Urban Wild Kingdom!

This is very cool! Two red-tailed hawks have nested on the Franklin Institute, which is about a mile north of us. It's very possible that I've watched this very pair running a flock of pigeons ragged, apparently for the sheer joy of it. Two of the eggs have hatched.

Banks will fail whether the government lets them or not...

I just realized that those troubled banks are going to fail and the taxpayer will foot the bill.

Here's what I suspect is going to happen:

• responding to public outrage about how the taxpayers' funds are spent, the administration is putting on salary caps
  
• the best talent will leave the troubled banks with the salary caps and go to other banks
  
• the money will follow the talent
  
• the TARP banks, husks of their former selves, will either limp along as quasi-government entities or be quietly sold off to the banks that aren't helped out by the government
  


Kinda-sorta related to that is an observation in the Wall Street Journal about populism in the U.S.



America has an enormous middle class that is heavily invested in the financial system and is hardly about to organize for its overthrow.

"What both the 1890s and 1930s had in common was an intense class anger, a stark division of the nation into 'bosses' and 'workers,'" said Jerald Podair, a history professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis. "I don't think this perspective applies to our present crisis."

People who have lost half the value of their 401(k) plans, in other words, want to regain it by having the economy rebound, not by seizing the assets of ExxonMobil Corp. People who have lost a home want to rebuild their credit and buy another one, not liberate the property of the wealthy.

--Naftali Bendavid, They Don't Make Populism in the U.S. Like They Used To




I think Bendavid is right.

Better than Susan Boyle singing that Les Miz thing...

( go on, you know you want to watch it )

My picture in the paper....

Not so that you could really tell unless you were looking for me, but in "Photo 1 of 2" I'm to the camera's right of the guy in the vibrant orange shirt.

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/43158867.html

It was a pretty interesting conference, on creating a Philadelphia encyclopedia.