But for our purposes right now, all you need to concern yourselves with is Dimon’s monumentally disingenuous self-castigation. Because Dimon is not stupid. Under his tenure, JPMorgan has been the best-run of the big banks. So Dimon’s self-criticism gets it all backward. The fact that JPMorgan was so very stupid is so very scary because we can rest assured that just about everybody else is doing things even more idiotic.

The whole point of the infamous “Volcker Rule” included in the Dodd-Frank bank reform act is to restrict the banking sector’s ability to clobber the economy by doing dumb things. As the Huffington Post’s Mark Gongloff noted, if  a strict version of the Volcker rule had been in place, JPMorgan, quite possibly, would have been prevented from making a bet that would lose the bank $2 billion — or more.

However, the Volcker Rule is not yet in effect. The final details are still being hammered out, and the brutal truth is that financial sector lobbyists have almost undoubtedly ensured that the kind of “hedging” bet JPMorgan just made would be technically legal under the new rules. There’s a remote possibility that the blowback from Morgan’s disaster might strengthen the final version of the rule, but don’t hold your breath. The worst financial crisis in 80 years resulted in bank reform that at best can be categorized as tepid and perhaps fatally compromised. One bad stumble by JPMorgan that, lucky for us, doesn’t seem likely to ignite a system-wide crash isn’t going to make a dent in Washington regulatory policy.

On the other hand, there could well be real political repercussions. Because if anyone is going to come out of this mess looking even stupider than Jamie Dimon, it’s got to be Mitt Romney — the presidential candidate actively campaigning on a pledge to repeal Dodd-Frank.

Barack Obama has been rightly dinged from the left for his soft approach to Wall Street, but there’s a reason why Big Capital is shunning him and pouring money into Romney’s campaign. Romney’s answer to the financial meltdown is to do absolutely nothing; to abandon even any pretense of reining in Wall Street bad behavior, to return us to the pre-crash regulatory status quo.

That’s suicidal. The U.S. economy may well skip over JPMorgan’s folly without any serious long-term damage. But that’s not the point. What we learned from the financial crisis is that the real danger inherent in Wall Street’s endless orgy of speculative trading is the prospect that multiple bets could go bad simultaneously when there is a big external shock to the system — like the housing bust. That’s when a downturn becomes a crash.

I can’t say with certainty that Dodd-Frank will do a good job of protecting us from a replay of the great financial crash of 2008. But the prospect of electing someone as president who is promising Wall Street that he will let them blithely self-regulate? That seems even stupider than JPMorgan’s $2 billion bad bet.

For three decades the cost of attending college anywhere — public, private nonprofit, or for-profit, Ivy League school or community college — has risen significantly faster than the rate of inflation. But the sharp acceleration over the last 10 years — and particularly since the onset of the Great Recession — has stoked a new wave of widespread anxiety over an impending “crisis” in higher education. The unrelenting cost hikes also explain why government aid for college students has become such a hot topic in this presidential campaign year. Even as the government continues to print money and throw it into the breach, the hole just seems to gets bigger. Total student debt is now over $1 trillion and rising.

In fact, for some critics, access to “easy government money” is the real problem, not the solution. No less an authority than House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, explaining why he wants to cut Pell Grants and reduce the availability of government-backed student loans, claims “there is evidence that subsidized lending contributes to tuition inflation.” Just last month, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi told the Associated Press that government loans and subsidies don’t work because “universities and colleges just raise their tuition. It doesn’t improve affordability and it doesn’t make it easier to go to college.’’

For some of these critics, the solution to higher tuition costs is to take government out of the education equation altogether; to allow the market to provide “innovative,” cost-effective alternatives to old-school brick-and-mortar-style higher education. Online learning, for example, could theoretically provide students with a cheap end-around to the existing establishment. There’s an intuitive attraction to this approach that crosses party lines. We’ve already seen the Internet wreak havoc on the music business and publishing industry by fundamentally changing the economics of content delivery. Why can’t it do the same for education?

Maybe it can, and will, in the long run. But before signaling a full-scale retreat of government from the higher education fray, it’s important to look a little more closely at the simplistic claim that “easy government money” is fueling higher costs. While there are certainly some sectors of higher education in which there is a clear relationship between student loans and higher tuitions, for the great majority of college students the problem isn’t that the government is giving them too much money. Quite the opposite: It’s the collapse of direct government support for higher education that is the main driver of higher tuition costs.

