From Pine View Farm

Paul Collier in the Guardian:

The inherent problem facing shareholders is that incentive payments cannot go negative. However much damage a manager inflicts, wiping out both shareholders and depositors, the consequences cannot be remotely commensurate.

(snip)

Faced with a corpse and a killer, police do not need to prove ill intent: manslaughter sets the hurdle lower than murder. It is enough to show the killer was irresponsible. That is the standard we need; we need a crime of managing a bank irresponsibly: in other words, bankslaughter.

It just keeps coming, fast and furious.

Travel Day.

The “American Revolution Center” project is moving to Philadelphia from Valley Forge.

Despite the patriotic hype at their website, this was not some altruistic proposal to celebrate the winter at Valley Forge in the interest of history..

It was a bleepin’ convention center disguised as a museum that the developers wanted to build on a stray plotch of private land in the middle of the national historical park.

Like we need another convention center.

Good riddance.

(more…)

There is something deeply wrong about those who wish destruction upon their own country because they lost an election and things aren’t going their way.

Brendan clarifies:

My kid’s mom was evacuated from the World Trade Center that day. A guy I knew in high school died in the attack. My friend Claiborne’s brother was on his way to work at the WTC, when he saw the planes fly into the buildings, and couldn’t call his family to tell them he was alive. My friend Rupa’s boyfriend worked in the plaza, and walked across the city covered in ash and debris to the school where she worked so she’d know he was alive.

A week elapsed before my mail carrier learned that his cousin was still alive. One of the fellows I knew at the job I then had lost his secretary and several friends.

Words fail me.

CC discusses karma.

How to start a blog post.

When they say “private solutions,” they mean “campaign contributors.”

Learn more here.

Somehow I missed this:

Residents in New Castle County (Delaware–ed.) are lighting up the lines at the county dispatch center with reports of rumblings that were confirmed to have been caused by a small earthquake.

I did notice the 4.8 that happened when I was San Francisco once. It was like being in a railroad sleeping car going over rough switches.

They never cease to disconnect from reality.

Twitter on Dr. Dan’s couch:

What are you doing? It’s a simple question that has transformed the internet. With Twitter, we can find out what people are up to and in to at any time. But what’s different about this form of social networking, what makes it appealing, how will people use it in years to come? On the next Voices in the Family, we’ll discuss Twitter. Our guests are Clive Thompson and David Parry. Thompson is a science, technology and culture writer for Wired magazine, The New York Times and New York Magazine. He is also the author of the blog, Collision Detection. Parry is assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at University of Texas, Dallas. Check out Parry’s blog, Outside The Text.

Follow the link and search for the June 29, 2009, show or click listen here (MP3).

DougJ at Balloon Juice:

. . . I can’t help but be struck by the contrast between the outpouring of sympathy for people who put money in an investment scheme they didn’t understand and the outpouring of contempt for people who took out loans they didn’t understand. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that Madoff’s victims are wealthy and white, while subprime loanees are (inaccurately) seen as mostly poor and black.

The gift that keeps on giving.

Via Balloon Juice.

John Cole at Balloon Juice.

Via Atrios.

Grumpy Realist on theological coincidences as regards Mark “I’m David, she’s Bathsheba” Sanford:

Oddly, whenever I hear someone who claims to know God’s will it exactly matches what that person wants. It’s the strangest coincidence.

Power failure. The UPSs held long enough for me to shut the webserver down in an orderly fashion.

Meanwhile, when I went to check on the details of the power failure at the electric company website:

(more…)

Off to drink liberally.

Via Bartblog.

From Bartblog:

Let’s make this Independence Day National Waterboarding Day! Here’s the way it would work: At each major public gathering on Saturday, July 4, 2009, have a crew there ready to waterboard all comers. Bring your conservative friends and relatives who deny that waterboarding is torture and challenge them to personally experience this ‘enhanced interrogation technique’ for themselves.

There’s more.

Minnesota Supreme Court rules that the winner of the election won the election.

A picture is worth a thousand words (click the graphic for a larger image):

Via Delaware Liberal.

Vanity Fair explores Sarah Palin’s career and campaign. I know that some persons are suffering Too Much Palin Syndrome (Palin-drome?); nevertheless, it is a fascinating article.

A nugget:

The narrative that the McCain campaign employed to explain Palin’s selection and to promote her qualifications—that she was a fresh-faced reformer who had taken on Alaska’s big oil companies and the corrupt Republican establishment, governing with bipartisan support—was never more than superficially true. In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular.”

Vincent D’Onofrio is looking more like Raymond Burr with every episode of Law and Order CI.

A local plumbing firm’s telly vision commercial includes a reference to their “family values.”

I guess that means they run around with other plumbing firms in the middle of the night.

Richard Adams in the Guardian on Bernie Madoff as a distraction:

Sadly for Bernie Madoff, his fraud was straight forward: he stole money from investors and ran a Ponzi scheme. (His particular genius was not to promise fantastic, overnight profits, as is usually the way. Instead he offered solid long-term returns, less likely to attract attention.) But if he’d really been smart he would have got into selling collatoralised debt obligations, credit default swaps, mezzanine level revolving syndicated loans, tulip futures and all the rest. Then, if he’d really got lucky, he’d have got a bailout.