"The stock market is no longer the common ownership of the means of production: it’s a place where early-stage investors can exit to a group of muppets and high-frequency traders."

"For all its innovation, the financial industry of today is less efficient than it was in the age of the railway, according to research by Thomas Philippon at New York University. That is, it charges the rest of society more for financial intermediation than it did 130 years ago. Considering the evidence, regulators could at the very least remove the taxpayer subsidy that has paved the road for banks to become so big."
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/25/jp-morgan-chase-breakup/

"Since October, anybody in California who commits a new crime that is non-serious, non-violent, and non-sexual (or “non-non-non”) has been sent to a county jail instead of prison. The main difference is that sheriffs and their deputies have much more discretion over how to deal with such offenders than state-prison wardens do.

"Sheriffs can, for example, send troublemakers to mental-health treatment instead of jail. They can “flash-incarcerate” people for just a few hours. They can put them under home surveillance with a GPS monitor strapped to their ankle, or make them do community service and drug rehabilitation. They can refer them to vocational training so they can get jobs.

"A similar change applies to everybody now released from state prison. Before October, all these people were automatically on “parole” (a state term). And about two in three parolees soon ended up back in jail, usually for technical hiccups, such as a missed meeting with a state parole officer. This revolving door of recidivism has now largely stopped, as former prisoners enter “probation” (a county term) and work with a local officer."

"Last year, the Oberpfalz cultural curator Erika Eichenseer published a selection of fairytales from Von Schönwerth's collection, calling the book Prinz Roßzwifl. This is local dialect for "scarab beetle". The scarab, also known as the "dung beetle", buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Eichenseer sees this as symbolic for fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

"Eichenseer says the fairytales are not for children alone. "Their main purpose was to help young adults on their path to adulthood, showing them that dangers and challenges can be overcome through virtue, prudence and courage.""

"While death and taxes may be only relative certainties in today's economy – failing megabanks neither die nor pay taxes anymore – one thing that was always absolutely certain from the start was that Wall Street was going to sue the living hell out of Washington before the ink was even dry on Dodd-Frank. It took a little while, but the banks very quickly found a tried-and-true method of tying up the reforms in court."

"That's how the swaps market works. It operates completely in the dark. If you're some Podunk town in Texas or Alabama and you need swaps financing, you've got to ask Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley what it costs. There's no exchange where you can compare prices. And modern investment bankers are ethically a notch below your average drug dealer. They will extract from their customer – a town, an airline, a chain of retail stores – whatever they think he'll pay. And that extra cost will be passed on to you by the overcharged customer, in the form of higher taxes, bigger home-heating bills, higher sewer rates or pricier airline tickets. Wall Street will be taking a bite out of you every time you write a check."

NB "municipal-bond offerings, one of the most dependably corrupt businesses in the American economy."

"Joblessness is also associated with some serious illnesses, although the causal links are poorly understood. Studies have found strong links between unemployment and cancer, with unemployed men facing a 25 percent higher risk of dying of the disease. Similarly higher risks have been found for heart disease and psychiatric problems."

"The article was written by a 12-member panel that spent three years reviewing the evidence. It concluded that the nation’s safety system for endocrine disruptors is broken."

"Even with those credentials, it took a little while for the CRP volunteers to win the trust of the students they hoped to represent. After all, weren't would-be lawyers just junior members of "the establishment"? To break the ice with protesters facing discipline, Shaffer put it to them this way: "Look, we're being trained at being adversarial assholes, so if you want us to be adversarial assholes on your behalf, we'd be happy to do that.""

"Although the teenage birth rate dropped 9 percent in 2010 from 2009, the United States still has one of the highest rates among developed countries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia among American teenagers continue to rise."

"After all, “English was created by barbarians, by a rabble of angry peasants,” McIntyre says. “Because if it wasn’t, we would still be speaking Anglo-Saxon.” Or worse, French."

"The government has long known that tiny amounts of chemicals used to make plastics can sometimes migrate into food. The Food and Drug Administration regulates these migrants as “indirect food additives” and has approved more than 3,000 such chemicals for use in food-contact applications since 1958. It judges safety based on models that estimate how much of a given substance might end up on someone’s dinner plate. If the concentration is low enough (and when these substances occur in food, it is almost always in trace amounts), further safety testing isn’t required.

"Finding out which chemicals might have seeped into your groceries is nearly impossible, given the limited information collected and disclosed by regulators, the scientific challenges of this research and the secrecy of the food and packaging industries, which view their components as proprietary information."

"The industry developed tactics of dubious legality — not just robo-signing, which most Americans have heard of by now, but an array of business practices, some dating to the 1990s, that were designed to skirt the law and fatten profits. The federal and state governments largely tolerated these practices until they pushed Ramos into a tent and all of us into the Great Recession.

Even then, the federal government, facing an electorate bitterly divided over how and even whether to help "irresponsible" homeowners, responded in ways that proved ineffective. To be sure, the government's efforts were unprecedented, as Obama administration officials have repeatedly insisted. But those efforts were also halfhearted. Only recently, after the banks admitted to widespread law-breaking, did the government launch a response that might prove commensurate with the calamity."