“The reality is that student debt is not rising because the government is putting more money into higher education,” says Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. “It’s rising because the government is putting less money into higher education.”

The first step in grappling with the rise in the cost of higher education requires understanding where students go to school. There are three main categories — public schools (which include both four-year public universities and two-year community colleges), private nonprofits (the Ivys, most liberal arts colleges, etc.), and the for-profits (Kaplan, University of Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges, aka “career schools”). Here’s the key statistic: Fully 70 percent of the 19 million undergraduates and 3 million graduate students enrolled in post-secondary education in 2010 attended schools considered to be in the public sector — by which it is meant that some portion of their funding comes directly from government.

The problem: The word “public” doesn’t mean as much as it used to. Direct state support for public colleges has cratered over the past 10 years, and really fell off the cliff after the financial crisis. Yes, tuitions have risen, but not by as much as state and local appropriations for higher education have fallen. Just between 2008 and 2009, for example, average tuition revenue at public research institutions increased by $369 per student, but the loss in state and local appropriations per student was $751. Similarly, at public community colleges, tuition revenue rose by $113 per student, while appropriations fell by $488. Since the recession of 2001, tuition hikes, as exorbitant as they have been, still haven’t kept pace with the fall in government support.

The bottom line: For the large majority of college students, rising tuitions have nothing to do with the availability of student loans or Pell Grants. What’s happening, instead, is that the burden of paying for college that was previously provided directly by government has now been shifted onto the backs of students, in the form of crippling debt.

The picture becomes a bit more complicated when one considers private nonprofits, which don’t get government support, but where tuitions have also been rising, if at a slower pace than at public schools. There’s an argument to be made that one explanation for why college costs have consistently risen faster than inflation over many decades has to do with the built-in resistance that the education sector has to the kind of productivity increases that result in lower prices in other industries. You can’t outsource teachers to China like you can iPhones or blue jeans. You need talent to operate a full-service college, and there’s a lot of competition for the talent, and so prices keep going up. While there are some problems with this argument — such as, do schools really need to have as many administrative personnel as teaching personnel? — the private nonprofit sector is where this argument seems to hold mostly true. Generally speaking, the private nonprofits are more or less immune to the same market forces that result in economies of scale elsewhere. This is particularly true for elite schools, where astoundingly high tuition gets tremendous public attention. So what? If you’re turning away 75 to 80 percent of your applicants, what possible reason do you have for lowering tuition? Quite the opposite: Keep hiking it! The kids will continue to apply!

Of course, deserved or not, our culture places a lot of value on a degree from an elite institution, which further maintains their ability to charge as much as the market will bear. The same is not true for the rapidly growing for-profit sector, which has burgeoned in size over the last 15 years despite not delivering much that anyone values.

One out of every 10 American college students now attends a for-profit school. And there is absolutely no question that those schools’ entire business model is built on the availability of student loans. Eighty to 90 percent of for-profit revenue comes from government aid — and it would probably hit 100 percent if not for a government regulation capping the total percentage of revenue allowed to come from government aid at 90 percent.

“It’s very, very clear,” says Carey. “The for-profits set their prices to whatever the maximum federal loan limit is. They charge as much money as students can borrow. ”

As has been amply documented, the for-profit sector also does a horrible job of actually educating students. For-profit students are more likely to drop out and much more likely to default on the debt they accumulated while failing to get a degree.

The dependence of the for-profit sector on government money poses a bit of a conundrum for Republicans who decry “easy government money,” because ideologically, Republicans are big fans of the for-profit sector, and fight hard to keep it free of government regulation and oversight. Yet it is precisely here that the system is most screwed up. When profit is the goal, and government looks the other way, students are the losers.

One informative, market-based method for comparing public, private and for-profit schools, suggests Lauren Asher, the president of the Institute for College Access and Success, is to look at the “net price” charged by institutions. Posted tuition rates don’t actually give a very clear picture of what a college actually costs to the person writing the check. The “net price” subtracts whatever grants are provided to the student directly by the school or government from total tuition (but does not include student loans).

The most recent data is eye-opening. The net price of attending one year at a four-year public school in 2009-2010 was $10,175. At a private nonprofit: $16,672. And at a for-profit school? A whopping $23,771. In fact, says Asher, the data indicates that in the last couple of years, the net price of attending public schools has held even and in some cases declined slightly, despite tuition hikes. Asher says that even as state appropriations plummet, schools are finding ways to cut costs and plow whatever cash they have available back into aid for low-income students. The data seems clear: If you’re looking for a bargain, your best bet is still state-supported education.

