I have two posts (here and here) on the conviction of Raquel Nelson whose child was killed by a drunk driver in Marietta, Georgia. Because Nelson was considered a jaywalker, she was tried and found guilty of homicide.
I also argue for more complex super villains in film, and more in-depth examinations of crime and its many causes.
Interesting casting news:
Two of the most important roles for the upcoming second season of HBO’s "Game of Thrones" have been cast, with producers snagging their Stannis Baratheon and Melisandre.
According to EW.com, Stephen Dillane and Carice van Houten have landed the key parts.
[…]
A Tony winner for "The Real Thing," Dillane also earned an Emmy nod for his work as Thomas Jefferson on HBO’s "John Adams." His feature credits include "King Arthur," "The Hours" and "The Greatest Game Ever Played."
Van Houten had her breakout role in Paul Verhoven’s "Black Book." She’s subsequently been seen in "Valkyrie" and "Repo Men."
At least, deficits don’t matter when unemployment is teetering on the brink of 10%, and when government debt is actually cheaper than cash.
The chart is from Karl Smith, who writes:
Suppose the government had two choices. It could either pay for infrastructure improvements as it went along out of tax revenue or it could borrow money build the infrastructure now and then repay the money with tax revenues.
Ordinarily the question would be, does the advantage of building quickly outweigh the cost of the interest.
However, right now the interest cost is negative. The government saves money by borrowing now rather than waiting and paying cash. Let me say again because I have noticed that this goes against so much intuition that its hard for many people to wrap around when I first say it.
The government will wind up paying more if it decides to pay cash for a project than it will if it decides to borrow. This is irrespective of the return on the project itself or the advantages of avoiding delays or anything like that. It is simply that the cost of borrowing is negative.
As Alex Knapp notes the deficit really is a long-term problem. It just isn’t a problem right now and focusing on it is a cynical political ploy that is helping nobody but the cynical politicians exploiting it. The markets are spooked, the credit rating agencies are grumbling, and people remain very much unemployed.
I discuss the News Corp scandal and can’t come up with anything quite like it in the U.S.
Also, a no-brainer, but ending the War on Drugs is one way we could help fix the federal budget.
A reader of Kevin Drum’s writes in response to Kevin’s piece on the new dotcom bubble:
See, this is the kind of crap you get when people look at "Silicon Valley" and see Facebook. The investors I have spoken to accept a fairly stable universe of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon and Netflix into the mid-future. Nobody likes to look any farther down the road than two to three years anymore, so that’s the horizon.
The excitement, the "bubble" if you will, is not about creating another Facebook, it’s about finding a way to enhance and monetize an established internet ecosystem. It’s the cloud, it’s big data, it’s Hadoop, Cassandra and Mongo on commodity hardware, it’s faster, cheaper storage subsystems, it’s scalability and flexibility, the sudden newfound ability to just "switch on" five hundred new servers with no capital cost, and turn around and switch them off on Tuesday. It’s deep, low-latency analytics, clickstream analysis, social media mining, and targeted marketing. It’s mobile localized communications. It’s seamless integration between the OS, the browser, the web application server and the data, all stored in remote indexed and optimized servers that autonomously move the data closer to the user.
It’s really interesting and exciting stuff, and all the pieces are almost there. They’re still trying to figure out how to scale web properties to hundreds of millions of users, which is incredibly hard, especially because most of them were built on the previous generation’s technology — think LAMP stack with sharded MySQL and Memcached. But the infrastructure is catching up. The hardware is actually moving backwards: lower-power, cheaper, slower processors, memory and disk, but now in a clustered and distributed environment that, because failures in that kind of environment are a common event, protect themselves against failure (think multi data center replication, autonomous P2P status monitoring, disk writes to append-only tables before memory writes…).
But most people don’t know or care about that stuff. They just know about Facebook and Amazon and Apple, and they get frustrated when they don’t work. And that leads to these articles that get the core part of the conversation so dreadfully wrong.
Setting aside the fact that all this debt-ceiling brinksmanship is probably starting to spook markets and could have an enormously bad, possibly catastrophic effect on the economy should negotiations collapse entirely, the very focus on deficits during the worst recession in decades seems to just badly miss the point.
