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Love or hate Lady Gaga, this video is a complete trip to watch.  Strangely addictive. The last shot in particular is…odd.

This is four minutes out of your life worth spending.  As Boing Boing so eloquently put it: “Sh*t gets real about a minute in…”

xtcian: between the woods and frozen lake : This post is by Ian the Screenwriter, a chap I met at a conference in Canada last year.  He’s also the raging liberal I’ve posted here before.

But, besides being a raging liberal, he’s also an incredible writer.  He’s a professional writer, to be sure, but he also writes little essays like this one here that are astonishing well-done.

It’s a special thing, this capacity for depression, and it sets you apart from the others who may feel blue, but lack an all-encompassing dread so thick you can’t imagine it ending. I know it set her apart from her sisters, who all found solace in the capable hands of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and it’s something she imbued in her five kids to varying degrees.

So, nothing here but some amazing writing.  Move along, now.

U.S. Looks to Australia on Curbing Credit Card Fees: This is an example of where I think regulation does not work.

[…] as Congress debates how to rein in credit and debit card companies in the United States, Australia’s experience is being pointed to as an example of just how tricky that can be: for one thing, if regulators limit one fee or rate, banks are likely to find another way to keep revenue flowing.

Credit card companies are going to get their money, there’s just no way around it.  End one fee, and two others will pop up to take its place.  You can play whack-a-mole all you want, but the only way to avoid credit card fees is to not use one, or use a debit card instead.

George W. Bush: Biggest Spender Since LBJ : From the Cato Institute no less – Bush was no conservative when it came to spending.

Spending in Bush’s first year (FY2001) was $1.863 trillion, thus he presided over an 83-percent increase in overall federal spending, which includes defense, domestic, entitlements, and interest. Even without TARP and Fannie/Freddie, spending was up a huge 70 percent under Bush over eight years. By contrast, total spending under eight years of President Clinton increased just 32 percent. These are the overall increases in nominal dollars.

[…] Bush II was the biggest spender since LBJ. His spending increases were far larger than the three prior presidents.

Napolitano concedes security system failed

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano conceded Monday that the aviation security system failed when a young man on a watch list with a U.S. visa in his pocket and a powerful explosive hidden on his body was allowed to board a fight from Amsterdam to Detroit.

That reads like an Onion article.

Left vs Right (World) : I really enjoyed this huge graphic describing the supposed differences between people on the left side of the political spectrum, and people on the right.  Try as I might, I can’t make a case that it portrays either side better than the other.

A Dangerous Dysfunction : I find the idea of filibusters kind of silly.

[Needing 60 votes to overcome a filibuster is] a requirement that appears nowhere in the Constitution, but is simply a self-imposed rule

[…] The political scientist Barbara Sinclair has done the math. In the 1960s, she finds, “extended-debate-related problems” — threatened or actual filibusters — affected only 8 percent of major legislation. By the 1980s, that had risen to 27 percent. But after Democrats retook control of Congress in 2006 and Republicans found themselves in the minority, it soared to 70 percent.

Ain’t Nobody Telling Me What My Baby Allergic To : This is equal parts hysterical and tragic, because this no-doubt happens in the real life.

So yesterday some bitch nurse at the clinic was wasting my time trying to tell me my baby Liondrae all allergic to penicillin or some shit. I don’t know what kind of made-up bullshit that is. She probably, like, said it just to come off all important.

At the end, I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

Upper Mismanagement : Another example of how America has forgotten how to make stuff.  Our manufacturing base has been decimated since its height in the 60s and 70s.  We’re so consumed with “thinking” work, that we’ve lost sight of the most basic source of wealth – making and selling stuff.

This is now ultimately reflected in the quality of executives available.  Most of them are coming up from finance backgrounds, not manufacturing backgrounds.  So we have fewer and fewer executives that understand manufacturing on a basic level, from experience in the trenches.

Up until World War I, the archetypal manufacturing CEO was production oriented—usually an engineer or inventor of some kind. Even as late as the 1930s, business school curriculums focused mostly on production. Khurana notes that many schools during this era had mini-factories on campus to train future managers.

[…] By the 1980s, the conglomerate boom was reversing itself. Investors began seizing control of overgrown public companies and breaking them up. But this task was, if anything, even more dependent on fluency in financial abstractions. The leveraged-buyout boom produced a whole generation of finance tycoons—the Michael Milkens of the world—whose ability to value corporate assets was far more important than their ability to run them.

[…] it’s hard to believe that American manufacturing has a chance of recovering unless business schools start producing people who can run industrial companies, not just buy and sell their assets. And we’re pretty far away from that point today.

Two other articles I posted recently relate to this –

Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame is big on sending American back to work actually making and doing stuff with…physical stuff, rather than financial abstractions.  He even created a Web site to advocate for this:

His basic premise is that “working the trades” has been vilified.  Everyone wants to go to college, because working as a plumber or a carpenter or an ironworker is beneath them.  He’s creating this site as a community and an advocate for people considering going to trade school to learn a skill.

And just recently, we discussed a Time article about how the value of a college degree was falling, and many students are being pushed into college when they would do better at a trade school of some kind.

Sadly, in this county, not going to college is general considered substandard, as if college is the highest purpose of the high school graduate.  It’s not necessarily true – I read somewhere recently that the average annual salary for an experienced plumber or electrician in this country is almost $50,000.  How is this not considered professionally successful?  When and how did making and fixing stuff drop down the acceptability scale?