Classics Appreciation Day
Who knew that Victor Hugo was also an pretty decent artist? He painted this rather sinister looking octopus and the little twists of the tentacles near the top are meant to form his initials “V.H.” You can see more of his artwork here. His painting of a mushroom is quite good too; maybe that’s where he drew the inspiration for some of his other works.
Michelle Farran speculates that Hugo’s description of the devilfish in “The Toilers of the Sea”, which he describes as a “disease shaped into a monstrosity” may have been the impetus for using the octopus as a metaphor in political cartoons. She has lots more at her website Vulgar Army.
And for fans of The Bard, here is the recent Gates/Cambridge PoPo brouhaha redone as Shakespeare. A sample:
CROWLEY: Stay, now! Who disturbs our peaceful shire?
GATES: I disturb no man. My key unlocketh not.
CROWLEY: Forsooth, thou breakest and enterest.
GATES (entering his castle): I break not for witless constables. Begone!
CROWLEY: Back speaks no man to the Sheriff; I arrest thee!
GATES: Knowest thou whom I am? That I am coy with the Daily Beastmistress, Milady Tina? That I am most down with Lady Oprah, the Queen of afternoon tele-dalliances? That I am sworn liege to Dr. Faust, of whom Marlowe wrote? That I unravelest literary mysteries at the Greatest University Known to Man?
CROWLEY: Of Tufts you speak? Even so, thou art under arrest.
Tufts!!!!! Bwahahaha!
![Project Gutenberg](http://<imgsrc="PG_Button_104x40.gif"width="104"height="40"alt="GoToProjectGutenberg">)
CEPHALOBLOG 
Researchers are using computer programs in an attempt to decipher some 4000 year old classics – scripts found on artifacts from the Indus Valley.
If this effort is successful, maybe they can use the technique to figure out who was jabbering in Linear A at about the same time on Crete.
Corporate execs taken to the woodshed. Where they were given hand carved antique Louis XIV furniture and asked to pay $5 for it.
B of A ordered to pay a pittance of $33 million.
GE slapped on the wrist for $50 million.
Goldman Sux CEO tells his employees to stop acting so rich for a while.
I’d never seen Hugo’s art before and I’m very impressed. I love the abstract ink washes; very modern considering their time. Coolio!
Here’s something of interest, the first interview of Tyler Durden. He manages to keep his anonymity but gives some background on his blog and blogmates.
First Amendment Award for Outstanding Journalism: Best Blog Zero Hedge
Nice interview. Sometimes I wonder if he might be Andrew Lahde, the guy who cashed out his hedge fund last year and wrote that very sarcastic good bye letter.
Just popped over to zerohedge found a much better article about the BofA fine hilariously written by a Mr. Ben Dover – Ken Lewis Tips Mary Schapiro $33M For Good Service:
I wonder if Seymour Butz and I. P. Freely will start contributing there ;)
Decoupling the American Caboose.
Wave bye bye and maybe it will toot.
Sounds about right to me. Something’s got to give soon – if they keep interest rates so low nobody is going to lend us any more money but raising them will kill off a recovery pretty quickly. The banksters better be spending all the money they’ve stolen on extra gates for their gated communities because they may need them soon when people start getting ornery.
That personal savings rate of over 6% didn’t last long. Down to 4.6% in just a month.
In keeping with the zeitgeist, here’s a reinterpretation of a classic from the last time everybody ran out of money – bad art from George Michael.
George Michael is not a classic I can appreciate. Not gonna push that go button, no way, no how. ;P
Good article from the LA Times about Obama cutting deals with big Pharma.
Now Tauzin and the pushers are coming out in favor of Obama’s health plan because they will continue to make billions in profits off the sick. This quote from Tauzin was very telling:
If PhRMA’s principles haven’t changed, it doesn’t take much to figure out whose have.
Speaking of corporate whores and criminals, former Blackwater/Xe CEO Erik Prince has been accused of murdering or instigating the murder of people who were cooperating with the feds investigating the company.
Jeremy Scahill is one of the few young investigative journalists doing the right thing.
Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder
If true I hope this company is made bankrupt and anyone who has worked for that fucking mercenary piece of shit is suspect. They are monster makers and enablers of the worst sort.
Those are some really sick little monkeys at that company. Why they are still in business at all is beyond me. And WTF is going on here:
Bunch of assholes.
Now, now, he’s doing it all for Jay-sus! Onward christian soldiers and all that dominionist rot…and remember they’re not mercenaries anymore, they’re contractors.
Looks like Timmeh the Elf has a potty mouth. The article discusses whether Congress has the stones to stand up to the Fed and pulls this from the WSJ:
Who knew the little guy had it in him. Maybe the Larry the Cane Toad gave him lessons.
