Quote of the Day

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
– Helen Keller

Quote of the Day

More than any time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
- Woody Allen

First Lines of Road Dogs

They put Foley and the Cuban together in the backseat of the van and took them from the Palm Beach County jail on Gun Club to Glades Correctional, the old redbrick prison at the south end of Lake Okeechobee. Neither one said a word during the ride that took most of an hour, both of them handcuffed and shackled.
- Elmore Leonard, Road Dogs.

Because not all reading needs to be so damned serious.

Quote of the Day

When you look over your shoulder
And you see the life that you've left behind
When you think it over, do you ever wonder?
What it is that holds your life so close to mine?

You love the thunder and you love the rain
What you see revealed within the anger is worth the pain
And before the lightning fades and you surrender
You’ve got a second to look at the dark side of the man

You love the thunder and you love the rain
You know your hunger like you know your name
And I know you wonder how you ever came
To be a woman in love with a man in search of the flame

Draw the shade and light the fire
For the night that holds you and calls your name
And just like your lover, knows your desire
And the crazy longing that time will never tame

You love the thunder and you love the rain
You know your hunger like you know your name
I got your number if it's still the same
You can dream - but you can never go back the way you came

- Jackson Browne, "You Love the Thunder" off of Running on Empty

Questionable Finance

I understand that yesterday's market crash wasn't all about Standard & Poors downgrade of the U.S. credit rating to AA from AAA. However, let me get my facts straight. None of the other bond raters downgraded U.S. debt. So all of this Sturm und Drang about our credit rating is based on S&P, a company that was so wrong and misguided about mortgage securities leading up to the U.S. housing boom that they might as well not have done any rating at all. (See Nate Silver's "Why S.&P.’s Ratings Are Substandard and Porous" for more detail on exactly how fucked up S&P is.) And because we as a country failed to really fix any of the problems leading up to the housing boom - including a lack of rating agency reform - this same company whose misjudgments helped spark the housing boom is now helping to spark what many folks are calling "the great recession." Oy.

If I have any misunderstandings about the situation, please let me know. But from where I sit, the whole situation smells rotten, and as usual, it's the normal folks who end up footing the bill for the misfeasance of these corporate fools.

Pay with Your Face

And SciFi-ideas start to come true: This article ponders if the iPhone 5 will enable mobile payments for goods by "leveraging the user's face as a security token, unlike plastic cards which typically need receipt signatures." Fascinating, Captain.

What happens if you hurt your face? Cut yourself shaving?

Dealing with Criminals

These stats are incredible:

Between 1970 and 1990 the total prison population in the U.S. rose by a million, and crime rose, too. Since then we’ve locked up another million, and crime has gone down. Is there something special about that second million? Were they the only ones who were "real criminals"? Did we simply get it wrong with the first 1.3 million we locked up? If so, can we let them out? ...
We have more prisoners than soldiers, and more prison guards than U.S. Marines. We have more prisoners — by rate and number — than any other country in the history of the world: more than Stalin had at the height of the Soviet Gulag, and more than China has now. And China has a billion more people than we do! Something has gone terribly wrong.

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore policeman who now serves as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, argues that this is a serious problem and that the solution is to replace incarceration with flogging for minor offences. Sounds cruel and will probably never happen, but could be a good solution to a serious problem facing our country.