David Cameron's gifts to Obama

*via a Dowd column

The British opposition leader David Cameron gave Obama a copy of Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and a box of CDs by British bands, including the Smiths, Radiohead and the Gorillaz.

Nice! I wonder what Obama would give other world leaders to represent our country...

Weep-worthy.

President Bush inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion when he took office in 2001 but has since posted a budget deficit every year.

President Bush's budget chief blamed the faltering economy and the bipartisan stimulus package for the record $482 billion deficit the White House predicted for the 2009 budget year.




Or maybe, that messed-up, expensive war we're in had something to do with it.

Spot the nerd.

*thanks Caroline!

Great blog.

http://creativecapitalismblog.com/

Creative Capitalism: A Conversation

A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book -- a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development -- to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world's problems are too big for philanthropy--even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

Some contributors (both of their own accord and quoted, but relevant nonetheless):

Abhijit Banerjee
Alex Friedman
Bill Gates
Brad DeLong
Clive Crook
Conor Clarke
Ed Glaeser
Elizabeth Stuart
Eric Werker
Esther Duflo
Gary Becker
Gregory Clark
Jagdish Bhagwati
John Quiggin
John Roemer
John Williamson
Joshua Gans
Justin Fox
Kyle Chauvin
Lawrence Summers
Loretta Michaels
Matthew Bishop
Michael Kinsley
Michael Kremer
Milton Friedman
Nancy Birdsall
Nancy Koehn
Paul Ormerod
Richard Posner
Robert Reich
Steven Landsburg
Tim Harford
Vernon Smith
Warren Buffett
William Easterly

Boomers running up the national credit card

Taken from Slate:

The Democrat-sponsored housing bill received 72-13 Senate approval in a rare Saturday session, giving the Treasury Department sweeping authority to prop up the country's two largest mortgage finance companies and potentially costing the government billions of dollars. "The bill raises the national debt ceiling to $10.6 trillion ... the first time that the limit on the government's credit card has grown to 14 digits," the NYT reports. Sen. Jim DeMint (R, S.C.), mentioned in both stories, told the WP that that the Treasury's new authority "crosses the line into socialism"; John McCain and Barack Obama both support the bill. The Post's economist sources say that the end of crunch won't come near as fast as the bill's passing. In fact, one says, the 400,000 households the bill hopes to assist are "a drop in the bucket."



This will make things worse.

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

Domino's Scientists Test Limits Of What Humans Will Eat

Outside Lands or Treasure Island?

Agh! Which one would you go to? (Keep in mind that it will be tough for me to catch the Friday bands because of work...) Oh and there's a price difference to take into account.

http://sfoutsidelands.com/

http://www.treasureislandfestival.com/

OH! Philly people - there's a Bob Dylan show at the Electric Factory for the venue's 40th Anniversary in mid-August. If there was any possible way I could make it, I would do so - that's going to be a GREAT show. Get on it.

Berlin

"The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."

-Barack Obama

Belgrade

Global Rich List

Type in your annual salary and this computes your place in a world income-ranking. According to this gadget, I'm in the top 1%. Nice to remind everyone how lucky they really are.

"You are the 54,175,729 richest person in the world! "

What I'll be doing October 3 - 5

The line-up for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is ridiculously great this year. Let me know if you want to come with...

Mat Collishaw

The Dark Knight mini-review

Well, while I was back east visiting my family I had the pleasure of seeing The Dark Knight... twice. (Unfortunately neither time at IMAX - sold out for days!) Both myself and the various family members who accompanied me were stunned after walking out of the theater. It has been a long time since I've seen a summer blockbuster that was so unbelievably good.

Obviously, as everyone has no doubt already heard, Heath Ledger was the piece de resistance of the film. At some points I was nearly moved to tears just by the sheer talent exhibited in his performance (and yes, I'm an over-dramatic person generally, so take that with a grain of salt). Given the character, and Jack Nicholson's prior performance, I thought Nolan etc. really made a great transition to a sick, depraved, intelligent Joker worthy of the more serious Batman films of today, as compared with the more cheesy Batman films of yore (though don't get me wrong, they still sneak in some great puns etc.). I feel the need to comment more on this because it was just SO phenomenal, but I'll let you all make up your own minds. And perhaps I'll post more later, depending on my mood.

Other bright spots of the film - cinematography, particularly shooting angles from skyscrapers. I actually felt afraid of heights while watching the film. In fact, the whole thing was incredibly well done. I also enjoyed the themes - particularly the exploration of depravity in every human being when put in a desperate situation. I don't want to spoil anything for anyone who hasn't yet seen it, but it's a really loaded superhero film. Dark, gorgeous, open to interpretation... glorious. See this movie!

Some weak spots - Maggie Gyllenhaal was disappointing and I wish there was a bit more Caine in there, but overall, fantastic film. I'll be going at least once more, to an IMAX. (And I don't usually make it to the theater, so that's saying something.)

Watusi!

Note to self: Learn how to do all of these... just in case.

Cost of Government Day

Congratulations! In order to pay taxes, you worked from January 1 until today (if you're one of my American friends). During that time, the government spent some money on this, some on this, ran up debt like this, and wasted a whole bunch of their (our?) time trying to do shit like this. Now doesn't that feel good? Aren't you glad you labored for such noble causes? Just curious.

The truth is, it's not like I hate the government programs with admirable aims - Medicare etc. - but when our government can be hijacked for eight years by scoundrels, why give them such a big budget to play with? There's got to be a better way.


**I thought I should mention that I'm not a Republican, or a Norquist fan, and thus am not endorsing them nor their ideas through way of reference, but rather I find the information (if true) to be quite provocative.

I Ain't Gonna Marry, Ain't Gonna Settle Down

This struck a chord...

So friends of mine, take my advice,
If you've been stung once, don't get stung twice;
Married life is mighty sweet,
But a single life personally is hard to beat;
It's nice to say that you are man and wife,
It's hard to find a pal who will stick through life;
So if the right one ain't easy found,
I ain't gonna marry or settle down.

Get them advertising dollars, James.

Now THAT'S entertainment!

Check out Clarence's hair! Classic. And seeing Silvio Dante use his teeth on a guitar... brilliant. I actually can't say enough good things about this YouTube clip.

Reverse incentives much?

'Regulation-induced Innovation': The Role of the Central Bank in the Subprime Crisis

My favorite paragraph:

Regulators and others mistakenly focus on maintaining market liquidity, he noted, citing John Maynard Keynes: "There is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment ... is to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating half-crown to the other fellow." In the cases of the current subprime crisis and the 1980s savings-and-loan mess, the "other fellow includes the taxpayer," Kane said, "and that's what pisses me off."


More commentary to come on Fannie/Freddie, Bernanke (and what an idiot he is), etc.