Today is our wedding. Michelle and I are very excited, ironing out the final details. In a few minutes, we will head to the space to start setup.

By 1:30, everything should be more or less in place, with me and close friends at a sports bar near the space, watching the USA rock Ghana. After that game, we will do final decorations, set up the electronics, don our suits, and Michelle and I will tie the knot.

For all those who could not make it, we are thinking of you and are grateful for your kind notes, gifts, and cards. (Bruce Springsteen's Radio Nowhere just came on and I got energized and started dancing with Michelle a little).

Thank you to everyone that has helped out - this is incredible. Kimmi has welcomed Michelle to the family.

I have gone back and forth on whether it makes sense to try the Bush Administration, Bush, Cheney, or others, for their crimes while in office. My thoughts center on how such an attempt would change the future despite the fact that I would love to see them pay for their many crimes... but revenge is not a particularly good reason to do this.

In a recent issue of The New Republic, Michael Walzer considers other political trials in a good article examining the merits of a Bush trial. Highly recommended for those who would argue for a trial.

My conclusion is ultimately that such a trial would create more problems than it would solve. However, I think a Truth Commission would be a good approach. If anyone truly believed we were a society governed by the "rule of law," then a trial would make sense. But we aren't - despite the popular talking points of both parties who only care about the "rule of law" when it disadvantages their opponents.

If you had to guess what side the famously polygamous (though the Church officially frowns upon it now, it seems) Mormons were on in the fight to "save" marriage, what side would you guess? If you guessed that they are pouring hateful dollar after hateful dollar into campaigns to deny this human right to gay and lesbian couples, then give yourself a gold star!

An issue of Mother Jones earlier this year offers fascinating insights into the campaigns Mormons have secretly funded across the country to "protect" marriage. Aside from being yet another perversion of Jesus' message, this outrage should result in the loss of their tax exempt status. The idea that they don't have to pay taxes why focusing so intently on government policy is unjustifiable.

A few weeks ago, Sports Illustrated ran a fascinating cover story about evolution, genetics, doping, and sports. I think the insights into human evolution will be interesting even to those who are generally uninspired by sports.

It notes that all human are fundamentally built to be distance runners... and they mean distance! In fact, there is an argument that running was fundamental to our human development.

Even our large brains developed because we ran, growing only once our endurance enabled us to gorge on animal fat and protein. We are who we are—the only sweating, largely hairless bipedal mammals—because we ran. As Lieberman puts it, "Endurance running is hardwired into our anatomy and physiology."

The article goes into a great discussion of investigations into why the Kenyan runners have succeeded so well at long distances ... and it seems far more behavioral than genetic.

The discussion turns to brain injuries and what we can predict based on genetic markers and predisposition to slow healing from brain trauma:

The more ApoE has been studied, though, the more it has been associated not only with Alzheimer's but also with the ability of the brain to heal from all manner of trauma. People with ApoE4 variants who hit their heads in car accidents, for example, are more likely to have permanent damage or to die than those who have other variants. And a series of small studies suggests that athletes with ApoE4 variants who get hit in the head are more likely to recover slowly and to suffer greater dementia later in life. It is not entirely clear how ApoE affects brain recovery, but the gene is involved in the inflammatory response of the brain after injury, and people with the ApoE4 variant appear to take longer to clear their brains of a particular protein called amyloid, which floods in following head trauma.

I highly recommend the whole article, but I also wanted to note that our intelligence evolved because of our ability to maintain a high-fat and high-protein diet... from our ability to hunt animals. Those who argue that eating meat is inherently unnatural are wrong. Not only is it tasty - it was essential to our human development. Now, I do agree with those that argue much of our modern meat industrial complex is unhealthy, but that is different from arguing we should simply avoid meat because eating other animals is somehow wrong.

I dunno who this punk is, but there's about 20 min of him yakking about broadband.

Chris Mitchell - Muninetworks.org from Geoff Daily on Vimeo.

Thanks to Kimmi for alerting me to this excellent commencement address to Smith College by Rachel Maddow. Highly recommended.

I bet she didn't learn this from the Wii. Found it while checking out some Franti stuff.

This is local - shot at Lake Nokomis I think. There is a massive "hooping" culture out there apparently ... or so YouTube would suggest.

Is Timothy Geithner, head of the Treasury Department, leading a charge toward socialism, saving the banks, or setting up the next big crisis (or all three and more?)? I don't know. I feel very comfortable weighing on telecom issues, energy issues, and a variety of other policy matters that I have deeply studied. But all this financial stuff is really friggin complicated ... perhaps because the "Greed is Good" generation sent its best minds to Wall Street to make money rather than producing something of value (which can include banking services - but that wasn't what these folks were doing).

So I find it all very frustrating. I'm trying to read up on it - Michael Lewis' The Big Short is on my short list of books to read. As is Simon Johnson's 13 Bankers. What I did just read is Joshua Green's "Inside Man" and I don't quite know what to think of it. I generally find Joshua Green a pretty astute observer, so I wanted to write about it.

I agree entirely with this quote from Geithner:

“In a crisis, you have to choose,” Geithner told me. “Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson? They’re in direct conflict.”

Nothing that I have read suggests the bank bailouts could have been avoided absent a desire to create a much bigger crisis. But I am deeply disappointed in the Obama Administration's unwillingness to pass good policy into law to limit the size of banks and crack down on shady practices that serve to enrich a few bankers but do nothing to improve the overall efficiency of the economy.

[Simon] Johnson contends that Team Obama has ignored the necessary step of breaking up the power of what he calls the “oligarchies”—the big Wall Street banks—as part of the reform process, which is what happened after the emerging-market crises. “If your banks have run themselves into the ground doing crazy things,” he told me, “you need a substantial shift in the power structure. In the ’90s view, the Geithner-Summers view, it is essential that you address that problem as part of the immediate stabilization policies.” To Johnson, as ardent a believer in regulatory capture as George Stigler ever was, it’s plain that Geithner has fallen under Wall Street’s spell, and that through him and his whole apparat, Obama has too.

I do recommend this article as a decent start in understanding why Obama's Administration has done what it has done. But it seems that we really need Congress to push good policy. Obama doesn't seem up to the task.