manunderstress.com

Amazing debut from this band.

Dude, if you haven’t checked out the latest Mastodon masterpiece, Crack the Skye, then you needs to get a checkin’…this shit is EPIC. If you don’t like metal than beat it, pussy. (Apologies for the MTV embed with 15 sec commercial, couldn’t find it without.)

South Park hit a home run last night with a hilarious deconstruction of the economic crisis.

Part Two
Part Three

One would think that shiny interwebs technology would have created a revolution in event calendaring technology to some degree. But even with sites like upcoming.org, so many clubs (most!) fail to offer their show listings as some sort of subscribable feed, even something as simple as an RSS feed on their website. 529, the latest greatest addition to the EATL club scene has a website with just what you need: a google calendar feed of events. Why all clubs don’t do this is beyond me. It’s called facilitating business. Help me get to your club to see music and drink drinks. Help me help you make money!

Update: Here are instructions for embedding a google calendar on a webpage. No doubt this could be tweaked in a variety of ways to your liking.

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

As an advocate of disaster tourism, culture hacking, and the special olympics, I fully support the heckling and harassment of the AIG’s high echelon criminals, and the free market blowback rage that is currently threatening their lives. Relax, right? All laissez-faire economists should realize this is simply how the market corrects itself. Fuck with the people’s money and the people fuck you back. Eventually. We NEED to send this message, Godfather style. I’m talking horse head in the bed, ears and fingers of loved ones in the mail, flaming piles of shit on the doorstep, whatever. All of it.

A message to AIG from the Godfather:

On a side note it kills me how the media is labeling all of this public outrage as some sort of “populist” revolt. Since when has demanding accountability become synonymous with populism?

I have latched on to the GOP-are-statist-hypocrites meme and I am not letting go. I fucking love it when Libertarians rip on the GOP! If the Republitards were in power right now we would have a similarly sized stimulus package with a different name. Something like, “Heterosexuals, Guns n’ Freedom- Why Do You Hate America Act?”

Under Bush and a Republican Congress we had an explosion of growth on all fronts: spending that put Lyndon Johnson to shame, huge deficits and a doubling of the national debt, corporate bailouts, further centralization of education, protectionism, expansion of Medicare, increased regulation, undeclared wars, civil-liberties violations and other unchecked executive power, and more. Bush did not veto a single spending bill in eight years. His cutting of tax rates in 2001 and 2003 has to be judged in the context of growing spending. Milton Friedman pointed out that the level of spending, not taxation, is the truer gauge of the government burden. The money has to come from somewhere. Removing it from the economy through borrowing is as economically damaging as taxation — more so when you figure that the government will perpetrate inflation to manage the debt.

That was bad enough, but the Republicans added rank hypocrisy to the mix by claiming to favor free markets.

There is a lot of speculation that nerds contributed to the global financial meltdown with all their fancy pants statistical models that didn’t work. Neeeeeeerrrrrds!

The story goes something like this: The nerds emigrated from physics and mathematics to wall street for better paying jobs and fancy cars. The banks needed them to do their modeling wizardry with derivatives, so that the banks would know what and when to buy and sell, to make money and all that. This is called risk management, and the nerds were renamed quants. Meanwhile, the SEC was wooed by these new computer models, they seemed so sciencey after all, and began turning a blind eye to the whole process. Without proper regulation, they let them play with their derivatives, over-leveraging themselves in the the process with risky debt. Life was good for a while the money was flowing, as high-risk mortgage bundles were sold halfway across the world rated as triple A securities. The bad alchemy was working. Then came a little bump in the road. The housing bubble burst. The bubble that wasn’t supposed to burst. The computer models didn’t take this into account. Who’s fault was it? The quants? After all, their models were wrong. Only the quants and risk management officers will be the first ones to tell you that risk management is hardly a science. And they had already warned the Kings of Corporate America, who turned a blind eye with the government, and kept over-leveraging themselves.

What have we learned? What we already know. Risk science is hardly a science, and risk scientists will the first ones to admit it. Don’t blame a quant when there is a king in the room. The banks knew the risky mess they were getting themselves into all along.

The bizzaro film ‘Holy Mountain‘ was playing at 529 last night after Marnie Stern played. A definite candidate for drug movie night.

Sadly, the worst part of Battlestar Galactica is what most people celebrate about it, the humanity, the overreaching emotions, the so very obvious, forced allegories. They way overdo it. If you watch the show and witnessed Adama’s 17th emotional breakdown last week you know what I mean. More Cylon trickery and less human-cylon reconciliation bullshit! But fuck it, maybe there is something the U.N. can learn from a TV show.

On March 17, there will be a “Battlestar” retrospective at the U.N. in New York and a panel discussion of how the show examined issues such as “human rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith,” according to Sci Fi.
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The panel will be moderated by “Battlestar” fan Whoopi Goldberg.