What a complete and utter asshat

 Just another Bush factoid re: how horrendously evil a president he was (from the NYT):

Mr. Bush frequently used signing statements to declare that provisions in the bills he was signing were unconstitutional constraints on executive power, claiming that the laws did not need to be enforced or obeyed as written. The laws he challenged included a torture ban and requirements that Congress be given detailed reports about how the Justice Department was using the counter-terrorism powers in the USA Patriot Act.

Dating back to the 19th century, presidents have occasionally signed a bill while declaring that one or more provisions were unconstitutional. Presidents began doing so more frequently starting with the Reagan administration.

But Mr. Bush broke all records, using signing statements to challenge about 1,200 bill sections over his eight years in office — about twice the number challenged by all previous presidents combined,[my emphasis] according to data compiled by Christopher Kelley, a political science professor at Miami University in Ohio.

Many of Mr. Bush's challenges were based on an aggressive view of the president's power, as commander-in-chief, to take actions he believed necessary to protect national security regardless of what Congress said in federal statutes.

Asshole.

When good intentions really just ain't enough

Maybe charging the president of Sudan with war crimes wasn't such a great idea after all (via the always on-point lenin's tomb)

damn

Slipped up on posting again. It's hard damnit, trying to be witty or intelligent. But that's at least part of the goal, to keep writing, keep the ideas flowing see what pops out.

So I guess...speaking of writing I've been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest which is amazingly well written and impressively agile in its ability to jump between narrative styles, points-of-views, dialects and ideas. Yesterday I read an  extended riff on telephones and the way people always doodle and only half-pay attention while talking on the phone yet somehow believe that the person on the opposite end of the line is paying them rapt attention, and the consequences therewith that would occur upon the widespread use of videophones. It was impressively conceived and written. And funny. Did I mention the books quite funny?

But...(there had to be a but) it all gets a bit tedious sometimes, the constant long winding witty monologues from desperate stoners or obsessive tennis players, indepth descriptions of quebec separatist movements or other bizarre fixations. Eventually it all starts to collapse a bit under the sheer monotonous weight of the thing; for realz, the book is hardcover size (though softcover) and over a thousand pages. Mostly this is due, for me at least, to a lack of narrative pull to the novel. Most of the reason for continuing to read on is just to see what other inventive situations Wallace thinks up, but the piecemeal, unconnected pick-n-mix style results in a sense that you could just start reading anywhere and not have too different an expereience. It's just more of the same, though it's a pretty good same. I figure at some point in time some over-arching theme might evolve, or some things will happen in succession that will build causally to something else, but right now I'm not seeing it. And it's taken me maybe 2-3 weeks to get 150 pages in and I don't know whether I'll be able to hang on long enough to see it.

The Big O

So I've known for a while that my opinion on Obama's policies has a distinct ordering, from best to worst:

1. Domestic Policy
2. Political Policy (aka what to do with the republicans)
3. Financial Policy (aka what to do with the banks)
4. Foreign Policy

Actually 2 & 3 could be swapped, I'm not too sure about those. But 1 & 4 are clear: I'm not at all pleased with the continued drone attacks on Pakistan, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, or the continued broad support of Israel's occupation of Palestine. But his just announced budget proposal is fantastic. Better healthcare, cuts to the military, increased funds for new energy research (and money to beef up the energy grid, which is a 100% necessary precondition for a lot of new energy types), carbon cap-and-trade initiatives, and increased taxes on the wealthy! I agree with every single one of these things. Of course he could go farther, but even these policies are so far removed from the previous administration's agenda one wonders if it's even the same country we're talking about here. Sometimes I am really happy that man is POTUS.

Also: hi Katy!

Mind = blown

Crucial article on how the financial collapse occurred. The crux of it being that apparently, the model that they were using to calculate the likelihood of defaults in a given mortgage-backed security really did assume that house prices would only ever keep going up! This is because the historical timescale that they were using to predict the likelihood of default only covered the last ten years, exactly the timespan of the housing boom. In other words the housing boom was used to predict the housing boom! That's incredible. And the fuckers knew this or else willfully ignored the warning signs, because they were making too much money selling mortgage-backed securities not to mention the CDS's that were used to model the fucking things in the first place. As you can tell, I'm kind of astounded by this, both by the stupidity of the whole thing and by the fact that this absurd feedback loop entirely makes sense.