"But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical. More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead guilty.

"The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial. Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment."

"To better explain for the uninitiated, Ruby on Rails is not a language, or a version of Ruby. It uses Ruby code to make building a website much faster and easier. Let’s say that you wanted to make a complicated Web-based product, such as an online invitation service. You could do all the programming yourself. But Ruby on Rails is a framework that includes a lot of the basic, necessary functions for you.

"In his writings, he evinced a longing for artistic purity coming from obscurity. “People cling to ideas, because they're supposed to be vouchers for a million dollars. no, write an obscure book. build something outside all that pressure. i guess treehouses for kids qualify,” he wrote in 2004."

"Geoff Dyer has “broken” America, as they say in Britain. This year’s National Book Critics’ Circle award for his collection of essays, "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition," capped his rise from the occasional introducer of republished classics to a regular columnist in the New York Times Book Review, where he writes about more or less whatever he wants, more or less whenever he wants. His new book, Zona, is ostensibly a summary of the film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, a director he calls “cinema’s great poet of stillness.” It is a testament to how high Dyer’s star has risen in the last few years, for while there are few people who could have written this book, there are fewer still who could have gotten it published. It is also an account of Stalker‘s production, a vicarious autobiography, a state-of-the-culture address, and a meditation on cinema and youth. It is, in other words, a secondary text that aspires to the stature of the primary."

"[Ray Dalio's] economic model “is not very orthodox but gives him a pretty good sense of where the economy is,” says Paul Volcker, a former chairman of America’s Federal Reserve and one of Mr Dalio’s growing number of influential fans.

"Whereas Mr Soros credits the influence of Karl Popper, a philosopher who taught him as a student, Mr Dalio says his ideas are entirely the product of his own reflections on his life as a trader and his study of economic history. He has read little academic economics (though his work has echoes of Hyman Minsky, an American economist, and of best-selling recent work on downturns by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff) but has conducted in-depth analysis of past periods of economic upheaval, such as the Depression in America, post-war Britain and the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic. He has even simulated being an investor in markets in those periods by reading daily papers from these eras, receiving data and “trading” as if in real time."

"By the definition of the latest study, mental control was defined as the ability to keep two key nodes of the default mode network from becoming active during meditation. The posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex appear to be hubs of the brain's "neutral" setting--areas that come alive when we are not engaged in a task that requires more specialized attention and let our minds wander. (Not coincidentally, they are also areas that tend to become active when we remember events in our past and think about other peoples' motives and intentions.) In the 12 veteran meditators who participated in the current study, those two regions were quieter during meditation than they were in the brains of the 12 meditation novices with which they were compared.

"The study also detected greater connectivity between some of the brain's key cognitive control areas and elements of the default mode network. During meditation and in the mental rest periods in between, a brain region known to be important in focusing and maintaining attention, the dorsolateral anterior cingulate cortex, was more likely to activate in tandem with the posterior cingulate cortex in regular meditators than in those who are new to the practice: that, says Brewer, suggests that during meditation and in everyday life, meditators may have more skill in reining in their wandering thoughts and bringing the brain back "on task"-- than those who don't routinely meditate."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jsuler/sets/72157594205710301/

"One of the things Seeley has been thinking about during his vigils with his swarms is how much they’re like our own minds. “I think of a swarm as an exposed brain that hangs quietly from a tree branch,” Seeley said."

"The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year."

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/02/volcker-rule-mfglobal-bankcounterparty/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/business/14prosecute.html?pagewanted=all

"Dotting i’s and crossing t’s can be a costly bore, of course. And eliminating the need to record mortgage assignments helped keep the lending machine humming during the boom.

"A crucial but obscure cog in the nation’s lending machinery: a privately owned loan tracking service known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System. This registry, created in 1997 to improve profits and efficiency among lenders, eliminates the need to record changes in property ownership in local land records."

NB "hoisted by one's own petard"

(9/26/2009)

http://www.alternet.org/economy/153291/eliot_spitzer:_5_ways_to_make_banks_pay_for_their_secret_$7_trillion_free_ride/
"Even if one accepts the notion that the stability of the financial system could not be sacrificed, those who dispensed trillions of dollars to private parties made no apparent effort to impose even minimal obligations to condition the loans on the structural reforms needed to prevent another crisis, made no effort to require that those responsible for creating the crisis be relieved of their jobs, took zero steps towards the genuine mortgage-reform that is so necessary to begin a process of economic renewal. The dollars lent were simply a free bridge loan so the banks could push onto others the responsibility for the banks’ own risk-taking."

(12/1/2011)

"There has been extreme variability of the Arctic Oscillation in recent years, including a record negative monthly value for December in 2009 (the month of the so-called “Snowpocalypse” in the northeast U.S.), a record negative for any month in February 2010 (“Snowmageddon”), and a record positive one for April in 2011 (coinciding with the extraordinary number of tornadoes in the U.S. that month)," Ostro said. "And this has been occurring in the context of the precipitous decline of Arctic sea ice volume.”

