Something I Didn't Know: Tribes

Chippewa and Ojibway are the same name.

Follow the Money

Seems like everything in my Reader this morning is about who gains/loses from the inglorious  of the super committee. Here's a GOP Congressman on how the Super Committee failed because the Dems refused to privatize Medicare.   Here's   Jia Lynn Yang on how failure jeopardizes payroll tax cut, and Rebecca Leber on how the  collapse leaves Big Oil subsidies untouched.  A zillion people are telling you that the "failure" wasn't a failure at all--that it was bound to happen, that it's good for the President, whatever. Meanwhile, you get the sense that defense cuts and an end to  unemployment benefits just ain't gonna happen.

Oh, and this just in: pepper is a vegetable.  Apparently so is ketchup, but opinions are divided on pizza.      

More Stuff I Did Not Know

Things I learned last week:

• Tycho Brahe may not have died from an insurgent  bladder; he may have been poisoned by his assistant (and successor) Johannes Kepler.

• Wyatt Earp is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Colma.

• If you call for an ambulance in Karachi, the driver had better have the right ethnic profile; otherwise the neighborhood gunmen won't let him through (sometimes, they won't let him do a pickup anyway; they'd rather watch the victim die).

Misc

• Once again, I learn important stuff about health care from Austin Frakt.

• I'm betting they're putting us on but I'm enjoying it anyway.

• White Male Judges are being Discriminated Against.  No, not him.  [Statement of interest: I know and like--admire--"him," but I wish he had taken himself out of this fight.]

• "The world is undercollateralized."   For a grand theory of undercollateralization, go here.

• Worth it for the picture alone.

I'm supposed to be grading today...   

Dynamite Ad Capaign

That is all: dynamite ad campaign.  Link  H/T Chris Blatman.

And to match or top it, go here..

w/ o comment

 When he understood it, he called for his friends, and told them of it. Then said he, I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I have got hither, yet now I do not regret me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness before me that I have fought His battle who will now be my rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ And as he went down deeper, he said, ‘Grave, where is thy victory?’ So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. 

--John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

 

Good Morning Stuff

The old Volvo blew its alternator, which is  the Volvo equivalent of pancreatic cancer.  So, off to the repair shop.*  Meanwhile, a couple of really great morning reads:

• Felix Salmon's piece about the microlending meltdown in Andrha Pradesh offers some interesting stuff about microlending but it is really a story about bloggers and the changing nature of journalism--about how a fully informed blogger in his mother's basement some thinktank somewhere can do more to clarify a story than a reportorial bigfoot who parachutes onto the scene and harvests a few random quotations.
  
  
• Remember Cliff Clavin on Cheers and the buffalo-herd theory of how beer makes you smarter (hint: the weakest go to the wall)? Barry Ritholtz reminds us that it worked for GM, could have worked for banks. Sadly, it may not work for beer, though.
  
  
• Oy, men: Prince William and his Kate "were flatmates in a group house, just friends, they said, until suddenly 'they became more. The 'more' was rumored to happen when Kate was wearing less, strutting the catwalk in lingerie for a student fashion show."
  

*What, get rid of an old Volvo?  You nuts?

It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

...but Felix Salmon is not impressed:

Meanwhile, a horrible little turd somewhere is gleefully if quietly celebrating his coup (I'm sure it's a guy) in leaking [David] Weigel's private correspondence to Fishbowl DC and the Daily Caller. Maybe he's genuinely disturbed in some way. But, to coin a phrase, this would be a vastly better world to live in if he decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.

...nor Barry Ritholtz:

What does [Financial Reform] mean for us?

It means that the same people who brought you these horrible changes — rising wealth discrepancy, massive unemployment and a crumbling infrastructure – have now further institutionalized the policies that will keep the causes of these problems firmly in place.

Meanwhile, all involved in the facade try to pretend that this should be considered a success because, gosh, real financial reform is just too hard and those crafty banksters will just outsmart us anyhow. Many in the media are either too complicit, too confused or too lazy to contradict this spin, but the rest of us shouldn’t buy that BS. Real and lasting financial reform is actually quite easy to implement — and the last time we had a crisis of this magnitude, we kept the banksters in check for 70 years.

Comment Vit l'autre Moitié

14 May 1968

This is the house in which, this week, Maria delivered a woman of her child. At the upper end of the Boulevard Magenta, in a colony of huts--which are leased to the poorest of the poor in Paris by whom? Baron James de Rothschild--a room where the planks that form the walls are coming apart and the floor is full of holes, through which rats are constantly appearing, rats which also come in whenever the door is opened, impudent poor men's rats which climb on to the table, carrying away whole hunks of bread, and worry the feet of the sleeping occupants. In this room, six children: the four biggest in a bed, and at their feet, which they are unable to stretch out, the two smallest in a crate. The man, a costermonger who has known better days, dead-drunk during his wife's labour. The woman, as drunk as her husband, lying on a straw mattress and being plied with drink by a friend of hers, an old canteen attendant who developed a thirst in twenty-five years' campaigning and spends all her pension on liquor. And during the delivery in this shanty, the wretched shanty of civilization, an organ-grinder's monkey, imitating and parodying the cries and angry oaths of the shrews in the throes of childbirth, piddling through a crack in the roof on the snoring husband's back.

--Edmund and Jules de Goncourt,
Pages from the Goncourt Journals 136-7 (NYRB Classics 2007)

Per Wiki, Baron James de Rothschild had turned 76 just three days before; he died on 15 November of the same year, just three months after purchasing the Chateau Lafite vineyard. There still is a Boulevard de Magenta in Paris; it runs through the unfashionable ninth and tenth arrondissements..

Some Weekend Reading

As is sadly customary, other people's postings seem far more interesting than my own. Here's the best thing I've seen so far about gulf oil. Here, James Fallows breaths a gust of sanity into the acrid stench of paranoia that lingers over the terrorism/security debate. DeLong offers a challenging insight into the politic situation of undergraduates at Berkeley, suggesting that (surprise!) it is a good deal more complicated than the right-wing slime machine believes.

Too True, Too True

My friend Marvin says:

More battles are lost by diarrhea than are won by good generalship.

Underbelly: Your Go-to Blog for Beyond-parody Viagra Email

Here's another:

Been drunk and get with the girl? Don't try your luck, insure yourself with blue-pill!

Honest, I am not Mocking This

...but it's too good to pass up:

Mr [X] also worked at the post office for several years, making a suggestion on how to improve the city's mail collection system that won him as $200 award in 1962.

--Obituary, San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 22, 2008

On the other hand, maybe I am mocking this (link):

Woman Dies Trying to Rescue Dead Chicken

A 63-year-old woman died on Saturday night after falling down a well while trying to fish out a dead chicken.

H/T Sally.

The Good News Is...

That I turn 60 today.

The bad news is that that's dodecenal, base 12.

In dog years, I'm about 10. But in tortoise, I must be 135, so I guess it all depend on your point of view.

Note to self, go wash the feet of a beggar and throw some coins at the poor.

Postscript: Oh, and my sister Sally sent me this.

Scanning Stuff

• Glenn Greenwald is on a roll this morning.

• And so is Barry Ritholtz.

• I found this one over here.

• Here's some election background reading.

• You didn't forget Valentine's Day?

• And speaking of scanning stuff--I don't suppose I actually need this.

Miscellany

Lots to do today, so I pony on other people.

The headline of the day is here.

For a thought-provoking defense of the former surgeon general, go here.

If you like second, or third, or fourteenth, chances, read this.

For the ultimate second chance, check here. For a more impassioned view, go here.