“Even the supporters of our existing financial structure — men like former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr… the White House economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers… and JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon — concede that big crises occur every five years or so. What hit us in 2008–9 was not a “once per century” event. Rather it was the latest, and scariest, in a series of regular global crises going back at least to the 1970s.”
-MIT’s Simon Johnson takes a stab at explaining why huge financial institutions are self-serving and a menace to those of us who aren’t them.

Finally, a set of family-friendly lyrics for the Liz Phair oldie “Flower.” Now everyone can enjoy it!

Erykah Badu brought her top hat and silver swim cap to Jimmy Fallon’s show last night to sing her new single “Window Seat” with old friends the Roots-who, you’ll remember, made much of the music on her first album, Baduizm, way back in 1996. She also wore a tan leather jacket over a very tight Wonder Woman costume that showed very much the shape of her body. But don’t say anything about that because she is awesome.

I don’t have much to say about Ben Smith’s big story on how the Republican National Committee plans to raise money through a combination of fearmongering and promises of access, because, you know, DUH, but if you missed the story it’s worth a look just to see the strategies that play out daily on the national stage put together in a simple PowerPoint presentation.

“Like Afrika Bambaataa and Kraftwerk, Newcleus made music that anticipated a high-tech future. Decades before Wikipedia became a household name, Newcleus introduced ‘Wikki wikki wikki’ to the pop lexicon by using it as onomatopoeia to denote a D.J.’s scratching a needle back and forth on a record.”
–Nice to see the Times going so big with an obituary of Robert “Chilly B” Crafton, a member of the early-’80s electro-rap group Newcleus, whose 1983 hit “Jam-On Revenge (The Wikki Wikki Song)” was one of the very first rap songs to reach Markham Place grade school in suburban Little Silver, New Jersey. Also nice to see Rob Kenner, a founding editor of Vibe magazine (and always a force for good writing there) in the Paper of Record.

Let us bow our heads and give a blessing of thanks to the Lord for providing us with such easy and mockable content. God truly is great!

The on-line menu only presents the “signature sandwiches” (all named after Wilco songs), but if Toronto’s Sky Blue Sky Sandwich Co. doesn’t call their largest drink size, “The Aquarium,” someone is missing an opportunity.

I am making less money upfront than ever and so is America’s Sweetheart™ and potential This Weekend’s Oscar© Winner Sandy Bullock, who only got $5 million up front for her dye job in The Barf Slide. Now more than ever, actors are working on an attention-based bonus system, in which the success of a film is what brings the big pay, and the huge names take “less” up front. (Setting aside the hilarious pay scale itself, in some ways this is not a great idea, as actors have the least to do with the finished product being watchable or miserable? And yet still.) In the future, though, I think we’ll see that most industries will have switched to this system. Book publishing, obviously, is backwards and has known but not acted on the fact that past performance is no guarantee of future performance; and someday all writers will work on a scale that pays them just based on eyeballs. Also strippers and pole dancers all over the world have been working on such a straightforward system for centuries! They even improve upon this model, in which, while the customers stare at you, they also feed you money. Movie theaters could work like this too quite easily! It just makes sense, America.

“They were like locusts. She showed up with like 20 people, and they immediately swarmed the place taking everything!”
A vendor at the Silver Spoon Red Cross For Haiti Oscar gifting suite discusses the behavior of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and her entourage, who apparently made a pretty good haul the other day.

Hey, what did I miss on my huge, three-day vacation? Oh yay, New York “has descended into a bizarre, riveting spectacle of corruption and political debasement”! (Politico also notes that “At this point, only two of the six statewide elected officials, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, were actually elected to the positions they hold.”)
But also, oh noes, my three favorite running political stories have largely up and died.

Harold Ford realized that he was an idiot and couldn’t be elected to dogcatcher. (OKAY SO LONG, ENJOY BEING A MILLIONAIRE.)

More upsetting to me, Charlie Rangel, no longer the chair of Ways and Means, is therefore also no longer one of the top five most influential politicians in D.C. and is apparently “sad, lost and alone in his own thoughts.” (!?)

And then David Paterson is pretty much all done except for the resigning and/or just fading away. The Post is calling FreeYankeeTicketsGate “strike three,” which is their code for “We expect a resignation.”

What can we say? I guess 2010 will go down as having the angriest Black History Month ever, seeing as it apparently tried to take everyone down with it on the way out? Or you know, if I was just a tiny bit more conspiracy-minded, I’d see a conspiracy in this!