The women are standing up to him and by proxy Cane Toad the Sexist. I watched part of Bair’s testimony to one of the Congressional committees yesterday and I believe she’s correct. Centralizing even more power into a super regulator and giving even more power to the Fed is a bad idea given the players. The system does not need more too big to fail centralization. It needs the opposite.
I was just checking in and noticed the ratings appear in mid-read. Did you add a new widget or did wordpress do it automatically? You get a thumbs up for the last comment and a thumbs down for not watching George Michael :P
I saw the ratings widget on the menu for the first time this morning and turned it on for comments but not for posts. Thing is, I can’t see them! Waaa. I’ll have to investigate further.
That’s odd. I can see them but it does make the page load a little slower. It also lets me rate my own comments.
I had something blocked with scriptblocker. Now I can see them. I changed the names of the ratings. :) Whee a new toy!
Signs of the times in Britain. Pub closures rise to record 52 a week
Blimey.
Found a couple of articles related to this one that triv posted a couple days ago about the Fed basically printing money by buying up securities from the banks.
In Bernanke’s Shell game Mike Whitney describes more of the tricks the Fed and the banks are playing to prop up the failing system by pumping even more money into it. He quotes the WSJ:
And adds this:
He also explains how Treasury has been fudging the numbers to make it look like there are more foreigners willing to keep buying Treasuries and mentions that the banks are playing a game with the government where they buy up Treasuries nobody wants with all their extra taxpayer money.
The Nation had this piece by William Greider – Dismantling the Temple – where he also talks about the Fed flooding the economy with money and suggests that it’s time for an alternative. He suggests setting up a capital investment fund that would basically be doing the same thing as the Fed is now – printing money- but at least the money would go towards something constructive like building a high speed rail system and other projects. That way we’d improve our infrastructure and the money would work it’s way through the economy giving other people a shot at some of it rather than it going straight to the banks. The banks would still get it eventually as people deposited it, and the higher deposits would allow them to lend more.
Sounds good to me. As Greider notes, it can’t be any worse than the disaster we’ve got going now. The people of this country are caught between a rock and a hard place because the government is flooding the country with money which is causing our dollar to be worth less and plummet against the euro. But the money is going straight to the banks who are not lending it out, which means that people don’t even have a shot at the new supply of currency as prices for lots of goods continue to increase. And meanwhile they continue to keep the interest rates artificially low to try and fend off more inflation so people who do try to save have little or no incentive. Something’s gotta give here.
Here’s another critique of Bennies bank enrichment program from the Guardian
Ben Bernanke’s failure at the Fed
I also heard some other econ pundit refer to the Fed as the latest Ponzi scheme. They take taxpayer money in and payout the newest investor with the taxdollars, leaving the taxpayer the last one without a chair when the music stops.
I totally agree that the money needs to be redirected to hardware/infrastructure/research and development – preferably at the University level. Stop the etherial mythical paper madness!
Good article. This part is key and speaks to what I was mentioning above:
Throwing it from trucks would have probably been more useful than what they did because then someone besides the bankers would have had a chance at it. The banks are hoarding the cash while Treasury and the Fed continue to prop them up and meanwhile everyone else is struggling and running out of money. Now I’m waiting to start seeing articles about the banks buying up everything on the cheap once everyone else goes bust.
Somebody is seriously suggesting that we improve our infrastructure and create jobs and such with a capital fund rather than the little shell game we’re playing now? Ha! That’s a real knee-slapper! Like that’s going to happen, whew…ah, let me catch my breath! I have to wipe the tears of laughter from my eyes now and go make my usual investment of my available funds…I’m off to buy a Powerball Lottery Ticket.
Ha ha. Looks like a creationism theme park is going the way of the dinosaurs.
Sounds like this guy will have plenty of time to catch up on his reading while he’s in the slammer. Maybe he’ll run across the part in his bible where Jeebus mentions rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
This is the kind of thing that just makes your head explode.
Why does the US continue to send billions of dollars to fund blowback?!?!?!?!? It sure as hell seems that the US wants and needs this “War on Terra” or “Overseas Contingency Operation” or whatever the fuck you want to call it, and will do whatever it takes to ensure that it doesn’t end. It would be a lot harder to grab all that oil, build all those bases, and expand US hegemony is there were actually peace. And it just wouldn’t do to have people like Eric Prince be unemployed. Much better for the government to pay him millions to murder anyone who looks at him crosseyed.
When are enough people going to pay attention to all this shit and get pissed off enough to do something about it?
Sigh. yeah. I saw another article that the Generalissimos were telling Squobama to double up the troops in Afghanistan. Gotta keep our military manufacturers happy I guess. Gotta keep the tension high between Pakistan and India so we can keep selling weapons to one while using weapons on the other. Gotta keep the wars of deception stoked for laundering all that WallStreet money. Fucking Empire.
