Sunday links.

* More well-deserved heat is being directed at the Obama administration for its inscrutably sluggish stance on gay rights: this time it's about the Defense of Marriage Act.

* The Dow has erased its 2009 losses.

* New revelations of HIV in the porn industry.

* The great unwinding: Michigan roads shifting from pavement back to gravel.

* 'Fallen Princesses.'

Melodies derived from stock charts. Via Amalle.

Ways you can tell I bought Apple stock today: Steve Jobs just announced he's taking a six-month medical leave. Best wishes to him and his family.

Other ways to restore confidence: 'To Raise Confidence in the Market, Bush & Cheney Should Announce They Will Resign As of November 14, 2008.' You had me at "resign."

Bailout v. 2.0: The Treasury looks to be changing its bailout strategy after its initial actions failed to significantly loosen the credit markets: it's now planning on taking an ownership stake in U.S. banks. Will it work? Only my IRA knows for sure.

Although I have too-little understanding of the economics involved, something must be said on the historic $700B+ bailout of the banking sector, an event so significant that it may well be used in the future to date the debut of a new stage of capitalism in which government and multinational corporations are so entwined they are literally impossible to tell apart. But I'm pretty outclassed here: all I know is that I'd like to see a Second Great Depression avoided and I'm willing to make significant short-term sacrifices in order to see that happen. That said, most of what I'm reading from left and center-left economists suggests to me that this bailout won't see that goal accomplished and will in fact only make things worse:

* Krugman: "I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets."

* Sebastian Mallaby: "With truly extraordinary speed, opinion has swung behind the radical idea that the government should commit hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to purchasing dud loans from banks that aren't actually insolvent. As recently as a week ago, no public official had even mentioned this option. Now the Treasury, the Fed and congressional leaders are promising its enactment within days. The scheme has gone from invisibility to inevitability in the blink of an eye. This is extremely dangerous."

* Robert Reich: "The Bailout of All Bailouts is a Bad Idea."

* William Greider in The Nation: "If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public--all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims."

* Calculated Risk: "Think of a drunk gambler at a slot machine. He starts with $100 and slowly loses. Every now and then he wins some money, but he keeps putting the coins back into the slot until he has lost everything. That is how this plan will work."

* Brad DeLong: "There is no way in hell that anybody should give any extra power to any Treasury Secretary chosen by John McCain. I beg the Democrats in congress: write a bill that makes sense."

* Atrios: "Any member of Congress who looks at the plan to give Hank unchecked power to transfer $700 billion from the Treasury to his friends' companies and has any reaction other than 'You've got to be fucking kidding me' does not deserve to hold office."

While you were sleeping, capitalism apparently ended. I've been keenly aware of the emptiness of most free-market rhetoric, but nationalizing banks goes far beyond what I'd ever thought was in the realm of the possible. Our economy is entirely, astoundingly broken, just another gift of eight years of radical Republican misrule.

Elsewhere in the news and internets:

* The House has passed its energy bill over the objections of the Republicans, which Bush has threatened to veto. (See this post from last night for more on this.) Why the veto? Because it actually takes the Republicans up on their empty "all of the above" rhetoric. Right now this looks like some good political jujitsu from the Democrats—perhaps the first time I've ever had occasion to type that particular sentence.

* Harper's has opened up its David Foster Wallace archives in memoriam.

* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.

* In a nearly exact inverse to the Citibank theft story the other day, a banker has been caught stealing $14 million dollars from the Royal Bank of Scotland, giving it to needy customers.

* Colbert's getting his own Christmas special.

* Duke's own Fredric Jameson has received the Holberg Prize.

* All American kids play video games: 99% of boys and 94% of girls, according to a recent study.

* Obama's putting out a long, two-minute ad on the economy. That's all well and good, but he should be running ads like the one Ezra proposes on Social Security night and day.

* Tantalizing news about the Chevy Volt.

* And the always amazing Big Picture blog has photographs of the aftermath of Hurricane Ike.

While I've been finishing up my absurdly busy weekend, Wall Street has apparently collapsed around our ears.

Warren Buffet recently made a one million dollar bet that a hedge fund "won't beat the returns of S&P 500 after their extremely hefty fees are accounted for." The bet was made using the Long Bet mechanism set up and operated by the Long Now Foundation.

Of course, we're talked about the more scammy aspects of hedge funds before. Via Boing Boing.

* Cracked has 7 insane conspiracies that actually happened.

* MetaFilter has a fun post on irrationalities in the stock market like the January effect, the weekend effect, and the Halloween indicator.

* Via Boing Boing, Scientific American tackles the science of orgasm.

But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.

Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”

We here at Gerry Canavan Industries are watching this research with great interest, as our G Spotter™ and CliMax 3000™ products have not yet caught on in the way we might have hoped.

* I forgot to link to Waxy's great compilation of obsessive fanboy supercuts, including such gems as every "What?" ever uttered on Lost, every "Dude" and F-bomb in The Big Lebowski, and every murder from the Sopranos. Below: Sen. Clay Davis.

A brief history of the liquidity crisis, in cartoon form.

Via Matt Yglesias and everywhere else, this is why I'm glad I have no money:

It’s just been announced that JP Morgan will buy Bear Stearns for $2 a share, implying a value of about $250 million. Given that the company headquarters is said to be worth about $1.2 billion, that gives the BS banking business a value of negative $1 billion. And that’s only after the Fed agreed to take on $30 billion worth of toxic waste from the BS portfolio, politely described as “less-liquid assets.”

Bear Stearns, Wall Street's fifth-biggest investment bank, had opened at $60 a share on Thursday.

There's much more at Huffington Post, MetaFilter, and elsewhere, including Alan Greenspan's claim that this is the worst financial crisis since World War II. And he should know, he helped cause it.