Deep Water
Portishead
Happy New Year!
December 2011
“An article last Sunday about Mitt Romney’s wealth described incorrectly the horses Mr. Romney bought for his wife, Ann. They are warmblood horses, not thoroughbreds.”
—
“One thing I find paradoxical is that highly numerate people, people in the engineering, business and technical fields (Mr Marks writes about the tech industry), are often most reluctant to consider social problems from a statistical point of view, and prefer to consider them as individual moral or motivational stories. We have a curve composed of 150m dots that is becoming steeper and more parabolic. Go down to Occupy Wall Street, and you’ll find a lot of cultural-studies majors working for environmentalist nonprofits who support changing systemic rules to flatten the slope. Go into the financial-institution office buildings that surround them, and you’ll find a lot of math majors devising computer models for risk-weighting assets who think the dots on the bottom end should try harder to get into the top end. It’s weird.”
—
He's A Mighty Good Leader
Beck
When will this Beck return?
“From Rockefeller Center’s underground concourse, I rose by escalator to glimpse the statue of Atlas, kneeling in welcome. Was it enough? Somehow, no. As I had three blocks of safe passage in the cozy Art Deco warren, I impulsively decided to carry on—all the way to Central Park, if possible.”
—Just did a portion of this.
This Talking Is Only Bravado →
cordjefferson.tumblr.com
If I was a poor black kid I would first and most importantly work to make sure I got the best grades possible. I would make it my #1 priority to be able to read sufficiently. I wouldn’t care if I was a student at the worst public middle school in the worst inner city. Even the worst have their…
Well.
I feel this warrants a full, articulate, evidence-laden response, if only to recover the Forbes name slightly. But I’m way behind on a magazine piece. And I cannot.
So I will leave you with this snarky response, this seminal paper, and this Jay Electronica lyric.
Coffee Shop Just Changed Music From Liturgy To Bon Iver
Now headphones.
Tennessee
Silver Jews
We’re off to the land of club soda unbridled.
“I am not going to light my hair on fire. I am not going to sign those silly pledges, like everyone else on that [debate] stage has done. I’m not going to go to a Don Trump debate. There are some things I’m just not going to do.”
—
Jon Huntsman (via theatlantic)
…Except reverse my position on climate change. I’ll do that.
“
What Herr Hitler failed to do in 1923 cannot even be attempted now. Even apart from the fact that the severest trade depression is less productive of a revolutionary spirit than such catastrophic inflation as Germany experienced in 1923…the strongest protection of the State is the unity which exists among its highest executive organs…
All this does not mean that the tide of National Socialism has subsided…Everything, of course, will depend upon the course of business, which seems recently to have shown some signs of improvement.
” —The Economist, February 21, 1931.
Oh, hey, we’re not good at predicting anything. (via)
A member of Congress has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate “troubling reports” of possible misconduct in police officers’ treatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City →
thedailybeast.com
Today in Headlines We Never Thought We Would Actually See
Really? Because this is the Member of Congress who co-introduced the End Racial Profiling Act of 2010 (it didn’t go anywhere) and a bill to allow gay folks to sponsor partners for citizenship (also, nada).
