Four for Monday.

* The Most Amazing Halloween Costume Ever. (via Steve)

* Whose America? Mark Bauerlein and Duke's own Priscilla Wald debate a new Harvard anthology of American literature.

* Tetris zen.

* A collection of bank robbery notes. There was apparently a successful robbery at the Wachovia on 9th Street a few weeks ago, so look for that one on the site soon.

Naked Capitalism has a somewhat speculative but persuasive take (via Vu) on why the government still isn't breaking up the too-big-to-fail banks.

...the government’s failure to break up the insolvent giants – even though virtually all independent experts say that is the only way to save the economy, and even though there is no good reason not to break them up – is nothing new.

William K. Black’s statement that the government’s entire strategy now – as in the S&L crisis – is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts") makes a lot more sense.

Friday!

* 'Decision to end Reading Rainbow traced to a ‘shift’ in priorities during the Bush administration.' That bastard!

* "Too big to fail" is so 2008. Via Ezra Klein.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street's most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

* No Senate Democrat has gone on record as opposing the public option. More and more I think the public option will pass using reconciliation. I haven't heard a single persuasive counterargument to doing it this way, and Obama and the Democrats are too all-in to let health care die altogether.

* Also in health care news: Steve Benen announces the death of the public option and the rise of the free pony option. Sounds a little bit like socialism to me.

* WAKE UP SHEEPLE. THE OLIGARHY IS REAL.

* Snow Leopard reviews. I've installed this on both our Macs and so far everything appears to be almost exactly the same as before. Disk Utility works much better, which is nice. And a few menus that used to be white are now black. Believe the hype.

* And io9 has your TV science fiction themes by the numbers. We are truly in the dark age of televised time travel.

'The Man Who Crashed the World': Michael Lewis on Joe Cassano, former head of AIG's disastrous Financial Products Unit.

Truly this is a summer of infinite linkdumps. Things will only get worse once summer camp starts.

* Glad to see pseudo-liveblogging tenure denial II has the happy ending I was expecting.

* Raleigh slime monster update.

* The Universal Translator is here! This is pretty amazing.

* Push is a simple sidescroller with a unique "cosmic distortion" gimmick.

* 'How Beckham Blew It': Inside the L.A. Galaxy.

* Bank runs, Amish style. Not a hoax, not an imaginary story.

* Yo La Tengo rocks the Twitter.

Monday night.

* This American Life has another of their must-listen episodes this week on the decades of governmental and private-sector regulatory corruption that made last year's financial collapse possible.

* Infrastructurist debunks the story I linked earlier claiming that trains can be less green than planes when the entire production process is taken into account.

After all, in the realm of pure possibilities, of course planes can be greener than trains. So can an SUV with 7 passengers. The real question is not about exceptional cases, but about averages.

...

What the headline writers did was cherry pick the trains with the highest calculated c02 emissions–the Green Line in Boston–were a bit higher than the emissions for some aircraft. And therefore planes can be greener.

* Swedish Pirate Party enters European Parliament.

The party advocates shortening the duration of copyright protection and allowing noncommercial file-sharing.

Engstrom said the court verdict in April against four men behind the popular Pirate Bay file-sharing site had boosted the party's support.

"Our membership tripled within a week of the Pirate Bay verdict," added Engstrom, "I think it just made people think that it had gone too far both in Sweden and the rest of Europe."

* Yikes. An Israeli couple are preparing to divorce after the man summoned a prostitute to his hotel room only to discover she was his daughter. In his email, Neil calls this "bad luck." I'd say that's putting it mildly.

Iceland after the crash.

Sunday linkdump #2, our ruined economy edition.

* Matt Taibi has today's must-read AIG article in Rolling Stone, "The Big Takeover." Discussion at MeFi with more links.

* The article in this month's Harper's ("Infinite Debt") is good too, but unfortunately it's not available to non-subscribers online yet.

* Rachel Maddow on how deregulation helped get us into this mess.

* John Gray reviews Margaret Atwood's new book on debt for The New York Review of Books.

* And Paul Krugman is very unhappy about the Geithner toxic assets plan. He's not the only one.

I guess I'm doing some AIG blogging today. A few more links for people looking for background and commentary on this.

