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Capitalist speaks truth, is muffled

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Nick Hanauer, and I have no idea who he is, though he is apparently rich, made some wholly obvious points during a TED lecture. Naturally, this led the folks at TED to try to block distribution of his talk, apparently on the grounds that it would hurt the fee-fees of other rich folks. Some might recall that I wondered a few days ago about why the capitalists, at least those who actually produce things, don’t demand stimulus. Hanauer, we must presume, agrees that is precisely what they should be doing.

 

 

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Curt Schilling at the public trough

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Life is a mystery. Curt Schilling, well known for being a vocal Republican, would never go in for a government guaranteed loan like Solyndra got, would he? After all, the government is not supposed to pick winners and losers, am I right? And yet…

38 Studios, the video game startup founded and funded by former Boston Red Sox ace Curt Schilling, is reportedly in troubled waters just three months after releasing Kingdoms of Amalur, its first title.

Ocean State economic development officials are reportedly working to keep the company viable. At stake is a $75 million loan guarantee the state of Rhode Island made to the fledgling video game developer.

The Providence Journal reports Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee spent the weekend working under a “tight timeframe” with 38 Studios and officials from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corp., with the aim of “keeping 38 studios solvent.” A spokeswoman for the governor’s office confirmed that the governor had made the reported statements.

38 Studios started six years ago in Massachusetts. But in 2010, Rhode Island lured the startup company south with a $75 million loan guarantee. In exchange, 38 Studios promised it will grow to a head count of 450. Turbine Inc., at one time the largest independent video game developer in Massachusetts, had a head count of 300. Schilling has invested millions of his own money in the company.

Presumably he’d welcome an Issa-type investigation.

 

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Adventures in Semantics, Redux

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

A few days ago I noted that the Mystic River Press featured this front page (very large type) headline:

RTM tries new tact on budget

Apparently the disease is spreading. Today I saw this, in an article about the demise of unlimited data plans, at a computer blog called EverythingICafe:

AT&T has taken a different tact. They set limits on unlimited plans. Once a customer hits those limits, they are throttled. There is little to no advantage to having an unlimited data plan on AT&T at this point.

This shook my faith in my own mental dictionary a bit, so I resorted to the Oxford Dictionary of English, which restored my faith, though I suppose there are some who might argue that the English have no business telling us Americans what words mean.

The English language is under assault from two directions. On the right, the Orwellians, determined to manipulate language in service to their ideology, and from all other directions, the lazies, who have no agenda, other than the preservation of their right to know no dictionary. To be fair, the blogger may simply have been a victim of the tyrannical spelling checker now incorporated into the Mac operating system.

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Some British Businessfolks waking up

Monday, May 14, 2012

A while back I wondered why it was that the Best Buys of the world (or at least, of the USA),were not demanding stimulus. Well, so far as I know, nothing has changed here, but according to Atrios, the business world in Britain is beginning to wake up to the fact that when no one has a job, no one can buy the crap they sell.

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Business as usual for the Democrats

Monday, May 14, 2012

Sigh…

This is the kind of thing that is all too typical of the Democratic party:

Wisconsin Democrats are frustrated with the lack of national support in the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker, and in what’s likely an effort to pressure the Democratic National Committee to pitch in, they’re airing their frustrations to Greg Sargent:

“We are frustrated by the lack of support from the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Governors Association,” a top Wisconsin Democratic Party official tells me. “Scott Walker has the full support and backing of the Republican Party and all its tentacles. We are not getting similar support.”

“Considering that Scott Walker has already spent $30 million and we’re even in the polls, this is a winnable race,” the Wisconsin Dem continues. “We can get outspent two to one or five to one. We can’t get spent 20 to one.”

Give Howard Dean credit. He pushed the 50 state strategy, forcing the Republicans to defend seats that were not formerly in play. Besides the Walker race, the Democrats are nowhere to be seen in Paul Ryan’s district, where Rob Zerban is a credible candidate.

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Convention

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Today’s convention was they way they all should be:short and sweet. Well that’s not quite sure. The 2006 convention was long, but far sweeter, as that was the year Ned Lamont shocked everyone with the high percentage of votes he got at the convention, doing far better than Susan Bysiewicz did this year. But, there is something to be said for a convention so short that it,left everyone with plenty of time to enjoy what might have been the most beautiful day of the year so far. We in the second district were placed, appropriately give our standing in the state, as far from the scene of the action as they could put us. This picture was taken only a few rows up from where we Grotonites were sitting.

Here’s most of the Groton delegation. As the guy with the camera, I have the luxury of being among the missing.

 

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Friday Night Music

Friday, May 11, 2012

These days I’m listening to music in my car, having given up audiobooks for a while. My iPod is connected to my stereo system, which is great, but finding music on the little display while driving is a bit difficult, so I tend to play something a little like roulette, spinning the dial until something that looks good comes up. Not entirely random, but close to it. A few days ago Lou Reed’s New York album came up. The album certainly evokes its time, but this song, it seems to me, has some continued relevance. The live versions I’ve found can’t match the pure anger that he projects in the studio version, but you can’t have everything, and this is still a good performance.

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Adventures in Semantics

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Front page headline (not on-line) from the Mystic River Press:

RTM tries new tact on budget

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Humpty Dumpty bested again

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Richard Mourdock, who just beat Richard Lugar, in the Republican Senatorial primary in Indiana:

Well, what I’ve said is that I certainly think bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view. […] Bipartisanship means they have to come our way […]

As a practical matter, this has been the operative definition of bipartisanship in the beltway for years, but so far as I know it’s never been publicly acknowledged in this fashion.

The question now is: how long before this definition is totally out of the closet, and universally acknowledged by the pundits that are always demanding bipartisanship?

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The Day does good

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

I’m a frequent critic of the New London Day, so it’s only fair that I give credit when they do something right, and they’ve done just that recently.

In my other life I spend a lot of time in housing court, and the subject of their recent exposé is not unknown to me. Zane Megos is a local landlord, who has apparently made quite a bit of money on the side by conning poor people out of money for apartments that never seem to become available, despite repeated promises on his part. The Day ran a long story about him recently, exposing his criminal activity, and today ran a followup:

Norwich police confirmed Monday that they are conducting multiple investigations into allegations that Zane Megos accepted cash deposits and advance rent payments for apartments that were condemned or never became available, while more would-be tenants continued to come forward.

There’s an old saying to the effect that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”. A corollary is that police are trained primarily to look under bridges, in the streets, and in the markets (except for stock markets) for law breakers. As soon as I read the paragraph quoted above I just knew, having tried to interest the Norwich police in white collar crime of a different variety, that past complaints against Mr. Megos had been ignored. Not surprisingly, I was right:

[One tenant] said he filed a complaint with Norwich police at the time and plans to do so again now that police say they are investigating.

You can take it to the bank that were in not for the Day, Mr. Megos, unobstructed by the Norwich police, would be happily conning more poor people. The Norwich cops are not unique, of course. We have priorities in this country, and we’re far more interested in jailing the poor than in protecting them from predators like Megos.

So, congratulations to the Day for a job well done. Real journalism, which might hopefully lead to some real justice.

 

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