Several parts of this relate back to what I was saying a couple posts ago: the power and danger of abstraction, the difficulty of keeping a complex software system stable. Because in one sense, this whole financial meltdown can be seen as a bug in the complex interconnected software system that is the global financial system. The system became too large to be easily understood as a whole; and then Li's equation entered, was quickly integrated to the point of total pervasiveness, but was subject to insufficiently rigorous testing and analysis. I guess, if there's a moral claim to made about where fault resides in this fiasco, it is there, in the lack of rigor and scrutiny that the interlocking system of mortgage-backed securities and CDS's were given. No one wanted to stop the money that was being made from these things.  It's almost capitalism's problem in a nutshell! The bankers, the modellers, the ratings agencies and the government regulators were unwilling to see past the massive profits to the massive pitfalls that lay ahead. Goddamn it was greed.

Fuck those fuckers if I lose my job because they couldn't admit to their own goddamn mistakes.

XXVII

It's my birthday! (he shouts through a large cardboard tube)

Signs that I'm now "of a certain age":
-My cooworker Chad says to me today, "By the time I was 27, I had a wife and kid!"
-Patrick Batemen, the psycho-killer/wall street big-wig played by Christian Bale in American Psycho is the same age as me
-A week ago my friends and I had an extended conversation about hair-loss.
-I have a real adult job and spend more time then I'd like to admit thinking about buying a condo.

The funny thing is you always end up growing older, so I'm sure in a few years I will look back at my concerns as a 27-year old and laugh at my innocence and envy my youth. C'est la vie. You can't really ever come to terms with aging because it isn't a neutral process that you can try to disengage yourself with. It's almost by definition a negative, subtractive process: one year closer to the grave, one year more of wear and tear on your body. All you have to measure against it is learning & wisdom; thankfully the brain works on a slightly longer timescale then the rest of your body, but even it too will begin to disintegrate eventually. And women have it even worse, let there be no doubt. At least we men can look up to people like george clooney who are allowed to grow old largely naturally and still be praised for his salt-and-pepper good looks. Women are done after about 21, if we're to take the pages of Us magazine seriously (which we all do on some level, much to our own horror).

The best we can do is accept the unacceptable because it's innevitable. We grow old, our bodies break down and we die. Sweet! That sounds awesome! :)

Google mapping

They should make up a name for obsessively scrolling around through google maps checking out sweet places in the satellite view. Cuz it's a real problem of mine, sometimes. Did you know they have the underwater topography as part of it now? It looks really sweet when you scroll out over the ocean and plus it makes it really easy to find ultra-remote random islands in the middle of the pacific ocean and such. So many candidates for the Lost island! Jeez Widmore, it's not that hard to find the island, just use google maps!

Workin' for the Man

So I work for a bank, right? I like to say I work for a software company owned by a bank, but since it's a wholly owned subsidiary of said bank then really, who am I kidding? I work for a bank, a big bank. A fuckoff big American bank. The kind of bank that gets called up in front the US Congress to explain just what the fuck they think they're doing with all that goddamn money. I'm not gonna name names just to avoid random bad-luck googling (especially given todays Metro front page story about a bus driver fired for keeping a blog), but if you know me you know the bank, and if you don't know me...wait you don't know me and you're reading my blog? Who the fuck are you?

So yeah, the bank thing. It's weird, reading about your company in the news, following random internet people speculating on your company's outlook on Google finance, or for that matter, watching your company's stock plummet or rise on a daily basis. Weird because it's so amazingly far removed from my day-to-day work life, completely detached from my influence, yet at the same time very real in it's influence. News story about layoffs...yeah seen those before...then the guy down the hall get's layed off. He's got two kids and a wife.

Sometimes I read things and it sounds like we've got our fundamentals a lot stronger then other banks (we, our...simple pronoun's and then all of a sudden you're identifying with an abstract legal entity, a bundle of business interests? No weirder than identifying with a sports team or a country, and hey at least these are my employers. The relations pretty direct really, but nonetheless, so easily is my linguistic allegiance bought.) And then other times I look at this whole mess, I see countries across the world scrambling to plug holes in their sinking economies and no two countries are plugging the same holes the same way and I think "all these economic oracles got us in to this mess in the first place, and they're expected to get us out?" The say 09 will be rough but after that it'll get better but most of them also thought 08 would be great and that didn't really turn out so well.

Just as few really understood the complex, layered securities that started this current crash, I don't think anyone has a true grasp one what our current economy has become. Particularly in the financial sector, abstractions have been based on abstractions, then split apart, wagered upon and insured, and then abstracted again. These are the hallmarks of extreme technologization. The wonder of abstractions is that each layer need only understand the layer below it. The weakness is thus that each layer is completely dependant on the assumptions of the layer below, such that if one fails, they all fail. The financials already have a name for this in their catalogue of risks: Systemic Risk. The inevitble stupidity in the face of unanticipated errors by computerized systems is only exacerbated by the difficulty in anticipating errors as systems become increasinlgy complex and interconnected. Computers are only as smart as the people who design them, and right now our world economy is essential a vast interconnected software system written by the highest bidder to feed the howling maw of unending quarterly growth.

