Matt Ulman

“We had an old 30’s illustration showing a hairy ape-like creature that George kinda liked.” … “We started out with the idea of him looking sort of like a lemur, and then I did one creature that had breasts down the front of him. I removed the breasts because it wasn’t to be a female, and I put a bandolier on there and gave him a weapon.”

The fascinating story of how George Martin invented Chewie

I’m not going to claim to have invented this, but more and more people are starting to talk about it.

The true problem is the return of neo-liberal thought and policy that is dominating debate, and the financial and political elites that are using this return to push their own destructive agendas.

He then raised his fist in the air and left the stage.

They’ll get what they deserve, those nose-spiting cheeseheads.

Frankly, I’m not sure how wonkish the debate about this article is, but it’s both hilarious and disturbing.   The fact that our press, the people who are supposed to keep us safe from abuse, can’t even understand first-year concepts makes me fear for the future.  This from a source that isn’t supposed to be biased and claims some knowledge of the subject (Business and Economics Editor).  From the mainstream source of The Letter from Birmingham Jail.

And the best part is that she continues to be wrong in the comments of this story.  Very, very wrong.  Treating savings like it only counts if you have a passbook, not as an economic concept that can be positive or negative… that’s what the average person on the street would do, but it’s no way to lead a technical debate.

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.