Bleg
Dreadfully sorry I haven’t been around much. Been quite busy lately. Have a bit of a bleg to put out, in two parts:
Firstly, I’ll be heading to the Northern Virginia/ D.C. area this week, so if you happen to be driving down I95 and see a sleep deprived motorist chugging red bulls and doing 105 mph with cigar smoke billowing out the window and the complete score of Porgy and Bess blasting from the car’s speakers that would be me.
Monday I plan to take a stroll around Mananas National Battle Field. Tuesday it’s site-seeing in D.C.. I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for my itinerary to make it more interesting rather than the usual list of decrepit museums and moribund memorials. Also any recommendations for not too terribly expensive places to eat/get hammered at?
Secondly I was just subjected by my webguru/IT department/ Drinking-buddy to Charles Ferguson’s Oscar Winning “Inside Job”. I found the movie to be extremely effective. And by effective I mean it’s sure to leave the less sangfroid viewer filled with rage. I personally thought it was too slick by several measures and played heavy on emotions and quasi-facts than an actual well reasoned argument. In fact I’m not quite sure what the movie was about exactly.
It started off as an explanation of the 2008 financial crisis, which it seems to have gotten the technical explanation right. But then it veers off bizarrely into this long indictment of everything and everyone the Left ever had a grievance against. Bush’s tax cuts, executive compensations, Wall Street types who like the whores (Elliot Spitzer was interviewed, but not about whores) and blah blah blah. The whole thing came off to me like a hit piece on [insert evil greedy faceless entity]. Some parts of the film were spot on, in my opinion, particularly the revolving door between government, academia, and business. But for the most part I thought it was a simplistic gloss of a complicated historical event and a lot of cheap shots and taking easy targets.
So anyone seen the film and have any thoughts or know any articles going over the issues raised there in?
