamentary democracy
under government
[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 59 cents, or 6.3 percent, to $8.73 in mid-afternoon trading...” [emphasis added]
The Times’ suddenly accelerated descent into fiscal disarray has probably irritated Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú. Just two months ago, Mr. Slim bought a 6.4 percent stake of the New York Times Co. at about $14 a share, an investment then worth about $127 million. If he’s still in, he’s lost nearly half his investment.
And, quoting Blodget:
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming
under government, law, military
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 least a third were victims of mass privatisation, which led to widespread unemployment and social disruption. The study adds to a growing body of research in recent years demonstrating how far the economic transition led to widespread suffering through death and physical and mental illness. The research, by David Stuckler and Lawrence King from Cambridge University and Martin McKee from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, takes a specific swipe at the legacy of Jeffrey Sachs, the US economist, who advocated shock therapy at the time. (Jack, “‘Shock Therapy’ Sell-offs Blamed for 1m Deaths,” FT, 15 Jan ’09)
Right on cue, the NYT’s Mustache—in a fit of some sort of U Chicagoized mashup of Freudian pathologies—urges Obama to avoid repeating the past by reenacting it (“Time for (Self) Shock Therapy,” 17 Jan ’09):
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
under economics, finance, government, trend, urban
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; everyone else can, as they have for the last three decades, go f— themselves.