Saturday night, and I can't stop reloading the blogs to see how health care is doing. Image at the right via kate.

* The White House press corps does not believe you have not heard of V.

* Democratic congresswomen shouted down by Republicans. Matt has the video, and it's pretty astounding.

* Krugman: "There’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980."

* Kurt Vonnemutt.

* Ladies and gentlemen, Mars. Related: 1924, the year Navy radiographers were asked to listen for communication from Mars.

The news from the economy remains pretty grim.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.

Read Paul Krugman.

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

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.'

Thursday again! How does this keep happening?

* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.

* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.

* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor's office might actually kill this; very glad it didn't.

* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.

* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller's assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.

* Obama speaks in Cairo.

* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media's continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.

* The recession: a global view. It's important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.

* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards's (and later Hillary Clinton's) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.

* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.

American Stranger has a report on Left Forum 2009 that segues into a smart discussion of the future of American ideology.

Monday morning.

* Following up on this post from Sunday: Rahm Emanuel says there will be no Bush-era prosecutions. OpenLeft wants to know whether Eric Holder is "a Gonzales-like lackey" in light of his apparent willingness to allow political judgments to influence DoJ policy.

* And speaking of political judgments influencing DoJ policy, this Rep. Harman story is pretty unbelievable, even for the Bush administration.

There are a lot of hairy details on this one. But the gist is that an NSA wiretap recorded Harman in a conversation with a "suspected Israeli agent" in which Harman allegedly agreed to use her influence with the DOJ to get them to drop the AIPAC spy case in exchange for help lobbying then-Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee -- a position she ended up not getting.

...

The story suggests that the tapes show Harman crossed the line. And the gears were in motion to open a full blown investigation. But then Alberto Gonzales intervened and shutdown the whole thing.

Why? Here's where it gets into the realm of bad novel writing: because Gonzales (and the White House) needed Harman to go to bat for them on the warrantless wiretaping story that the New York Times was then on the brink of publishing.

Find me one honest Congressperson.

* The Hollywood Reporter says the chances of a Dollhouse renewal are 50/50. That's actually a lot better than I thought.

* Tuna projected to be wiped out by 2012.

* Maps from the recession.

Cultures of Recession
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Hosted by The Program in Literature, Duke University
November 20 & 21, 2009
http://www.duke.edu/~gc24/culturesofrecession.html

Keynote Speaker: Stanley Aronowitz (CUNY), author of How Class Works and Just Around The Corner: The Paradox of a Jobless Recovery

Around 5:00 AM on Nov. 28—the day after Thanksgiving—a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by shoppers eager to participate in the store’s annual “Black Friday” sales blitz. On Dec. 1, after three months of violent upheaval in the banking sector, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the U.S. had been in economic recession for almost a year. On Dec. 5, a group of mostly Hispanic workers staged a sit-in at Republic Windows and Doors after being laid off from the Chicago-based factory with only three days’ notice. Throughout mid-December 2008, critics lauded the “tightness” and “economy” of Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, an 80-minute long independent film featuring a young woman, a dog, the Pacific Northwest, and not much else. Meanwhile, the country of Iceland—designated a terrorist state by Britain in an effort to freeze some of its assets—has declared bankruptcy. Widespread economic and institutional breakdown has resulted in a new wave of urban radicalism spreading across Greece, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. In China, mass deprivation and joblessness riots have escalated as authorities struggle to prop up a falling GDP. Despite unprecedented bailout and stimulus spending by the Bush and Obama administrations, the U.S. stock market has receded to levels last seen in 1997, with the unemployment rate crossing 10% in some states.

This conference invites graduate students from humanities and social science disciplines to think about how the idea and experience of recession—a sustained national or global-economic downturn that makes itself visible through declines in industrial production, employment, sales, and income—frames the cultural life and livelihood of affected communities, places, and governing bodies. This shift in communal and political makeup opens space for discussion about the impact of recession on cultural forms. What sort of cultural phenomena—artistic, political, or otherwise—find expression during times of recession? Are there features of recession that seem to transcend history or geography? Are certain socioeconomic climates more or less poised to give birth to recession—and what sort of political positionalities or modes of thought find themselves competing to “solve” recessive crises? How does recession change the parameters of social and political institutions? Within the governing structure, how do power dynamics shuffle as blame is distributed between institutions and people? How might the idea of recession compare to related concepts like depression, inflation, deflation, unemployment, crisis, or overproduction? Can we identify specific literary or artistic forms, motifs, and icons that emerge during times of recession?

