I have never been impressed with current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  His general policy in dealing with bad banks has been to use taxpayer dollars to pay face value for their toxic assets and then trust them not to misbehave further.  Among other shady dealings, he paid $62.1 billion to the bank counterparties of AIG to cover their derivatives contracts, which was far above market value.

But his public face has been even shoddier than his private dealings.  Appearing on the PBS NewsHour today with Jim Lehrer, Geithner was asked repeatedly to explain why Americans should not fear the apparent stalling of the economic recovery.  He gave no statistics or arguments to support the strength of the recovery, although these are readily available.  Instead, he launched into talking points about how Americans are still feeling traumatized from the 40% drop in financial markets two years ago, and how we should all focus on what an amazing job the Obama adminstration has done to fix things.

This sort of “respond to the question you wish was asked” is typical of politicians.  However, Geithner is not an ordinary politician.  He is supposed to have some sort of knowledge about the economy.  He is in a position to provide a good argument that will reassure both Americans and international investors that our economy is solid.  A decent intern could compose such an argument for him.  Instead, he delivered a set of talking points that seemed to be a year old.

Timothy Geithner is not even sufficiently competent to present a well bullshitted political facade.  If the economy turns again, I would not be surprised if Obama gives him the axe.  Not because Obama is a competent President, but because he is at least a competent politician.  And Geithner’s shady dealings and bungling public persona will prove to be a large political liability in any kind of economic downturn.

1.  When they talk, Scottish people occasionally mix in bits of Elvish.

2.  Captain Picard is a real person who plays Patrick Stewart the actor.

3.  Many people are actually deafer than Mos Def.

4.  Of the original 2,000 stooges, only three survived long enough to have their antics filmed.

5.  Complimentary peanuts taste awful, but are still better than derogatory peanuts.

6.  Champagne supernovas are impossible.  Supernovas chiefly involve hydrogen, helium, carbon, and some heavier elements being explosively fused and split to form other elements.  To suggest that they involve champagne is scientifically dubious at best, and setting such a claim to music does nothing to bolster its veracity.

Terrible.  Just…. just terrible.

At least Kevin Smith has the honesty to admit that his films are pure dick and fart jokes.  “Funny People” has its share of dick jokes — and they’re not nearly funny enough to repeat – but it also aspires to develop actual characters.  And there it genuinely offends.

While one cannot spoil an already spoilt film, I am revealing plot details when I mention that Adam Sandler (recovering from terminal illness) seeks to redeem his empty life by reconnecting with his original “true love”, a dipshitty actress who is already married to Eric Bana.  The results are predictable; the flitty actress flirts with Sandler before reabsorbing into the stupid equilibrium of her original life.  While unendurably long, the film’s development neither amuses nor entertains.  It simply passes time.

Why did we watch this?  We did not laugh.  We were not amused.  We learned nothing.  And yet the film was so full of the aura of import, the faintly twanging chords of semi-obscure modern age music, that it seems we should have.

And therein lies the identity of the Apatow oeuvre.  Take actors who have been funny elsewhere, give them a POS script and the occasional pretentious strum, and we are supposed to feel some kind of generational resonance. 

On “Real Time with Bill Maher”, the host credited Apatow with capturing the zeitgeist of a generation in the same way that John Hughes did in the 1980’s.  Hughes captured the manic strain of adolescence, the savage reality of now.  Apatow captures nothing but box office receipts.

Do not watch this movie.

There’s a lot of national despair in the US these days. Many people seem to be questioning whether there is just something fundamentally wrong with us as a nation. The stupidest among us (IE, Thomas Friedman) are even looking to China now with admiration.

I don’t think the country is broken. I think we just stopped enforcing government regulations, and we need to start again.

When I was in elementary school, the teachers briefly experimented with a new “honor system” of discipline.  Students would still receive demerits for bad conduct.  However, demerits would no longer result in detention.  They were purely a paper construct.  The consequences were predictable.  Student conduct deteriorated so rapidly that the old system was back within a month.

We’ve spent the last 30 years as a nation running such an experiment.  Major regulatory agencies — the SEC, the FDA, the FDIC, the EPA, the MMS  — have been systematically undermanned and undermined to the point where they cannot effectively police corporations.  The results have been equally predictable: a massive wave of fraud and negligence that began with the S&L scandals of the 1980’s, and has run continuously from Enron right through to the Deepwater Horizon spill.

BP’s recent accidents — the massive 2005 Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 and injured 180, the 2006 spill into Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, and the current Deepwater Horizon gusher in the Gulf of Mexico — are all the direct result of negligent safety practices that regulators should have corrected.  But as has been detailed elsewhere, the MMS was busier facilitating BP than regulating it.

The country has not run off the rails. Our society is not broken.  It is a well designed machine that has simply been turned off for 30 years. We don’t need to switch towards Chinese style statism or anything to fix things. We just need to start enforcing laws that are already on the books.

