It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

—which is one of the reasons why Ygelsias has become so dependent (rhetorically) on murdering Bangladesh. But:

If my pension fund is buying [crap mortgages] from Goldman, and my pension fund loses lots of value, that’s not Goldman’s fault. No one is forcing anyone to buy anything. The only thing Goldman is guilty of is making profits.

That’s from Matt Taibbi, quoting email written in response to his magisterial article on Goldman Sachs and why we’re currently where we are, in what should have been the resurgent golden age, the return to the nines. —“I’m not even going to go there,” says Taibbi of his interlocutor; “the psychology of a human being who would take the time to actually write in a complaint like that is so bizarre that it would take more time than I have today to even begin discussing it.”

Which is not to say I have an answer myself. Oh, there’s something in it of Dickinson’s corollary to Upton’s rede:

Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich, than face the reality of being poor.

From 1776, about 4m50s into the above scene.

But is that enough? In the desire to deny one’s own poverty, is it really so difficult to understand that one’s own salary, the very possibility one might one day be comfortable if not rich, is being stolen by the very system one thinks one is protecting? —Somebody’s got to be rich, and it might as well not be me?

I have no idea. Just go read Taibbi.

If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain—an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere—high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth—pure profit for rich individuals.

At the age of 15, Humperson ran away from home to become a lighthouse keeper on the rugged, storm-lashed Atlantic coast. During this time he worked on a new signaling system intended to warn sailors of the various complex dangers—extending far beyond mere storms and rocks—presented by the sea. Unfortunately, because of widespread unfamiliarity with the system amongst sailors, wrecks were caused and a great many lives lost. Humperson fled to Jerusalem, where he studied anthropology and sociology in Hebrew under Martin Buber.

It was here—swatting flies in the fierce Palestine sun—that he began to develop the ideas for which he’s best remembered. Later, as a tenured professor at the University of San Marino, Humperson developed these preliminary insights into the five Laws of Meta as we know them today—

Momus extols an uncelebrated thinker.

While as with all right-thinking people I celebrate Charlie Jane Anders’ review of Revenge of the Fallen as some sort of critical apogee or at least the most fun I’ve had reading a movie review this summer so far—

And around hour six of ROTF, something curious happens: the two components—male enhancement and pure id—start to clash, badly. Usually, in a summer movie, the two aspects go together like tits and ass: Jason Statham plays someone who faces the same insecurities as regular dudes, but he overcomes them, and in the process he blows up everything in the world. But creating that kind of fusion requires enslaving the id to the male enhancement, and that in turn means only going way over the top instead of crazy, stratospheric over the top. Michael Bay is not willing to settle for going way over the top, like other directors.

So you have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality—but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There’s no such thing as the “real world,” and the only thing that’s left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you’re drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?

—Robert Humanick’s more pedestrian review from the House Next Door nonetheless proposes what I think will become the crucial metric for gaining some perspective on the era of the entertainment-industrial complex:

I mourn the volume of human life being wasted on this thing. If the film makes $100 million this weekend and tickets cost $10 a pop, that’s ten million viewers and a total of twenty-five million hours, not including previews, travel and the time spent earning the wasted money. If the average person lives to be 75, that’s 38 lives.

Remember the Bay 38, people. Never forget.