It’s natural to feel wronged when you see your savings get cut in half or more due to a widespread economic downturn caused by irresponsible greed on Wall Street. It’s natural to feel misled and to seek out a scapegoat. It’s wrong to accuse and lynch workers in the financial industry– those who had very little to do with the cause of the economic downturn– simply because they make a lot of money.

The fiasco with the A.I.G. bonuses and the outrage expressed by the nation and its president are an example of the incredible ability and crippling need of the human mind to justify blame and, in some cases, deflect responsibility for the personal and corporate financial negligence that led to this financial crisis. Does anyone actually know the job responsibilities of the A.I.G. employees who received those bonuses? Do people even care whether or not their daily activities were related at all to credit default swaps? It is blind and foolish to assume that just because someone made a few million dollars in bonuses last year, that person is an evil criminal that leeches money from hard working tax payers.

Perhaps one reason it is so easy to villainize the executives we read about in the news is because we don’t personally know many such people. To most of us, the idea of making $1 million a year seems so incredulous that anyone who does it must somehow be cheating, breaking the rules, or doing something unethical. Perhaps part of that rationalization stems from a selfish desire that balks at the idea of anyone being many times more successful than oneself.

While the so-called moral outrage at the A.I.G. bonuses may provide good ratings for news outlets, any benefit that may arise from such emotional beatings of the chest are imaginary or psychological at best, and at worst, will only result in a distracted president and delayed solutions to the current economic quagmire.

Few things upset me more than greedy companies taking advantage of consumer ignorance. I own about 30 domain names, and therefore I get a lot of domain name spam– both emails and letters in the mail. Some of the letters in the mail attempt to pass themselves off as bills from the company that owns your domain. The wording makes it appear as if your domain is registered through them and will expire unless you pay them a fee (usually something like $30 for a 1 year renewal, which makes it even more ridiculous because the typical rate is around $10 per year). They make the letter look as official as possible, and while it does say in the (very) fine print that it isn’t really an invoice, a lot of gullible consumers aren’t going notice that, especially since they send these letters out a month or so before your domain is really about to expire. (Publicly accessible whois records allow anyone to obtain the owner name and address, expiration date, and registrar of any public domain name.)

Now, when I receive these types of letters, I just rip them apart and toss them in the trash. However, I can imagine non-tech savvy people falling for this. My mom, for example, recently received one such letter but thankfully was smart enough to call me about it. I don’t remember exactly which company it was from, but if you google “domain renewal scam” you’ll come across a bunch of reported cases involving companies such as Domain Registry of America and Liberty Names of America.

If you can get past the utter despair this story casts on the state of the economy, maybe you can appreciate the hypocritical irony in the idea of A.I.G. using government bailout money to sue the government.

Did anyone else notice that the awards music at the 81st Annual Academy Awards sounded an awful lot like the opening to “Belle” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast? You know, the part where it goes, “Little town, it’s a quiet village. Every day, like the one before…” Out of curiosity I superimposed audio clips from the two sources, one thing led to another, and I ended up making this video. [download avi]

Some things to note. The awards music at the Oscars is in E flat, while the Broadway recording of Beauty and the Beast’s “Belle” is in D, and the song in the actual movie is in D flat. I used Adobe Audition to transpose the awards audio down a half step so the music is in D flat while keeping the same tempo, since the original tempo matched the tempo in “Belle” pretty well. For the “remix” of the awards music in the second half of the video, the tempo was a bit faster, so I had to slow it down some. In the end, I added some animation from the movie, but remember I was using the Broadway cast recording, so the lip syncing didn’t match up precisely.