So what does all this mean in the big picture? In a perfect world, the easy answer would simply be to restore direct government support for higher education. There are still clear economic rewards to getting a post-secondary school degree, making government support of education a good investment for future economic growth and prosperity.

Unfortunately, in the realpolitik of today’s revenue-constrained, tax-averse governments, that simply isn’t politically feasible. Way back in 1978, California pioneered the future that we all currently live in when voters passed Proposition 13 and severely restricted the ability of the state to raise taxes. As a nation, we’ve voted with our taxpayer wallets: We are no longer willing to fund massive direct investments in our future.

Carey holds out hope for alternative providers of education that leverage the Internet’s huge advantages to provide instruction at low cost. Although some of the for-profits, most famously the University of Phoenix, have already been conducting classes online for years, they aren’t doing so with the goal of lowering costs for students, but rather to maximize their own profits. They’re essentially exploiting the Internet to deliver product as cheaply as possible on their own bottom line, but charging top-line prices to consumers that force massive borrowing.

There’s a clear role for government to play here, says Carey, both in restricting the abuses rampaging through the for-profit sector and in realigning incentives that constrict student and educational facility flexibility. For example, he notes, you can’t get a student loan to take a single calculus course from whichever professor might specialize in delivering the best online calculus course in the world. There’s no current way to get government aid for mixing and matching credits from different educational providers that can ultimately be assembled into a full degree.

Carey points to new, free online education initiatives from MIT, Harvard and Stanford that promise to revolutionize the education business by offering high quality at extraordinary low costs. These elite institutions pose no threat to their own operating model — there will always be plenty of students seeking the validation of a brick-and-mortar degree from Harvard, but they carry massive potential to destroy, or at least severely constrain, the for-profit model of education. We may one day look back at the current era and wonder how in the world the for-profit schools ever got away with charging such huge fees. And of course you won’t need a student loan to pay for a free online circuit engineering course put together by MIT.

How close that future might be is anyone’s guess. For now, you can’t get a transferable college credit from the MIT/Harvard initiative — exactly the kind of problem government needs to help solve. But for now, as Republicans and Democrats continue to squabble over how to pay for low interest rates on student loans or how much money to put into the Pell Grant program, we should remember that the real story here isn’t how much students are borrowing, but how little government is doing to help.

A big bet gone wrong is hardly unusual on Wall Street. It’s the nature of the beast, the kind of thing one expects from over-testosteroned speculators surfing the waves of their own monster egos. It happens all the time.

But not to JPMorgan. And not to Jamie Dimon. Until now JPMorgan was renowned for the excellence of its risk management strategies. It was one of the few big banks to come out of the financial crisis stronger than before the meltdown. While other banks collapsed or sought shotgun mergers, JPMorgan was the killer whale gobbling up the weakened predators around it. Dimon even complained mightily about being forced to take a government bailout. His bank didn’t need it, he said, and he returned the money as fast as he possibly could.

But it was his behavior after the meltdown that has really stoked the fires of pundit schadenfreude. An early supporter of Barack Obama — once even considered a possibility for Treasury secretary — Dimon’s feelings were hurt by the president’s mild anti-Wall Street “fat cat” rhetoric. He took great exception to the notion that Wall Street needed better regulation, and he fought long and hard to gut Dodd-Frank. All the while, he could point to his own bank’s relative fiscal strength as support for his superior attitude.

But not anymore. Now, one of his own employees has reminded the entire world that Wall Street needs to be protected from itself, both for its own good and for the rest of the global economy.

Finally to top it all off, there’s the nature of the trade itself — a huge bet on credit default swaps. Cue the credit crunch flashbacks! Details are sketchy, but what we know so far indicates that a London-based JPMorgan trader made a complicated bet on an index of corporate bonds that assumed that the individual corporations were likely to do well in the near future. The trader was essentially selling insurance protection on that index of bonds. If the companies did badly JPMorgan would have to pay off the buyers of that protection.

For weeks, there was scuttlebutt in the financial markets that a group of hedge fund sharks had figured out the strategy and were executing their own bets in a fashion designed to put pressure on Morgan. At the time Dimon and his chief financial officer casually dismissed the rumors. On April 13, Dimon called it “a complete tempest in the teapot.” Ooops!

