eszter balint. . .
r.i.p. dani baquet-long
just started listening to celer a couple months ago, sad to see her go so soon and unexpectedly
from disquiet.
best lately
the bewilderment EP by entia non and sophie walder on resting bell is one of my favorites lately
i’ve gained respect for him over the years, or more respect, i should say — his wry, distanced glare was as transfixing as it was offputting, and who could forget him in lolita or north by northwest or journey to the center of the earth, for that matter. inexplicably i have yet to see odd man out, the role lauded in christopher sandford’s bright lights film journal piece, which i thought was delightful
He has a quiet and emphatic presence here, made all the more compelling by Peter Sellers’ characteristically over-the-top turn as Quilty: it’s like watching Calvin Coolidge interact with Jim Carrey, if such a billing could ever be brought off. I know at least one elderly Englishwoman of irreproachable probity who would literally sag at the knees at the sound of Mason’s voice, that rich, full-bodied instrument that always gave one the impression that he took it out and let it marinate in a cask of port in between films. Pulling off this kind of eye-of-the-storm performance isn’t as easy as it sounds. The obvious trap would be to make Mason’s character in Lolita a sort of winking, in-on-the-joke letch like Michael Caine’s Alfie. Instead, we get someone who’s as much a victim as, in her own way, the 12-year-old jailbait is. You feel for him as much as you do for her: more so, quite possibly, toward the end. The scenes between Mason and Sue Lyon, 37 years his junior, are warm and skillful — offhand, I can’t think of another actor, not excluding Jeremy Irons in the remake, who could have pulled it off.
and if you get a chance to see a touch of larceny, do so.
never knew he was a counscientious objector in WWII.
interesting crop circles
taibbi on goldman sacks
thet’s not a mis-type, and I haven’t read this whole thing yet, but I’ll bet you’ll want to:
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain – an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere – high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth – pure profit for rich individuals.
and look here to learn about brokered deposits.
it’s really time to admit these markets are looting the world economy, isn’t it?
palinesque
here’s the vanity fair piece accompanying Empress Sarah’s er surprise pronouncement today — and the hubbub the article stirred up
A year ago, 80 percent of Alaskans viewed Palin very favorably or somewhat favorably; by this spring, just 55 percent had a positive opinion. All this has given rise to speculation in Alaska that Palin may not run for re-election next year. She does not have to declare her candidacy until June 2010. Most politicians of both parties in Alaska with whom I spoke assume she could win, though not as persuasively as she did in 2006, which would hardly help her standing in a 2012 presidential campaign. Though Palin’s spokeswoman has said she does not intend to challenge Senator Lisa Murkowski, the former governor’s daughter, who is also up for re-election next year, Palin has changed her mind without warning in the past, and becoming a senator would keep her in the national spotlight. Surveying the landscape of political and policy troubles in Alaska, Gregg Erickson, an independent economic consultant in Juneau, concludes, “Everything she’s doing seems to be saying that there’ll be a problem in the future owing to her inattention, but she won’t be here to deal with it.”
indeed.
maybe the article helped inspire the pronouncement.
anywho, all hail the empress!
bring the havoc, baby!
on health care
As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one.
Often I’ll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner’s nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one’s merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems.
Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.
the second link originated at boing boing, but the Denver Post link was infected, apparently.
Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.
The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
[Joseph Stiglitz] via [boing boing]
A new research brief from Kai Filion at the Economic Policy Institute highlights the stimulative impact of raising the minimum wage. Back in 2007, Congress obliged President Bush to sign a long-delayed minimum wage increase into law by attaching it to a must-pass war appropriations measure. After ten years in which the value of the minimum wage was continuously eroded by inflation, Congress raised the minimum from $5.15 to $5.85 an hour in 2007. In 2008, it went up to $6.55. Next month, it’s headed up to $7.25. And the economy is benefiting. So far, minimum wage increases have generated $4.9 billion in spending according to Filion, while the next increase will produce $5.5 billion in additional spending. As Filion succinctly explains “by increasing workers’ take-home pay, families gain both financial security and an increased ability to purchase goods and services, thus creating jobs for other Americans.”
The issue brief also takes on the most familiar minimum wage misconception – that raising pay inherently means increasing unemployment. Surveying a bevy of recent studies that have failed to detect significant increases in unemployment when the minimum wage rises, the issue brief considers factors like improved productivity, better employee retention and the stimulative effect of increased spending which may help explain why, in practice, jobs don’t disappear when low pay gets a mandatory boost.
[link]
you want people to spend money, give them some to spend.
advanced economics.