Possible panel or paper topics
• Recession and cultures of work
• Recession and the global economy
• Recession and the language of loss, failure, or decline
• Recession and establishment discourse
• Recession, labor struggle, and “class warfare”
• Recession and the banking-sector bailout
• Recession and debt
• Recession and the politics of greed or waste
• Recession, crisis theory, and the logic of capital
• Recession and radical political resurgences
• Recession and nostalgia
• Recession and consumer culture
• Historical recessions: the post-war ‘40s, the 1970s, Japan’s Lost Decade, etc.
• Recession in an age of Facebook, blogs, and “instant” information
• Recession and cultural production
• Recession and the politics of religion
• Recession and the politics of race, gender, and/or sexuality
• Recession and environmental/energy crises
• Recession and the university

Please send a 250-500 word abstract to culturesofrecession@gmail.com by August 31, 2009.

ORGANIZERS
Sara Appel
Gerry Canavan
Alex Greenberg
Lisa Klarr
Ryan Vu

CONTACT
culturesofrecession@gmail.com

I was going to follow up that Kal Penn post with a more substantive post, but I decided to take a nap instead. Advantage: Canavan!

* The U.S. dollar as Ponzi scheme. Via Alex Greenberg. See also: The Investment Delusion and Money and the Crisis of Civilization.

* Paging Superman: Barack Obama calls for a world without nuclear weapons. More at Attackerman.

* Things more likely to kill you than terrorist attacks.

* Two visits to the Mets' new Citi Field. I still miss Shea.

Ryan sends along an etymology of the word "recession."

Before the 1930s, any serious economic downturn was called a depression. The term "recession" didn't come into common use until "depression" became burdened by memories of the 1930s, said Robert McElvaine, a history professor at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss.

"When the economy collapsed again in 1937, they didn't want to call that a new depression, and that's when recession was first used," he said. "People also use 'downward blip.' Alan Greenspan once called it a 'sideways waffle.'"

Raleigh is #1 and Durham #3 in Forbes's list of top cities for business and careers. Will Durham never climb out of Raleigh's terrible shadow?

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.

Post-apocalyptic moves vs. post-apocalyptic reality.

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

Time for a quick linkdump.

* Even Lex Luthor needs a bailout.

* Two for fans of last night's comics archetype times table: A Sketch Towards a Taxonomy of Meta-Desserts and Fun to Draw.

* Is this the end of capitalism? David Harvey and The Nation's Alexander Cockburn report. (This time for sure.)

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!)

Sunday, Sunday.

* The New Yorker has fiction from the late great David Foster Wallace as well as discussion of his unfinished final novel. (There's also a profile of Rahmbo.) Discussion at MeFi.

* Even more six-word science fiction. More at MetaFilter.

* The twenty-first century: an FAQ from Charlie Stross.

* Hypothesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists. If there's no porn, the tool doesn't work. If there's no activists, it doesn't work well. (via)

* Maybe Dollhouse shouldn't have been as series: io9 clues into the central problem facing American television production, open-ended perpetual serialization. Discussion at Whedonesque.

* Sebelius to HHS.

* The formula that killed Wall Street. Some talk at MetaFilter.

* Anime Peanuts. More along these lines at MeFi.

* Reverse-plot movies. Reverse-plot games.

* Aside from their nihilism and incompetence, the biggest problem facing Republicans is that their mythology has become too difficult for the average person to follow. It’s like a comic book “universe” where the writers have been straining to maintain continuity for decades — all the ever-more-fine-grained details are really satisfying for the hardcore fans, but intimidating for potential new readers, who are left asking, “Trickle-what? Chappaquid-who? What’s that about Obama’s birth certificate? Obama’s European now? I thought he was a Muslim! Darn it, I’ll never catch up!”

I suggest, therefore, that the Republicans use their current time of wandering in the wilderness to do their own version of Crisis on Infinite Earths. They wouldn’t have to ditch their favorite heroes, of course — we could also be treated to limited series like Rush Limbaugh: Year One, Newt Gingrich: Year One, etc. They can reboot all the plotlines, free the beloved characters of the chains of continuity, and then do it again, and yet again — until finally they find success in some genre other than politics, much as comic book superheroes have moved on to the movies. GOP: Year One.

* See also: the GOP's voice and intellectual force, Rush Limbaugh.

* Forget Switzerland: Is Ireland the next Iceland? Don't forget your recession tourism.

* Slowly but surely, here comes marijuana decriminalization/legalization. Don't forget your revenue stream.

* Imprisoned fifteen-year-old beaten by police officer. On tape.

* And put aside that old question of "justifying" the humanities: the real problem is that for much of the past decade, the culture isn't listening to what the humanities have to teach.