* Good background on the collapse of Wall Street and the shady and/or illegal practices that have characterized the behavior of these large firms over the last few years can be found in Michael Lewis's piece for Vanity Fair from December.

That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”

Here's an interview with Lewis.

* Eliot Spitzer, hilarious national joke though he may be, says the real scandal is "that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full."

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

(Via Vu.) Spitzer also speaks about the (misdirected) "populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly," which is a topic I just finished writing an email about. My interlocutor had a good line I'll just go ahead and quote:

Every problem we have is met with demands for a kind of vengeful series of recriminations instead of a focus on what public policy should focus on - the institutional framework that allows/encourages people to behave in a certain way and that leads to disastrous results.

Obama needs to channel this rage into a movement for systemic reform of capitalism, not just pump capital into institutions that have been broken for not years but decades. Otherwise, he and we will find ourselves in this same place soon enough, with all same players crying "Oops!" again.

* Dan Hind has a somewhat similar take, via Lenin's Tomb, though it must be said that both links are instructive examples of how difficult it can be to divide justice from vengeance in times like these. What I like about Hind in particular is the way he traces the crisis to what I agree is a major point of origin, the explosion of public and consumer debt beginning in the early 1970s, which didn't "just happen" but which was, again, the result of a system of incentives instituted by those in power. The credit crisis is a symptom of a much larger disease; Obama needs to think much bigger than he seems to be.

* Dr. Bluman has some thoughts about legality and fraudulent conveyance in the comments to a post I keep pushing down the page.

The company claims any failure by the government to [back all of AIG's obligations] would have catastrophic consequences. This claim is exaggerated. Serious consideration should be given to forcing AIG's partners in derivative transactions -- which are mainly buyers of credit default swaps from the company -- to take a substantial haircut.

More on AIG: "AIG Still Isn't Too Big to Fail," by Harvard Law's Lucian Bebchuck. Via Josh Marshall, who provocatively writes:

These are derivatives, in many cases high-stakes bets on underlying assets the purchasers did not themselves own. So, you insure your house for fire damage. And I insure it too, even though it's not my house. Your house burns down and you get the policy payout to rebuild your house. But I just want my money because a deal's a deal. I have no problem with old-fashioned gambling. And if people want to play with their money this way, I've got no problem with that. But if the casino itself goes bust, don't come to me and talk about having moral claim on your winnings that I need to cover.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is apparently going after the AIG bonuses. He's already got some details on who got paid:

The highest bonus was $6.4 million, and six other employees received more than $4 million, according to Mr. Cuomo. Fifteen other people received bonuses of more than $2 million, and 51 people received bonuses between $1 million and $2 million, Mr. Cuomo said. Eleven of those who received “retention” bonuses of $1 million or more are no longer working at A.I.G., including one who received $4.6 million, he said.

Meanwhile, Josh Marshall has been looking into various claims that failure to pay the bonuses could constitute a "default event" under the ISDA Master Agreement that would trigger AIG's trillion-dollar liabilities immediately. Sounds as if that's not probably not the case, though Geithner may have been fooled. (Or "fooled.")

When are these people going to jail?

27 Ways of Looking at the Financial Crisis. At FlowingData.

Saturday night's all right for blogging. After the first few links we even get to some stuff that's not about Watchmen.

* Walter Chaw's Watchmen review goes to many of the same places as my own, albeit in a more thoroughgoing way:

Freeze any frame of the film and find in it the panel that inspired it. With each section separated by grabs from the covers of the comic book's initial run, fanboys should have no quarrel with the fidelity of the piece--but the reaction to the picture will likely continue to be fairly muted, as devotees of the graphic novel didn't exactly appreciate it for its slickness and sexiness. I'd hazard that what attracted people to the book is that Moore's vision is one of absolute respect for the power of the image in molding human history. Snyder does seem to understand this in restaging the Kennedy assassination with one of his masked heroes as the culprit, drawing a line pure and true from Zapruder's inauguration of film as history to the comic-book medium's inextricable hold on the collective imagination-in-formation. The power of Moore's work is that it takes the divine and, like Milton's mission, explains the ways of these gods to men in terms that men can understand: they're corrupted by their power and governed by their avarice and the essential baseness of being human. This sentiment is all but jettisoned, alas, by the time Snyder recasts the pathetic victories of sexually-reawakened schlub Night Owl (Patrick Wilson) and paramour Silk Spectre (a severely overmatched Malin Akerman) as triumphant victories. Watchmen--filthy with its director's now-trademark ramping technique--sees itself as a superhero adaptation of a human book. The failures of these characters are just weaknesses our übermenchen must overcome, not the foibles and hubris that lead to their downfall--and ours.

