Weekend Wrapup
Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 10:57AM No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims. Torturing too (outsourcing torture doesn’t give you plausible deniability, sorry.)
We killed hundreds of people in Somalia this week.
- US, Kenya airstrikes kill 64 in Somalia
- US terror drones kill 24 more in Somalia
- US drone attacks kill dozens in Somalia
- US drone strikes kill 38 in Somalia
- US terror drones kill 38 more Somalis
- US terror drones kill 41 more in Somalia
- US drone attacks kill dozens in Somalia
- US drone attack kills 28 in south Somalia
- US drone strikes kill 38 in Somalia
- US drone attack kill 20 Somalis
- US drone strike kills eight in Somalia
- US drone kills 28 in south Somalia
- US terror drone kills 21 in Somalia
Combat operations have concluded for:
- Army 1st Lt. Dustin D. Vincent, 25, of Mesquite, TX.
- Army Staff Sgt. Ari R. Cullers, 28, of New London, CT.
- Army Pfc. Sarina N. Butcher, 19, of Checotah, OK.
- Army Spc. Christopher D. Gailey, 26, of Ochelata, OK.
- Army Sgt. Carlo F. Eugenio, 29, of Rancho Cucamonga, CA.
- Army Sgt. James M. Darrough, 38, of Austin, TX.
- Army Staff Sgt. Christopher R. Newman, 26, of Shelby, NC.
- Army Lt. Col. David E. Cabrera, 41, of Abilene, TX.
- Marine Staff Sgt. Stephen J. Dunning, 31, of Milpitas, CA.
- Army Sgt. John A. Lyons, 26, of Seaside Park, NJ.
Days since Washington Post has updated its Faces of the Fallen site: 7.
Dispatch from a terrified system:
Here is one reason the Occupy movement is so radical:
These are the communities that are affected, you know, a community like mine in Far Rockaway, communities like up in Harlem and communities like in Brooklyn and certain places in Queens. Like, these are the places where we really need to be. These are where the problems are. These are where we should be mobilizing more people to come out. And Occupy Wall Street has given a movement like this a chance, so that we can come out and network and get more people and raise awareness to people who are like, ‘Hey, corporate greed is bad. Oh, but wait a minute. They’re stopping people in the streets for absolutely no reason? OK, I wasn’t a part of that. I had no idea. Now I know, and now I’m here.’ So that’s the beautiful thing about it. It’s just bringing everybody together.This is one case where radical is good.
When I was in high school, my physics teacher told our class to not be deceived by the sweaters and schoolmarm glasses: Librarians were some of the fiercest defenders of freedom of speech you were likely to meet. Noted.
Nurses are awesome too. They’re at the front lines of our dysfunctional health care system, so they see better than most how the 99% are suffering under the Raw Deal.
This Krugman column made me think of this one:
One of my favorite Keynes quotes comes from Essays in Persuasion, in which he tried to explain the nature of the Great Depression, which was still in its early stages, and declared that “we have magneto [alternator] trouble.” The economic engine was as powerful as ever - but one crucial part was malfunctioning, and needed to be fixed.
Occupy to Self Manage
It is absolutely astonishing to me that a journalist and presumed expert on the music scene could write something this dumb:
Right now, the single biggest problem with CD sales is all the stores where you used to buy CDs are closed. Well, what caused that? Well, people started buying songs online. That became a problem because people were only buying singles instead of albums and they weren’t spending a lot. Well, why did that happen? Because piracy put so much downward pressure on prices that you have to take any deal, whether it’s a good deal or a bad deal. It’s very hard to separate these things. Any study where people say this has nothing to do with piracy is a bunch of bullshit.First, he equates CD sales with music. It isn’t even equivalent to the music business. (And incidentally, the entertainment industry is actually doing better than the larger economy, so the cries of poverty are a little hard to take. Via.) And the music business is not the same as the music scene. Sure, digital distribution from iTunes, Amazon and elsewhere have made it much more difficult to sell one good song and nine crappy ones in a $17.99 bundle. Too bad. The Internet has made lots of things cheaper.
Know what else it has done? It’s given artists sites like soundcloud and bandcamp where they can upload music directly and let people stream it. It’s also created MP3 sites run by enthusiasts that allow people to sample from a wider variety of artists than would have been imaginable twenty years ago.
Know what else it’s done? Allowed for the creation of services like Spotify and Pandora that also let people stream music and get exposed to new artists in a way that claustrophobic radio playlists don’t allow.
There are more ways for artists to be heard than ever before, and thank God the artists themselves are more concerned with being able to make a living from their art than maximizing their revenue streams:
I’m all about Spotify, Rdio, and other services like that. I have no idea how much they pay, but I know my label gets something. Thankfully there are other ways to make money off of music besides selling traditional product now. I celebrate the fact that you can find everything for free online. That’s basically how I educated myself about music. If people like it, they’re going to find a way to support it.(Bonus Dent May:
Well, the live performance and the recording process rely quite heavily on the writing. If the songs aren’t there, then there’s really no point. Writing is more rewarding in that sense, but performing live is more enjoyable in the sense that I can get all boozed up and flop around on stage in a purple cape and assless pants.Via)
Lushlife just released a mixtape for free on Bandcamp - and this is an artist coming off the heels of a phenomenal album. Clearly they are not losing any sleep over it. So why the concern trolling from an observer?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course. The article describes him as “a former Billboard executive editor who has also contributed to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the New York Times.” In other words, a shill for the industry, not a fan of actual music. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is a golden age of music. Fans have never had it better. We have more choices for how we want to listen and more artists to be exposed to than ever before. And through some strange alchemy, that translates into more money; I’ve spent more on music each of the years I’ve been finding songs on the big, bad, (free) Internet than I did in any of the fifteen or so years prior - during which I had largely stopped listening to music as a hobby. Get people listening and the dollars will follow.
Oh yeah, and Pete Townshend is a dumbass.
ECONNED EXCERPT from p. 197 (emph. in orig.):
Readers would no doubt prefer a more satisfying tale where the bad guys fit more familiar stereotypes: black hats and handlebar mustaches, or the modern version, Gordon Gekko-like swaggering Masters of the Universe who broadcast their belief that greed is good. And a minor genre of crisis narratives has emerged to feed the desire to pin the crisis on easily identifiable villains, in particular the CEOs of some of the firms that failed.
But in this version, the process of maximizing current extractable value was for the most part not in the hands of colorful characters, but a legion of more mundane perpetrators adept in the nitty-gritty of transaction structures and accounting considerations that allowed them to shift risk onto less-well-informed parties, which at times included their own employers. This happened all up and down the food chain, from hapless borrowers signing mortgages they did not understand, to former Goldman Sachs co-head, treasury secretary, and Citigroup chairman Robert Rubin admitting he didn’t know what “liquidity puts” were until they forced the bank to fund $25 billion of CDOs just as the market was imploding.
Although shifting risk on a transactional level has become a highly developed art form, the main purveyors were hoist on their own petard, failing to grasp how these exposures created much greater danger on an aggregate level than they bothered to consider. And now that they operate under a large and generous government safety net, there is no reason for them not to do it all over again, on an even grander scale.
Reader Comments