We don’t know exactly what happened, yet, but in this case, it looks like the sharks savaged the killer whale.

So there you have it: the most arrogant of Wall Street’s investment bankers, a virulent critic of the notion that Wall Street’s sorry record of speculation in complex financial derivatives needed any kind of government regulation, gets brought back to earth by a taste of the meltdown’s worst medicine. As Dimon, no dummy, acknowledged on the conference call: ” “It’s very unfortunate … It plays right into the hands of a bunch of pundits out there, but that’s life.”

After all, who needs more information about the climate? It’s not like there’s been anything weird going on with the weather lately.

Oh wait. On the same day that the House voted to reduce funding for NOAA, the agency announced that the United States had just recorded its warmest 12-month period of temperatures since records started being kept in 1895.

The Washington Post provided some highlights of the report:

In the last year, the U.S. has experienced its second hottest summer, fourth warmest winter (December through February) and warmest March on record. And NCDC announced April 2012 was third warmest on record…

The degree by which some states and regions have exceeded their norms so far this year is incredible, and record-setting… The U.S. Climate Extremes Index – that tracks extremes in temperatures, precipitation and tropical cyclones – showed a record 42 percent of the country experienced extreme weather during the first four months of the year, primarily exceptional warmth.

The amendment’s author, Andy Harris, is the chairman of a House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment. He has previously criticized NOAA’s funding requests for a climate-related initiative on the grounds that “the climate services could become little propaganda sources instead of a science source.”

So, for fear of being exposed to propaganda, we’ll just stick our heads in the sand and wait until our asses fry off. I guess it’s better not to know what’s happening to the planet, if we’re not going to do anything about it anyway.

It was a lesson we never let go of. As Margalit Fox’s superb New York Times obituary for Maurice Sendak notes, his “books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children.”

That would be me. And my children.

As they were read unto me, I read unto them — each line reading with the intonation and emphasis passed down intact from parent to child — “And it was still hot!” It’s very simple: If the parent likes the book, or even better, liked the book as a child, then the child will receive a more vivacious reading of the text, which in turn impels the child to clamor to hear the treasured work read over and over again. Maurice Sendak planted an immortal virus in the culture, a self-fulfilling prophecy of rumpus, an affirmation that the child’s-eye view of the world made total sense. I thank him dearly for it.

Eighty-three is not a bad age at which to pass away, and while I feel regret at how the world is made less by his absence, my real sense of sadness after hearing the news of Sendak’s death came from the memories welling up of reading his works to my children.

My kids are too big now to fit alongside their father in the easy chair in which we conducted our pre-bedtime reading rituals. The easy chair itself has departed. Now we crack jokes while watching “Community” from the living room couch, their long arms and legs spread akimbo in every direction. Sure, we made a point of seeing the movie together, and agreed it was faithful to the original spirit, but it only served to evoke the spirit of those readings; it did not duplicate the experience.

In mere months, one child will be off to college, while the other increasingly exchanges incomprehensible YouTube in-jokes with his peers. Meanwhile, “Where the Wild Things Are” gathers dust on the bookshelf, safe from the culling that sent so many lesser works to the library or Goodwill (so long, “Magic Schoolbus”! Adios, Berenstein Bears!), but still a relic now of a childhood gone.

On Facebook, a friend of my sister’s recalled that when her mother read “Where the Wild Things Are” she would always sing the tequila song during the wild rumpus scene, “and I argued with her every time that this was not actually in the book.”

I felt another twinge. The anecdote struck a chord with me (and not just because tequila has been my rumpus-stimulant-of-choice for decades). That kind of mock argument between parent and child — where the parent is purposely provoking the child into a rote reaction — is an exercise in call-and-response harmony that binds the family tighter, just as did the ritual of reading and rereading the classic texts. We’re more sophisticated now, the jokes and arguments are more layered and complex, the call-and-response has lost its childlike simplicity. I even felt regret — why didn’t I sing “Tequila!” when I had the chance? What a missed opportunity!

I suspect (hope) that if Sendak, who didn’t seem like the kind of guy who suffered fools easily, was still around, he would scoff at all the nostalgia. There is, after all, always another generation of fresh young minds ready to be seduced by dreams of airplanes made of bread dough and kingly dominion over ominous beasts.

Guess the only thing left to do is get me some grandchildren, and propagate the virus some more. This time I’ll sing Tequila! Sendak might be gone, but “Where the Wild Things Are” will never leave us. I look forward to reading it a few more times.