Matt Ulman

I’ve had this post as a draft for a few weeks, just never had the time to finish it, but now something’s come up that makes me want to finish:

Lost Decade Looming?

Krugman talks about the commentary masquerading as news, and it makes me wonder: I don’t really have a lot of faith in the media, so I assume that commentary masquerading as news is generally just the regurgitation of talking points.  And what if the ‘deficit / inflation hawks’ are intentionally setting us up for a longer recession, one that hopefully lasts until 2012.  It’s a scary concept, this politicization of economics, and not in the traditional way.  Economics is politics at nearly every level and certainly the macro, but the idea that one side would intentionally misread the current economy in order to gain politically at the cost of the macroeconomy… that really frightens me.  Maybe I’m naive but I didn’t think we were there, and I hope we’re not.

Which brings me to the post from a few weeks ago, prompted by this headline at the Huffington Post, the link to which I can no longer find:

Dems Have Fractious Meeting On Bank Reform, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes

I’m not a big reader of the HuffPo, or any of the political theater blogs, but sometimes a guy needs a break from whatever.  This pattern, Dems Have Fractious Meeting On X, May Weaken Bill To Win GOP Votes seems like a fools game.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone who pays attention to these things, but I can’t believe the Democrats are still falling for stuff like this. I mean, the fact is that the Republicans don’t want reform to succeed – they want (at the very least, see above) a costly political failure. Collaborating with them only means that X, whatever X is, is more likely to fail.

I had this idea a while ago, that in order to be a part of ‘something’, and especially to be in charge of ‘something’ you have to believe, at least on some level, that that ‘something’ should exist. It’s not the Secretary of Education’s job to decide if the Department of Education should exist, it’s their job to lead it.  The SEC fell down because the people running it didn’t believe in its mission. I understand that this rule can’t hold 100% or else we’ll end up with bloat evident even to the left, but there’s something to be said for the general idea.

How will more regulation, especially more watered down regulation, help that?

I’m really late to the synthetic cannabinoid debate, but now that I’ve caught on a bit I’m fascinated.

If I was a paranoid guy, the headline would be something like:

Chinese exporters in race with FDA to mask and vary the ingredients in synthetic copies of illegal drugs.

Of course the reality is a less scary, but no less interesting.  I admit that from time to time I’ve read up on the latest ‘fake’ drugs, and they’ve always seemed to be just that.  I didn’t expect anything different when I started hearing about K2, but the reality’s quite different.

Imagine a world where they took this opportunity to regulate and tax this stuff instead.  Rather than playing whack-a-mole with each new product, or watching a bunch of kids snarf down acetone laced and unevenly dosed infusions, the FDA instead removes the uncertainty and solves the deficit problem instead.

Philadelphia seems to have more than its share.

Seriously, this is just over the top.  Once was funny, but I’m starting to look forward to the day he moves to Sky so I can stop caring.

Nice to see a little more tooth in this shot, after all he went through he should show them off.

I love this picture.  The intensity, the anticipation of it falling below the crossbar, the beards (except on the Fin, of course), it’s like time stopped.

I hate Joe Thornton more than I should, but there’s something about a waste of talent that makes me angry.  Consider this:

The outside world continues to say that the Sharks will only go as far as you can carry them. How do you react to that?

“I don’t necessarily believe in that so much,” he said. “Everybody knows that the most important position is goaltending and Nabby’s a big part of this team. Todd has said in the past that it’s not one guy that’s going to carry the load, it’s going to be the team.”

It’s not my fault if we lose.

Louisville, KY – Who’s In?

Someone should write a tune about [Alex Chilton]. Then again, nah, that would be impossible. Or just plain stupid.

Westerberg in the NYT

It appears that the authors of my quote generator plugin (wp-quotes) are gone, and the last WP upgrade (or maybe earlier, possible I didn’t notice) broke the admin interface to the quote management tool.

Nothing serious, it looks like the call to generate the link in the admin has changed. There are other quote tools out there, but changing would require much more attention than a blog with zero readers deserves. So for anyone else that might be interested, the very simple fix (in plugins/wp-quotes.php) is:


23,24c23
< global $submenu;
< $submenu['edit.php'][40] = array(__('Quotes'), 8, 'edit-quotes.php');
---
> add_submenu_page('options-general.php', 'Random Quotes', 'Random Quotes', 8, 'edit-quotes.php', '');


You can find an updated archive if you want here.

On a slightly related note, I’ve now collected enough quotes that I’ll change the font color to something other than the background color.

Nothing I can say more than this, reminds me of when Bob died – living the life we loved them for living and it killed them:

Dear Frank Vandenbrouke,
I was a loyal member of your posse, and I will miss you. You were my rider. You were the one I wanted to see in the break away. Your courage and willingness to suffer inspired me, and your inability to live outside of that suffering broke my heart.

You were a cheater. There is no denying that. You doped, both for performance and for absolution. Personally, I don’t blame you for seeking glory, and neither do I blame you for chasing oblivion. I spend the better part of each and every day doing both. I don’t know what is worse. Feeling the pain… Or feeling nothing… If I could take a drug that would make me write like Samuel Beckett, I’d do it. I’d do it no matter what it cost me.

We asked you and the rest of the peloton to do the impossible. We asked that you not only ride 200 kilometers a day with your ass up and your head down, but we demanded that you do it without weakness, without faltering and without complaint, day after day, year after year. We asked that you do it for our pleasure, and for our entertainment, and when you buckled under the pressure, when you gave in and used drugs to improve both your ability to recover and your ability to perform, we crucified you.

In the end, I don’t think it was the drugs that made us turn on you… The cycling world is full of heroes that use dope. It’s not the cheating that bothers us. What bothers us is that you got caught.

Your wife left you. You got depressed. You drank too much. You took drugs, and now you’re dead. I, for one, think the world is a poorer place for it. Rest in peace Frank. I’m drinking whiskey tonight in your memory.

Punk rock is as punk rock does,

Gypsy