Peter Frase

It somehow became a convention of modern blogging that you should periodically throw up a post of links to stuff that you think is interesting, but aren't going to write a whole post about. Some of the pros do one every day, while the amateurs usually do one weekly. If you do it weekly, my understanding is that Friday and Sunday are acceptable days for linkdumps. You're also supposed to have a clever title of some sort, but for now I'll settle for a reference to a great Ice Cube vehicle:

*Friday* came out in 1995. Today, there are a whole lot more people who ain't got no job, though sadly they probably still have shit to do. Anyway, here goes; this edition guaranteed to be 100% 9/11-free.

- Jon Huntsman has [complicated opinions about Captain Beefheart](http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/09/06/jon_huntsman_passes_the_captain_beefheart_test.html). Being something of a philistine, I prefer *Doc At the Radar Station*.

- Around the world, ruling parties [lose when the economy](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/07/313623/the-comparative-politics-of-the-great-recession/) is bad, regardless of ideology. Which implies that even if the voters are (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_07/public_opinion_and_keynesian_e031008.php) in theory, they're right in practice: if you don't get results, they'll throw you out.

- Trying to stimulate the economy purely by monetary means might just end up [inflating asset bubbles](http://theamericanscene.com/2011/09/07/monetary-stimulus-and-speculative-bubbles).

- People in their 20's are [mad as hell](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/profiles-of-the-jobless-the-mad-as-hell-millennial-generation/244552/), but seem like they're going to continue to take it for a while longer. The mixture of righteous anger and ideological confusion on display here is fascinating.

- The U.S. economy has about the same number of jobs now as it did [in 2000](http://www.businessinsider.com/), despite a much bigger population. Just imagine what things would be like if we had dealt with this by decreasing hours rather than shedding jobs, and if the income growth of the past ten years had gone to increasing wages instead of swelling the incomes of the top 1%.

- The rise of the [gig economy](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/the-freelance-surge-is-the-industrial-revolution-of-our-time/244229/) is good reason to expand the welfare state and decouple its benefits from employment.

- Ladies and gentlemen, the Internet: [Jack White and the Insane Clown Posse collaborate on a single built around a Mozart sample](http://pitchfork.com/news/43861-jack-white-teams-up-with-insane-clown-posse/). The song is entitled "Lick me in the arse".

- It's impossible to know what really went down in [the crazy battle over the Innocence Project](http://www.chicagomag.com/core/pagetools.php?url=%2FChicago-Magazine%2FOctober-2011%2FWhat-Happened-Between-David-Protess-and-Medill%2Findex.php%3Fcparticle%3D2%26siarticle%3D1&mode=print) at Northwestern's school of journalism. But my inclination is to come down against the servile and morally bankrupt culture of "objective" journalism, and in favor of a project that, whatever its errors, demonstrably saved the lives of people wrongly condemned to the state of Illinois' machinery of death.

- As I've [noted before](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/), sometimes "job killing" policy is a [very good thing](http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/09/08/314310/creating-jobs-by-making-peoples-lives-worse/).

- Peter Dorman [speculates](http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2011/09/political-economy-and-financialization.html) about the incentives and ideology of the elite in finance capitalism, and why it's so hard to pit one segment of big business against another.