Vu and kate both get at this deep in the comments to my original post as well.

* Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman says Watchmen is a "great film" and then spends the rest of the post explaining why it isn't.

* The headline reads, "Watchmen's first day disappoints." You're telling me!

* John Scalzi argues for a statute of limitations on spoilers.

Television: One week (because it’s generally episodic, and that’s how long you have until the next episode)

Movies: One year (time enough for everyone to see it in the theaters, on DVD and on cable)

Books: Five years (because books don’t reach nearly as many people at one time)

To my mind the whole "spoiler" hysteria needs to end; suspense is an overrated aesthetic in all but the rarest cultural productions.

* Husband, Wife Unaware They Are A Comedy Team.

* I suffered from this for years without knowing there was a name for it besides "being a college student."

* Another picture of a grown-up Calvin and Hobbes for your collection.

* The economy and literature: Will this crisis produce a Gatsby? More at MeFi.

* Does the financial crisis signal the end of neo-liberalism? David Harvey on the credit crunch and class.

* Abandoned places: a LiveJournal community. (Thanks, Eli!)

* And attention would-be humanities grad students: there are no jobs. None.

Whoops, missed a day somehow. (Even grad students get busy sometimes.) Here's a few links I've been saving; scroll all the way to the bottom for your daily dose of Watchmen panic.

* One of our most beloved blog denizens has started up a March Madness blog. Add it to your feeds immediately.

* Executing someone on their birthday may seem hilarious, but actually it's sort of cold. (via Srinivas)

* Same goes for trading your minor-league pitcher for ten bats. Via MeFi.

* All about experimental philosophy.

* The Daily Show's evisceration of CNBC was amazing last night. Also, incredibly well-deserved.

* Forget man-on-dog: will gay marriage start us down the slippery slope to human/robot marriages? It could happen right here in North Carolina. Only Steve Benen sees where this really leads: man/dog/robot/robot-dog polygamy.

* Two games: Linear RPG and Exploit, the second from amateur-game-creator of the moment, Gregory Weir, (The Majesty of Colors, Bars of Black and White).

* “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.” Vanity Fair has a huge feature on the Icelandic financial collapse that really makes for fascinating reading. More discussion at MetaFilter. (via my dad)

Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

* When will voters start blaming Obama for the economy? Nate Silver has the numbers suggesting that will start in 18 or so months, though I bet that timeline could halve or worse that as people grow frustrated with prolonged economic hardship.

* What Obama could learn from Watchmen: Matt Yglesias reports on Ronald Reagan's own Ozymandian scheme for global unity.

* And Jacob sends along your hope-crushing Watchmen reviews for the day.

J. Hoberman in Village Voice: The philosopher Iain Thomson (who valiantly brought Heidegger's Being and Time to bear on his reading of Watchmen) maintained that Moore not only deconstructed the idea of comic book super-heroism but pulverized the very notion of the hero—and the hero-worship that comics traditionally sell. For all its superficial fidelity, Snyder's movie stands Moore's novel on its head, trying to reconstruct a conventional blockbuster out of those empty capes and scattered shards.

David Edelstein, New York Magazine: ...this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

Meanwhile, Steve Benen and Adam Serwer take a stand against Anthony Lane on behalf of geeks everywhere.

For those who aren't already regular radio or podcast listeners, it's worth noting that this week's This American Life is another good show on the economy and the banking crisis. Until the next episode goes up over the weekend you can download this one for free; the previous two installments, The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show on the Economy, you've got to pay for you can stream for free but have to pay to download. (Thanks, Eric!)

V-Day links.

* I feel stimulated, and I bet you do too. Here's Arlen Specter with your partisan post-mortem.

