The NPR radio show This American life had a special episode on the mortgage and credit crisis that I just listened to while mowing the lawn: The Giant Pool of Money.
Wow, that a great show and it told the entire story of how these sub-prime mortagates got invented and how people up and down the investment chain exploited them. In the end, everyone lost.
You’ll be able to find a free download of it in the iTunes Music Store starting on Monday, May 12th and continuing for the next week.
This is a facinating show and it reminded me of two movies: Wall Street, and, Boiler Room except it is entirely true.
Berman is an expert on delegate selection and he builds models on the microscopic scale of how each district’s delegates will influence the whole.
No matter who you support in this election, this is a fascinating read.
This is another example of how Obama’s experience as a community organizer has helped him build a strong grassroots campaign that cuts across demographics. His wins in small states were meaningful but few understood how, especially the Clinton campaign.
While most of us focus on big picture issues and think they are the sole driving forces in this fascinating election, Obama and his team are working hard to register new voters. Voter registration drives like the ones done by The League of Women Voters are historically used to bring more people into the process which is bipartisan but of course, tends to favor Democratic candidates.
The Obama campaign has more individual donors (over one million) and a higher percentage of them use the web to make their donations, which are relatively small. This another example of grassroots campaigning: going wide rather than deep.
This campaign is setting a new standard and I predict it will become a template for future campaigns, especially when the candidate isn’t a white Christian male.
Fontstruct allows you to build, share, and download finished fonts. The editor looks quite good and there are lots of great fonts in their library to download..
Warren, Connecticut. The cornfield across the road, which hasn’t been plowed under yet, is covered with dandelions. For a weed they’re pretty interesting.
Follow the journey of legendary teacher Robert Cazimero and the only all-male hula school in Hawaii as they celebrate their 30th anniversary and prepare to compete at the world’s largest hula festival. NA KAMALEI: The Men of Hula goes beyond deep-rooted stereotypes of “grass skirt girls” and reveals a story of Hawaiian pride—past and present.
This film blew my mind: the dance, the language, the fact that these guys had to get over all the effeminate body movements and how they bond as a group, a team, a dance troup.
Click “Watch Preview” for a bit of the sound, culture, dance.
Great story. This is a useful feature in Leopard (Back to my Mac) but my friend David had an interesting security issue with it so it ought to be used carefully.
Joseph Hoflehner is an Austrian photographer who does monochromatic images in a square format that are incredible. I’d love to see these images on a larger scale and no doubt they were made with film and the prints are big.
This is a secure digital (SD) memory card than when used in a digial camera with some included software installed on your computer pictures you take will automatically be saved on the computer.
This looks quite interesting although I can’t use it as my DSLR uses compact flash cards. This is maybe even more flexible than tethered shooting with a cable. I’ll be curious if anyone reading this has tried it.
Matt Stuart shows a keen eye and a great sense of humor in his street photography.
In his notes we see that he uses a small Leica camera and what looks like a 28mm or 50mm lens. Eveyrthing is shot with relatively deep focus, simple and clean.
This is an incredible essay, well worth reading for anyone.
The sexist attacks on Clinton are outrageous and deplorable, but there’s reason to be concerned about her becoming the vehicle for a feminist reawakening. For one thing, feminist sympathy for her has begotten an “oppression sweepstakes” in which a number of her prominent supporters, dismayed at her upstaging by Obama, have declared a contest between racial and gender bias and named sexism the greater scourge. This maneuver is not only unhelpful for coalition-building but obstructs understanding of how sexism and racism have played out in this election in different (and interrelated) ways.
Yet what is most troubling–and what has the most serious implications for the feminist movement–is that the Clinton campaign has used her rival’s race against him. In the name of demonstrating her superior “electability,” she and her surrogates have invoked the racist and sexist playbook of the right–in which swaggering macho cowboys are entrusted to defend the country–seeking to define Obama as too black, too foreign, too different to be President at a moment of high anxiety about national security. This subtly but distinctly racialized political strategy did not create the media feeding frenzy around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that is now weighing Obama down, but it has positioned Clinton to take advantage of the opportunities the controversy has presented. And the Clinton campaign’s use of this strategy has many nonwhite and nonmainstream feminists crying foul.
This is an important piece of US history and given our current mess of a government it’s useful to take another look at this.
The types of things the Nixon white house did were terrible: disrupting the political campaigns of their opponents, bugging the national Democratic party headquarters and more.
The things that George W. Bush and his administration have done make Watergate seem like nothing in retrospect. Lying to start a war, torturing people, electronic eavesdropping on all Americans, and running up bills for all of this that stagger the imagination.
Where are Woodward and Bernstein now? Why haven’t a new “Woodward and Bernstein” come forward to shed more light on these things? The Washington Post took a huge risk with the Watergate story and they were right and they changed history. Why isn’t anyone willing to take a risk and change history anymore? Apathy? Corporate controlled media? The country devolving into decadence?
The Watergate story is uplifting. Our current mess is depressing. The media and all of us focus on who is and isn’t wearing a flag lapel pin and not the fact that our government is violating international law, lying, and torturing people.
Frank Rich (NY times) has written an excellent editorial on the double standard in looking at Obama/Wright and McCain/Hagee in: The All-White Elephant in the Room.
OK. You turned 50. You know you’re supposed to get a colonoscopy. But you haven’t. Here are your reasons:
1. You’ve been busy.
2. You don’t have a history of cancer in your family.
3. You haven’t noticed any problems.
4. You don’t want a doctor to stick a tube 17,000 feet up your butt.
Let’s examine these reasons one at a time. No, wait, let’s not. Because you and I both know that the only real reason is No. 4. This is natural. The idea of having another human, even a medical human, becoming deeply involved in what is technically known as your ”behindular zone” gives you the creeping willies.
Bill Moyers introduced his show last night with a great introductory essay on the Jeremiah Wright issue and race in America. I have great respect for this man as he’s not willing to cast this issue in simple terms. It’s a complicated issue and he knows he’s looking at it through the lens of his own race and his own experience.
This is what I like about Obama: not feeding us simple answers to complex questions but treating us like adults able to grapple with nuance.
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