Wolraich: Obama at the Gates of... Gates
Dr. C: In Praise of Writing Binges
Maiello: Gatsby Doesn't Grate
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Wolraich: Obama at the Gates of... Gates Dr. C: In Praise of Writing Binges Maiello: Gatsby Doesn't Grate |
Blowing |
So the powers that be on the Federal Reserve Board have decided to engage in round two of their little quantitative easing experiment, basically agreeing to purchase $600 billion in government debt over the next 8 months in order to keep interest rates artificially low and hopefully juice the economy in the process.
That $75 billion a month isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, and the markets are certainly acting as if all is copacetic, but I still find the hubris of the Fed incredibly alarming - though not incredibly surprising.  [Read more]
The one and only Genghis - all freshly scrubbed and shorn - stopped by the dagbuzz studio to discuss his book, Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual.
Next stop: Oprah's couch.
Wow. This is dagblog, huh? I don't even recognize the place. Readership is flourishing, the pace of posts is snowballing. Frightening dagger logo be damned, it even looks like an official bloggy thingy now.
It's like I left the neighborhood right before they legalized prostitution or discovered massive amounts of shale oil under dagblog's hallowed grounds. If I was a more insecure man, I might even say there was a causal effect involved here, and that everyone had been lurking on the outskirts of town, waiting for my departure, but I'm quite confident my body odor has been under control since my junior year of high school. [Read more]
My brother put his 18-year-old dog to sleep yesterday.
My sadness today is profound, almost overwhelming, and I am trying to figure out why.
Obviously, the dog himself, a terribly sweet, ridiculously cute cocker-beagle mix, is the primary reason. He was my brother's dog - there's no denying that - but he was really my first pet as well, my roommate and companion for the nine-plus years I lived with my brother after college.
When I came home from my first real job, he would greet me with that wagging stub of a tail and the butt jerking uncontrollably from side to side. I would lie on the floor, and he would pin me down, licking my face til I could stand it no longer. [Read more]
Ok, I know its been along time since I posted, but this should more than make up for it. You're welcome ...
Just read that Amazon has decided to give in to publisher Macmillan's demand that the online bookseller sell its books under an agency model for the price the publisher sets (which for the new books that make up most of the market will be 30-50 percent higher than the $10 Amazon currently charges). [Read more]
It's been a long time since I've done one of these, but it's that time of year when I must bestow the coveted My One Favorite Thing award of 2009. Last year, you may recall, Cottonelle Wet Wipes Toilet Paper won the 2008 MOFT, just edging out Barack Obama.
This year, there are so many worthy candidates. Certainly Obama was in the running again, as his January inauguration provided one of the more stirring moments of the year. But while infinitely better than what we had at this time last year, the Prez has been just a bit disappointing to me, so he'll have to settle with his consolation Nobel. [Read more]
I'm shocked by this whole Tiger Woods scandal. Not by Tiger's behavior, of course, but by the silence that seems to be accompanying it, at least in my circle of friends on Facebook.
I really expected to be bombarded today with status updates addressing the emerging Tiger Woods scandal. I expected them to be mainly from women expressing some degree of disappointment or outrage. Instead, I only saw one status update that fit the bill.
Maybe my Facebook friends just aren't indicative of society at large, but to me, this lack of response is a much bigger shock than anything that's happened in TigerWorld over the past week. [Read more]
With a couple of exceptions, I've been gone from dagblog for several months. I've rarely posted. I've barely commented. Heck, I've even stopped visiting the site on a regular basis.
I have a number of legitimate excuses - and some not-so legitimate excuses - for my time away. I did a lot of wedding planning. I picked up online poker again. I broke a wrist. I got married and had a minimoon. I fell behind work at my paying day job. Fantasy football started.
But mainly, my prolonged absence boils down to something much simpler, and in many ways, much more disturbing: I stopped caring. [Read more]
OK, I know I've been a bad, bad, bad dagblogger for quite some time, but seeing as I'm getting married in less than four weeks, I'm giving myself a pass. (Today's key word: ELOPE!!!)
I'll be back more regularly by the end of the year, but for now, I just wanted to give you a ballsy prediction:
The market is nearing a significant short-term top. Nailing the exact timing is always difficult, but I expect we'll be significantly lower by the end of the year, and certainly by the end of the first quarter of next year, I expect we will see market averages at least 15-20% lower than we have now. [Read more]
Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that—if it panned out—would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain—from synapses to hemispheres—and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted...
This has to be David Bowie's proudest moment, pending the manned Mars expedition.
By Aamer Madhani, USA Today, May 19, 2013
President Obama on Sunday told the graduating class at Morehouse College, the country's pre-eminent historically black college, there is "no time for excuses" for this generation of African-American men and that it was time for their generation to step up professionally and in their personal lives.
[....] The president connected his own path to the White House to the work of King and other African-American leaders of that generation. But Obama also conceded that at times as a young man he wrongly blamed his own failings "as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down."
"We've got no time for excuses — not because the bitter legacies...
Prompted by Peggy Noonan's claim in The Wall Street Journal that "we are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate," Andrew Sullivan steps forward to defend Pres. Obama's honor. "Can she actually believe this?," he asks incredulously.