"When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today," said Specter, "one of my colleagues said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' My Republican colleague said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' I said, 'Are you going to vote with me?' And he said, 'No, I might have a primary.' And I said, 'Well, you know very well I'm going to have a primary.'" [...]

"I think there are a lot of people in the Republican caucus who are glad to see this action taken without their fingerprints, without their participation," he said.

Your modern Republican party.

* The headline reads, "Large Banks Are on the Brink of Insolvency." You heard it from Brad Miller first.

* Heath Ledger fans want the Joker retired in honor of Ledger's turn in the makeup.

"When Michael Jordan retired, they withdrew the number 23 jersey as an honor. It’s the same thing with Heath.”

Yes, it's exactly the same.

* Space debris. Via Cynical-C.

* Images from Watchmen. Clock's at 11:59...



* Paul Auster, science fiction writer.

* Joss Whedon, cultural humanist.

* And Henry David Thoreau, vegetarian.

Vegetarian ideas figured prominently in 19th-century intellectual circles. Though practicing vegetarians remained outside the mainstream, as they do today, vegetarianism itself was intriguing, its arguments compelling. Thoreau, for instance, was not a strict vegetarian, but he did believe that the vegetarian diet was “the destiny of the human race.” Not because animals were cute and fuzzy and therefore ought to be saved from brutality, but because they were dirty and difficult and expensive. “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness,” he wrote in Walden, “and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.” You can stand around in the forest, waiting to spear, skin, and roast a bunny for your next meal, but…why?

North Carolina's Rep. Brad Miller (the Fightin' 13th!) is trying to figure out what the banks are up to. More at MetaFilter.

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that embezzlement is "the most interesting of crimes" for an economist. Embezzlement is almost always eventually discovered, but for a time results in "a net increase in psychic wealth," when the embezzler "has his gain" and the victim doesn’t miss it. Galbraith called the undiscovered and therefore unfelt loss "the bezzle."

According to Krugman, the stock in banks that are solvent only by virtue of an "optimistic" valuation of their assets "isn’t totally worthless," but the stock’s value is "entirely based on the hope that shareholders will be rescued by a government bailout." The "huge gift to banks shareholders at taxpayer expense," Krugman said, was likely to be "disguised as ‘fair value’ purchases of toxic assets."

So maybe insolvent banks are stalling for time, hoping that the economy turns around, that home prices will go back up, or that sick borrowers will get well and unemployed borrowers will find jobs. Maybe they want to enjoy the "psychic wealth" of paper solvency for as long as possible.

And maybe they’re hoping we’ll buy their bezzle.

Lots of links to dump today. Here's a preliminary batch...

* There's a new Springsteen album out today, which all right-thinking people have undoubtedly already purchased on iTunes. Slate and Salon both have Boss-centric coverage in celebration.

* The banking crisis has brought down the government of Iceland. More here.

* At one point, The Simpsons was funny. Eye on Springfield has proof. Via Kottke.

* Regional pizza styles of the U.S.

* LEGO Vipers. Oh, BSG, I can't stay mad at you.

* Favorite photos of George W. Bush. My favorite is probably this one, which I've linked to before, but they all have their charms.



You're doing it wrong...

How does this happen? How can the person in charge of assessing Wall Street firms not have the tools to understand them? Is the S.E.C. that inept? Perhaps, but the problem inside the commission is far worse — because inept people can be replaced. The problem is systemic. The new director of risk assessment was no more likely to grasp the risk of Bernard Madoff than the old director of risk assessment because the new guy’s thoughts and beliefs were guided by the same incentives: the need to curry favor with the politically influential and the desire to keep sweet the Wall Street elite.

And here’s the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has been done to change that, or any of the other bad incentives that led us here in the first place.

The end of the financial world as we know it, in the New York Times. Widely linked this morning, but I first saw it on MetaFilter.

Nobody is happy about the terms of the Citi group bailout, which appears to be a simple handover of cash with no strings attached at all. When we give a company $7 billion more than it's actually worth because it's "too big to fail," that shouldn't be giving anymore—that should be buying. Mark Thoma has your link roundup, with more commentary from Matt Yglesias, Paul Krugman, Kevin Drum, and Marginal Revolution. The word of the day, you'll find, is "ugh."