Yes, the national debt is a problem. No, we can’t keep going like this forever. And yet, if we don’t return to normal growth rates simply cutting spending (or raising taxes) to close up the deficit will do us little good and could in fact do us a great deal of harm.
Over at The American Prospect a number of smart bloggers have joined in a roundtable headed-off by former Gentlemen, Jamelle Bouie. The subject is A Game of Thrones in both its TV and book iterations.
The subjects range from the role of women in the series to the lack of clear moral divisions and hero archetypes. Adam Serwer has an interesting bit riffing off of this interview with Martin, who discusses the scouring of the Shire in Tolkien’s:
I was very satisfied with the end of the Lord of the Rings, let us say. Talking about predictability here–I had a sense, even as a kid, that the ring was going to go in the volcano. They weren’t going to let Sauron take over the world. But he surprised me in that Frodo couldn’t do it. Bringing in Gollum the way he did was an amazing part of the ending, and then came the scouring of the Shire. And when I was 13 years old, reading this, I didn’t understand the scouring of the Shire. They won–why are there all these other pages? But I reread these books every few years, and every time my appreciation for what Tolkien did there grows. It was this kind of sad elegy on the price of victory. I think the scouring of the Shire is one of the essential parts of Tolkien’s narrative now, and gives it depth and resonance, and I hope that I will be able to provide an ending that’s similar to all of that.
I will never forgive Peter Jackson for cutting this from the films. Ever.
But that’s beside the point. Serwer writes:
Martin is talking about the conclusion to the series here, but the series itself dwells on the concept of what happens after the war in which “the good guys win.” Game of Thrones is like if Tolkein had gotten involved in the messy politics of post-conflict stability: Imagine Middle Earth being flooded with Hobbit refugees whose home no longer produces enough food to sustain them, or King Aragorn facing a crisis of legitimacy as the aftermath of the war causes an economic downturn he’s powerless to ameliorate.
Indeed, the story in A Game of Thrones is set years after Robert’s rebellion in which the “good guys” won. But of course, it’s much more complicated than that. As we know from the current line-up of characters, there is a good deal of gray area between “good” and “evil” and such was the case when Eddard and Robert rode to war against the Mad King. We know that Aerys was insane and cruel – as evil as they come – but what of his son, Rhaegar?
The ambiguity of history is present in Martin’s books as well. We don’t know what happened, not really, not everything. Certainly not enough to make strong moral judgments about what’s happening now, about whether justice has been done. Unlike many fantasies, there is no glorious war between good and evil sitting as the backdrop for current conflicts. The rebellion was a bloody affair, but the victors were not just the Starks and the Baratheons, but the Lannisters, too. The truth of it all, I suspect, will be very ugly, but it won’t shine any brighter a light on questions of justice or honor.
One thing I’ve noticed both in Dance with Dragons and in earlier books as the series has progressed is the emergence of magic in Martin’s world. At first, there is very little magic at all. It is all but absent from the world and the dragons are all long-dead.
Then Melisandre comes with her fire. And the healings begin with Beric Dondarrion’s outlaws. The dragons are born. White walkers and direwolves roam the forests. Magic seeps up out of the dirt and into the places and people of Westeros and the Free Cities.
This, in itself, is an interesting twist on an old theme. In Lord of the Rings and many other fantasies, magic is seeping from the world not the other way around. In many fantasies we are the tail end of a golden age of magic, when it has all but faded from the world and the old glories of distant eras are little more than memories and myths. This is true, also, in Game of Thrones. The difference is, in Martin’s stories the magic is returning, the old gods are waking from their long slumber – for good or ill.
I started reading A Dance with Dragons last night. I’m only barely in, but it’s good so far.
I was thinking about the TV series again, and it’s interesting that they chose to call the Others “White Walkers”. I wonder, if Lost hadn’t been so recent or so popular, would they have called them Others as they’re called in the books? I can see why they’d change it for the show, even though I think it would be kind of cool to have Ben and the smoke monster north of the wall.
And I just stumbled on this, which is hilarious. This is how we get from Game of Thrones to The Goonies in three paragraphs.