I vacillate between confidence in my banks overall stability and horror at the blind mutant beast that is our economy, thrashing wildly while we prod and plead, suckle and suffer.

Today in music

This thread is cool, and it led me to this excellent thread: techno history from a germanic/continental european history is not something you get a lot of due to the predominance of american and (especially) british music journalists. All they ever want to talk about is detroit/chicago and the bloody "hardcore continuum." Guess Oliver Lieb is on my list of artists to check out.

Also I'd like to hear this

Also also the Fontan, Frak & D. Lissvik stuff on Information. Studio's West Coast being pretty much my favorite album of the last 2-3 years. Speaking of balaeric stuff, I was listening to the A Mountain of One album this morning and thinking to myself that I really need to listen to it more, especially on hung over weekends. It seem particularly apt for such a state of woozy languor.

And thus ends my day in music. Unless I download some tunes when I get home, which could well happen!


ps. About half an hour ago I forgot what letter came after 'v' in the alphabet. Fuck!

More notes to self

This thread makes me want to check out SOOO much music.

Also it reminded me, very randomly, about Ware records, and specifically the Markus Guentner and Mathias Schaffhäuser albums on there that from back in the early 00's. I have one or two tracks from them and they're great dubby house music. I didn't even realize Guentner had a second album on there. Crazy. I bet it's ace.

Apparently I've decided to start talking about all the music I want to check out here, rather than the music I have checked out, though (obv) I talk about that too.  The list of music I'd like to hear is long and this is a positive state of affairs.

The other funny thing about that thread is that it actually spans more-or-less the time that I've been listening to dance music. I guess I started more around 99-00, but stuff from 98 was definitely still current. It's weird...I have the Dom & Roland album...and Surgeon! I remember downloading tracks from him, though I never quite got any of his albums. And Consumed! Man I remember playing that to my friends when I first got into electronic music and they were absolutely appalled. Still one of my top 5 albums of all time, easily. Apparently I've been a music nerd for a while now.

I would add:
Lawrence - s/t (I've always loved Lawrence, glad he's more high-profile these days)
Herbert - Second Hand Sounds (the second cd with all his housier parts on it has always been my favorite thing by him)
...and I'm sur there are others.
Get to work dave!

"he’d always had a tendency to confuse happiness with coma."

So I read the book The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq the other day (literally, I read it in a day) and it was fantastic. One of the best books I've read in a quite a while, and really quite affecting. Then I learned that a lot of people really don't like Houellebecq, for instance John Updike (who, completely unrelatedly, just died). They seem to regard him as being particularly misanthropic; but it's funny when I read through that John Updike review the quotes that he pulled out were all great, and I smiled at some of them once again (I've read ...Island too, also good). Perhaps this makes me a misanthrope. In one sense it is a very depressing book. It does not try to hide from the realities of life, that you get old and die without ever really achieving much and barely getting a chance to have any decent human relationships or really have much nice happen to you at all. I suppose this is pretty pessimistic; actually I think he's overstating the case a bit. But it's totally refreshing to have someone make no bones about it, no illusions of some sort of spiritual reward at the end of it all. Several reviews mention a likeness to Camus, which makes sense, and also explains why I like Houellebecq so much--Camus is tops. It's a cleansing book, right. Lay things bare so you can see what's really there, take stock, and start again. Beautiful, beautiful stuff. Everyone should read it.

Note to self

Must get:
Crydamoure Presents Waves (volume 1)
Super Discount 1 & 2 by Etienne DeCrecy
Motorbass - Pansoul

And generally more 90's and early 00's french house. Post prompted by listening to Crydamoure Presents Waves 2.

Also should check out DJ Sneak, even though he isn't french.

bass

As phil says this mix is ace. I've not paid much attention to dubstep in while--which this isn't. Things got livelier, better synths, more colour, less rigid structures. This is fun stuff, party stuff, though still heavy pon de bass weight. ace

PS> UNCONTROLLABLE URGE TO RUN AWAY FROM WORK RIGHT THIS INSTANT!
fuck fridays!

READ THE POST BELOW

And do what I say!!! It seriously is that good.

Sebastien Tellier - Kilometer (Aeroplane 'Italo 84' Remix)

Search. I mean literally, do a google search and you should easily find it for download. It is brilliant! And I have high standards for Aeroplane: they make fucking stunning dance music, consistently, each and every time.