I’m a bad person. I was recently looking over a health magazine’s review of the worst restaurant dishes in America, and the worse they got, the more I wanted them. My favorite was this beauty, which has a mouthwatering 242 grams of fat. That’s more fat than 2.5 sticks of butter

I have a number of problems with the debate going on about whether earthquakes are more frequent or not lately.

First, what we really care about is not frequency, but the combination of frequency and intensity. And when you consider that, the historical record shows huge extremes.

More than 1/3rd of all earthquake energy released in the last 100 years happened between 1960 and 1965. In the period from the Indian Ocean Earthquake until now, about 1/5 of 100 years of earthquake energy has been released. (I’m basing these claims off this chart, with the 8.8 2010 Chile quake, and the 8.5 and 8.7 Sumatra quakes since 2005 added in).

So in terms of earthquake energy actually being released, clearly the last 6 years have been unusually intense.

Which brings along the next point.  The Indian Ocean Earthquake occurred along an area of the Sunda megathrust fault that had been thought to be dormant.  We thought this because we hadn’t observed any big earthquakes from it in a long time.  Now we know that in fact massive energy had been pent up there.

Tectonic plates are not isolated systems.  If you release pressure along one fault (especially a huge amount of pressure), pressures along other plates will adjust.  Seismologists agree that the two 8+ Sumatran earthquakes after the Indian Ocean earthquake were induced by the original quake.  I would argue that the Great Alaska quake of 1964 was probably similarly enabled by the Valdivia quake of 1960 (most powerful quake ever recorded), as the two were along the American portion of the Pacific Rim, and that Nazca megathrust fault was undergoing a similarly pent up period, being long overdue for a major rupture.  Furthermore, there were a few 8+ magnitude quakes in Alaska both before and after the 1964 quake.

The bottom line is that there’s a reason that releases of earthquake energy might tend to “bunch” — massive quakes enable other massive quakes.

When you have this type of system, it is not appropriate to think of earthquakes as being purely random.  Yes, the probability of an earthquake of X magnitude at time T is still a random variable.  But the mean of that random variable is changing over time.  The data shows it, and we have a compelling structural reason to believe it.

Which is why I am so put off by articles like Roger Musson’s op-ed in today’s NYT. Musson uses his dubitable authority as a seismologist to argue that it’s not that intense earthquakes are more frequent, it’s just that we’re idiots. We miss the earthquakes that happen far away from population centers, and we couldn’t record earthquakes that well for most of history either. If we were smart seismologists, we would know that people are just hysterical idiots, and that earthquake frequency and intensity are purely random over time, with the random “bunching” that we would expect.

Musson is wrong on all counts. The “bunching” is far too significant, and far too structurally connected to be purely random. The straw man hypothetical idiot he is punching at in this article could surely knock him out. Unfortunately, the public doesn’t get to see that fight. It only sees an erroneous “expert” opinion in the NYT.

Why didn’t the clam share with his friends?

Because he was shellfish!

So I haven’t been blogging lately because I’ve been making… er… I’ve been so amused by these cartoons of unknown authorship. I give the link below. But I warn you, the cartoons are so horribly vile, so disgustingly offensive (and funny), that you should not watch them on a full stomach. Seriously, try to imagine South Park without the restraint. That’s about the level of it.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6305131/

You can see the full set by scrolling to the bottom of the linked page. As of now, there are 5 cartoons.

As my readers well know, this blog maintains a proud anti-Irish tradition.  And it’s about that time of year when every Miles McPopelover and Paddy O’Pukebeer make their way to the center of every American city to drink and jig away until civilization lies in tatters. Be aware, my fellow non-Irish Americans: St. Patrick’s day is upon us.

Yet the dark day isn’t supposed to be until this Wednesday. So imagine my surprise yesterday afternoon when I stumbled into an endless horde of stupefied spud-eating Sodomites, crooning and reveling away on the erstwhile decent streets of our fair city.

I called the Mayor’s office to protest, but Mayor Patrick Duffy could only say, “Why the bug up yer but, m’lad? Tis a feyn day! The St. Paddy’s day parade, it is! Now calm dewn and have a pint and a potato.”

I do admire the Mayor’s cleverness. Celebrate St. Patrick’s day on a different date, and maybe you’ll fool some Irish into missing it entirely. But the Mayor should have thought more carefully; no doubt the craven crimsons will try to celebrate on both days. I thought for a moment that perhaps the Mayor had abandoned his own stout anti-Irish policies. But when I asked about that, he reassured me that he, “Has got more Irish stout in him than any other Mayor.”

I’ll continue to update my readers on Rochester’s red menace as the day approaches.  Until then, I should like to remind my readers to join my ongoing campaign to impeach our current Irish President, Barack O’Bama.