Following on my last post, I wanted to collect some thoughts on the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protest, which has rapidly grown more interesting. Today, for instance, instead of biking to Golden Gate Park and seeing some of the great free music, I watched mass arrests of hundreds of marchers who made their way onto the south (bklyn-bound) lane of the Brooklyn bridge where they were kettled by the NYPD. Live on the internet. Pretty high drama, but it's possibly quite a lot bigger than that.

According to press accounts, President Obama is pondering a strategy to make substantial cuts in both Social Security and Medicare funding. A friend asked on The Twitter why I thought this was a huge fail, and I can't really explain in 140 characters. So, the first substantively political blog post in a while.

I won't spend much time explaining why I think Social Security and Medicare are worth funding or what is motivating there is a clamor to fundamentally dismantle them. I just want to present some important and often overlooked information about the economic underpinnings of these arguments.

I've been doing the politics thing in a mostly mainstream way since 2003, following the action, participating heavily at times, trying to steer the Big Spaceship a little more to my liking. Following the horserace (or sometimes bloodsport, or sometimes commedia) in DC can leave one detached from the original motivation. One of my cousins asked me recently what my "real political values" are, I'm guessing because I tweet about class war and sound generally agitated. It actually made me stop and think, and that was nice. Here's what I came up with...

Starting a new tag, "Things I Consumed," I'll tell you about the things that I read, ate, watched or otherwise consumed, but more what they made me think. First up is The Big Short, Michael Lewis' exploration of our latest financial bubble via the lenze of those who saw the end coming and had the balls to invest in collapse.