Awesome

“I provide ways to control what is publicly visible or hidden, and my users figure out how to integrate that into their actual lives as human beings,” says Maciej Ceglowski, an oil painter and writer who created Pinboard while deep in debt living in northeastern Romania. Ceglowski also runs Pinboard on his own.

“There’s going to be a more natural way to share things with one another than having thirty ‘like’ and ‘+1′ buttons next to everything we see. The wonderful thing is that this will arise organically, as we gain experience with life online, and not be invented by any one company,” says Ceglowski.

"After a while, it struck me that most French descriptions of American kids include this phrase "n'importe quoi," meaning "whatever" or "anything they like." It suggests that the American kids don't have firm boundaries, that their parents lack authority, and that anything goes. It's the antithesis of the French ideal of the cadre, or frame, that French parents often talk about. Cadre means that kids have very firm limits about certain things—that's the frame—and that the parents strictly enforce these. But inside the cadre, French parents entrust their kids with quite a lot of freedom and autonomy."

"As for family life, Americans are far too concerned with a child’s self-esteem and accomplishments. The French woman knows that to build a child’s inner strength it is best either to completely ignore the child or to belittle him. As I was giving birth to my daughter, I refused to put down my copy of French Vogue. When it was over, I turned to my husband and remarked, “I have just had an unusually large bowel movement that will never be as attractive as me.”"
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2012/03/26/120326sh_shouts_rudnick

"We actually have less intergenerational economic mobility than other advanced nations. That is, the chances that someone born into a low-income family will end up with high income, or vice versa, are significantly lower here than in Canada or Europe."

"Almost two decades after the final class was held, passions still run high among the Reedies who were there. The rise, reign, and fall of calligraphy at Reed is a tale of charisma, discovery, Zen, jealousy, spirituality, body vs. mind, the hand linked to the heart, a Trappist monk, the white paper between the lines—and, yes, above all it is the legacy of one brilliant, caring and cranky teacher: Lloyd J. Reynolds.

"Lloyd saw calligraphy as the visible means of literate expression and, through that, as a gateway to the history and lore of civilization. Moreover, it is a link between one’s own simple, utilitarian practice of handwriting and the accumulation of knowledge and scholarship through the ages. When you write in an italic hand, you are making the same kinds of motions that Queen Elizabeth I made when she practiced Chancery Cursive as a teenager; the same motions as Poggio Bracciolini, a fifteenth-century chancellor of Florence; the same motions as Michelangelo. And if you write a Carolingian hand, you are making the same moves as the notable scribes that Charlemagne assembled in his court in the late eighth century: Alcuin of York, Peter of Pisa, Theodulf the Visigoth, Paul the Deacon, and Dungal the Irishman.”

"By the ’50s, Reynolds had built relationships with the A-list scribes of the day: Alfred Fairbank, Arnold Bank, Father Catich, Ray Daboll, and others. In 1958 Reynolds organized (with Max Sullivan and Francis Newman) a major exhibition at the Portland Art Museum: Calligraphy—the Golden Age and Its Modern Revival.

"From the Reed archives, scribbled in a tiny notebook: “Lect. Feb. 24—Browning + Arnold Child Rolande—mood of human desolation—poetic exploitation of ugliness—great vigor, movement."

"Often the conscious mind merely interferes with the hand."

"You make the discovery,” Lloyd Reynolds once said. “You shove off the lid and the light is blinding and you gaze into infinity; every person is sacred, nothing is profane!”

"Someone has drawn a picture and hung it up next to the painting of a Hindu god I can't identify. The picture says, 'You were supposed to read this right now.'"

"There used to be a clunky paragraph sign known as a pilcrow ; initially it was a C with a slash drawn through it. Similar in its effect was one of the oldest punctuation symbols, a horizontal ivy leaf called a hedera . It appears in 8th-century manuscripts, separating text from commentary, and after a period out of fashion it made an unexpected return in early printed books. Then it faded from view."

"In 2007, for example, Countrywide employees charged Hispanic applicants in Los Angeles an average of $545 more in fees for a $200,000 loan than they charged non-Hispanic white applicants with similar credit histories. Independent brokers processing applications for a Countrywide loan charged Hispanics $1,195 more, the department said."

One of sex educators’ big problems, Joannides told the New Jersey audience, is that they define their role as the “messengers of all the things that can go wrong with sex.” The attention paid to S.T.I.’s, pregnancy, rape and discrimination based on sexual orientation, while understandable, comes at a cost, he says. “We’re worrying about which bathrooms transgender students should use while teens are worrying whether they should shave all the way or leave a landing strip,” he said. “They’re worrying if someone special will find them sexually attractive, whether they will be able to do it as well as porn, whether others have the same kind of sexual feelings they do.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13UopSt4XZs
http://blinkytreefrog.livejournal.com/80660.html