1-20-2010

1-20-2010—Conan O’Brien and his production team are expected to receive about $40 million to leave NCG, the media conglomerate of General Electric, itself among the largest recipients of taxpayer help.—NYT B2
--Were the government actually to begin understanding itself as a market-ased, profit-maximizing enterprise, ... can there by any doubnt what it would do? It would sell gold. ... Were the administration to get started on the great gold dump ... we’d come to a different judgment day very quickly. When the massively inflated price of that metal collapsed, it would probably take with it a hefty chunk of the portfolios of tea-party types, survivalists, Birchers, dittoheads, Objectivists, and almost every imaginable species of secular end-timer.—Frank, WSJ A15
--The election turmoil in Massachusetts produced one clear winner: health-care stocks. DJIA jumps 1.1% to 10725.43, a new 15 month high. WSJ C1
--Erich Segal (LOVE STORY, love means never having to say your sorry) dies at age 72.NYT A15
HARPERS, February 2010
--Obama promised to end the war in Iraq, end torture, close Guantanamo, restore the constitution, heal our wounds, wash our feet. None of these things has come to pass ... Our torturers and war criminals and illegal spies and usurpers remain at liberty, unpunished... That Obama is in most respects better than George W. Bush, John McCain, Sarah Palin, or Joseph Stalin, is beyond dispute and completely beside the point. [p. 7]
--What computerized analysis of all the country’s school texts has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases life is turned into a data-base. [p 18]
--The anthropologist Steve Barnett saw in [members of Generation “X”] the phenomenon of pattern exhaustion, in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative. [p 19]
--Management researchers in Michigan found that lawbreaking by American corporations tends to increase as companies grow more successful and prominent... [p80]