Big Pickles

If you're like most Americans, you've mastered every board of Desktop Tower Defense and are ready for something new.

Never fear, Whiteboard Tower Defense is here. I hope you weren't planning on being productive today.

Labels: games

The bailout failed in the House today, but there's still a good chance they'll rehash it until it passes.

What's crazy is that this is one argument that finds liberals and conservatives on the same side. No one wants to bail out Wall Street. I read a piece by Michael Moore this morning where, rhetoric aside, he basically agrees with Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. What is the world coming to?

The only people who really want the bailout are Wall St. itself and the Bush administration.

The big question for me is why Ben Bernanke is so keen on it. If it were just Bush and his crew, a lot of Dems in congress would be more skeptical, I think. But I've heard several of them say that they trust Bernanke to be apolitical, so if he says a bailout is needed, they're inclined to believe him.

Bernanke is supposed to be this economics wonk fresh from academia, but all his colleagues seem to be against the bailout. I'd like to hear a point-by-point rebuttal from Bernanke about why he disagrees with someone like Allan Meltzer, or any one of these guys, for that matter. We need to find a way to tease out Bernanke's true motivations on this whole thing.

Glenn Greenwald lists the following ten principles for how our government functions, and how each one of them applies to the bailout.

1. Incredibly complex and consequential new laws are negotiated in secret and then enacted immediately, with no hearings, no real debate, no transparency.

2. Those who created the crisis, were wrong about everything, drive the process.

3. Public opinion is largely ignored, as always, and public anger is placated through illusory, symbolic and largely meaningless concessions.

4. The Government begins with demands for absolute power so brazen and absurd that anything, by comparison, seems reasonable.

5. Wall Street, large corporations and their lobbyists own the Federal Government and both parties, and therefore they always win.

6. The people who run the Washington Establishment are drowning in conflicts of interest.

7. For all the anger over what Wall St. has done, the Government--as it bails them out--isn't doing anything to rein in their practices.

8. When the Government wants greater and greater power and wants to engage in pure corruption, it need only put the population in extreme fear and it gets its way in every case.

9. On the most consequential and fundamental questions that define the country, the establishment/leadership of both political parties are in full agreement, and insulate themselves from any political ramifications by acting jointly.

10. Whenever you think that the Government has done things so extreme that it can't top itself--torture, theories of presidential lawbreaking, a six-year war justified by blatantly false pretenses--it always tops itself.

Labels: economics, politics

Like a lot of people out there, I'm sure, I've spent the past couple of weeks or so trying to wrap my head around this financial crisis we find ourselves in. Here's a convenient link to ten good articles of varying scope and detail about how we got into this mess.

If you aren't going to read any of those, read this one. It's short, easy to understand, and you already know the author.

Labels: economics

Schmapp!! is this super useful map program that you can download and use to see all the great tourist destinations and attractions for any city you would care to visit. I use it all the time.

Okay, I'm totally lying. I've never used it and honestly can't see that I ever would. (But you might still like it.) I'm only blogging about it because they used one of Melissa's Flickr photos for their Dallas Arts District page.

So yay, Melissa's a published photographer! Except my name is on the Flickr page, so they gave me the credit. Oh well.

For years we've been asking for more cowbell. Have we been getting it? No, we haven't.

Until today. MoreCowbell.dj is finally delivering the cowbell that we've been after all this time. You simply upload an mp3 file from your computer and then select the amount of cowbell and Christopher Walken that you feel is appropriate.

Don't hold back too much though. You're gonna want that cowbell on the track.

Here's an example:

	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

It's amazing how we will do stuff in the context of a game--especially video games--that would just be work in real life.

To wit, How To End Childhood Obesity.

I'm sure it would work, too. My mom has these Crystal Light drinks with "immunity" on the label and my kids go nuts for them. Because it's like something a video game character would drink.

Labels: food, games

I've found this procrastination flowchart to be eerily accurate.

Labels: internet

This is one of those political gotchas that's only possible because of the Internet.

You know Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speech writer, current Wall Street Journal columnist and occasional on-air conservative pundit. Here she is today in the WSJ, doing her thing, talking up Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate.

Now here she is on MSNBC, giving her true opinion about Palin in a candid conversation with fellow conservative pundit Mike Murphy and NBC analyst Chuck Todd (none of them realizes their mics are still live).

If you can't make out what she says, there are transcripts out there, and her quotes are already on her Wikipedia page (of course). Let's just say that it would appear that she doesn't believe her own rhetoric.

Labels: internet, politics

The Hidden Radio has no visible user controls. Or, you could say that the whole thing is just a big volume/tuning knob. Interesting design.

Labels: design