Speaking of art, Jason de Caires Taylor is building a new reef for all you cephs and other marine life:
Link
The sculptures are beautiful. I must say if I happened upon them without warning while snorkeling around it might freak me the hell out, especially the disembodied heads!
Thanks, artemis
That was really wonderful. I called my kid over to have a look and he was quite impressed. Being six, he’s not impressed by much, world weary as he is, but this really did it for him. Thanks!
WTF? I just glanced over at the financials where I track several of the zombie banks for mindless entertainment and saw that AIG was up 69% today!
AIG spikes more than 60%
Then I went over to ZH to see what they had to say
Cash For Clunkers Moves To Toxic Financial Stocks
huh?
I smell rattus
Definitely a rattus involved there somewhere. Perusing the comments of the ZH article I found this link talking about prime mortgages increasingly going belly up.
Wonder if they’ll try another crap asset fire sale?
Them squidlets sure are expensive.
Sounds about right to me, or maybe even a little low. Child care alone runs $10,000 a year and another $5,000 or so in health care. So lets see, 5 years of child care is $50,000 and 18 years of health care assuming no cost increases and assuming they don’t get sick (Ha!) is $90,000. That’s about half of the $291,000 estimate right there. That leaves about $8,000 per year for food and clothing. Guess they better not need braces or take up any hobbies. And obviously they can’t be allowed to talk on the phone if people want to stay within budget ;)
And how many parents are really done at 18? That means you have to account for the first car and insurance. And then there’s college after that. And then the wedding. :-D
No wedding. I’m moving to Idaho and raising the squidlet as a lesbian, whether she likes it or not ;)
Wouldn’t you rather move to the Isle of Lesbos instead? Idaho is pretty and all, but Idahoan survivalists live there! Of course, on Lesbos there could still be weddings. hah! Face it, you’ll be broke no matter what. ;P
Hmmmm. Check out Greenwald’s latest on the Olbermann/O’Reilly business. Lots of word parsing going on there. Olbermann denies he agreed to any deal between News Corpse and GE but also says that Greenwald had been factually accurate in his reporting. Sounds like Greenwald has it right when he says this:
emphasis in original
The link to Firedoglake and Hamsher’s take on it is worth a look too. There is indeed much parsing, but I too think this and the Wolffe issue are extremely important to get across to the more casual media observers and consumers. Corporate ownership is corporate ownership whether we’re talking about Faux Noise, ABC, CBS or General Electric’s TV commercial for the Military Industrial Complex.
I also think it important to recognize when so called independent bloggers cross that line too. I am very suspicious of Mamz’s relations with MSNBC for this reason. They are getting too cozy for comfort. Of course there will never be transparency on that account.
Somehow I missed this one but it appears the FBI thinks it caught a terrorist. The suspect Daniel Boyd is a Muslim and was found with lots of ammo and guns. Except from reading the article, it appears he hadn’t actually done anything. They just heard him say he’d like to start jihad here in the US. If saying you’d like to fuck up the people in charge of this train wreck we’ve got going in this country were a crime in itself, there’d be a lot of people in trouble right now.
I suspect they will attempt to make some sort of example of this guy. We’ll see how it plays out. But contrast that story withthis one from earlier this year which you probably haven’t heard about before.
So since the wife already shot the bastard, and he was presumably a Xtian and a good ol’ boy to boot, I guess there’s nothing to see here. No need to plaster this all over the news or investigate where he may have got all the uranium from or see if this independently wealthy whackjob may have been lending material support to his white supremacist pals. Case closed.
First, read this: AIG breakup nets Wall Street $1 billion bonanza
Then watch this
And I thought I was angry!
Wow. That was bad ass. Just watching it made me feel a little bit better :) That guy has a pretty decent swing too.
Ocean researchers working on a big patch of garbage off California pulled up a vampire squid. That one doesn’t look nearly as ferocious as the one on the right. And they aren’t very big either according to the comments. They will need to try harder if they want future overlord status.
They need to learn to flash a Gold color, to become more like their human counterparts. ;)
There was a story about the guy who discovered the “garbage patch” on PBS last night. It is massive, extending from off CA all the way to China. The plastic is breaking down and ending up in the food chain from fish to birds. We are killing the ocean.
Ha ha!!! More rattus!
It’s spring loaded! The music selection was too perfect! Thanks for the laugh :-D
I’m on the road today. Hold down the squid fort and keep the vampire pirates at bay.
Aye aye captain! Don’t forget to bring your plastic Jeebus :)
More classics appreciation. In a follow up to the wildly popular Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, coming soon to a bookstore near you.
A video promo: