- Blodget to Spitzer: Welcome Aboard! – Mergers, Acquisitions, Venture Capital, Hedge Funds — DealBook – New York Times – Back in 2001, who would have guessed that Henry Blodget, the high-profile Internet stock analyst, and Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general who banished him from Wall Street, would end up under the same journalistic umbrella?
- Airbus Dossier Dishes Dirt on Boeing’s 787 Program | Autopia from Wired.com – European aviation giant Airbus has compiled a surprisingly comprehensive dossier detailing every aspect of arch-rival Boeing's work on the 787 Dreamliner, using information gleaned from Boeing's own suppliers and proprietary documentation to assemble a sweeping critique of the ambitious but troubled aircraft. The 46-page document titled Boeing 787 Lessons Learnt broadly examines the aircraft's development, including its many design, certification and production issues, to a degree rarely seen. It raises questions about Airbus' industrial intelligence-gathering methods.
- Nepotistic succession in the political class – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – But this fixation on parent-child, sibling and spousal succession for elected office is particularly problematic. It's certainly true that one can find, in individual cases, instances of self-sufficiency and merit even among those benefiting from nepotism and family names. But the fact that it is now so commonplace — almost presumptively expected — for political power to be passed along to close family members is quite anti-democratic. The number of families possessing some sort of aristocratic-like claim to elected office is clearly increasing. By definition, that diminishes the role of merit and the need for democratic persuasion in how elected leaders are chosen. And this dynamic, in turn, fuels how insular, incestuous, unaccountable and bloated with entitlement the Beltway culture is.
- Eric Holder, Jack Quinn and the Rich pardon – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – This is vintage Washington. This is the filthy, venal sleaze on which both political parties feed. It's what fuels how the Beltway operates. It's the leading cause of why it functions as a corrupt, dysfunctional, bloated, incestuous royal court. That's what Washington is. For that reason, it would be next to impossible to find people who have been a part of this system who haven't been infected — or more accurately: who haven't infected themselves — at one point or another with this disease. More than anything else, Obama's endless invocation of the "change" mantra was not about promises of sharp ideological or even policy shifts — as needed as those may be — but instead, was about changing this core Beltway dynamic, delousing the Washington culture. A consensus has emerged, which I more or less share, that condemning the not-yet-inaugurated Obama presidency based merely on his appointments of establishment re-treads and war supporters is premature, irrational and unfair.
- Why Wall Street Always Blows It – The Atlantic was kind enough to ask me to write an article explaining how the hell we just blew yet another monstrous financial bubble whose bursting is now blowing our economy to smithereens. Specifically, they wanted to me to explain how, time after time, so many smart people could be so stupid–on Wall Street and elsewhere. They reached out to me because, in the last bubble, I was one of those people.
- Cool Infographics: The “Super” Family Tree of Dinosaurs – this radial family tree shows the diversity of dinosaur species. It's used in the article to help challenge the theory that dinosaurs went through a rapid decline during the Cretaceous period.
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