fuzzypuzzle

Ridley Scott Signs on to Direct Shitty Movie For Boatloads of Cash

Do not pass GO, do collect millions you cheap frickin' whore. Ridley Scott, the visionary director of classic films Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator has lowered himself to directing movies based on Hasbro board games. From the Hollywood Reporter:

"Monopoly" marks the latest Hasbro property to look to pass go and head to the big screen. Board games and branded properties have become more attractive as studios look to mitigate risk by finding built-in audiences.

Universal is working with Hasbro on several projects as part of a long-term development deal. Platinum Dunes is producing its feature adaptation of "Ouija Board," while the maritime classic "Battleship" is also in development. Elsewhere at Hasbro, Paramount this summer is set to release Stephen Sommers' feature based on its "G.I. Joe" character. And "Trivial Pursuit: America Plays" is now airing as a syndicated television program.

Pirates of Somalia Much More Interesting Than Pirates of Caribbean

Great article in today's Times.

Banks Come Out of the Woodwork For a Piece of the Sweet Bailout Action

From the NY times.

At least 15 new banks have signed up for the government’s offer of a cash injection, in addition to the 9 that joined the program initially. The injections are a bid to revive the sector, which has suffered since lending has dried up and many loans have gone bad.

The Treasury Department plans to provide funds for 20 to 22 lenders in the current round of a $250 billion bank recapitalization program.

Nine of the largest banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Company and Citigroup, received the first $125 billion of capital infusions two weeks ago.

The additional 14 banks that have announced they will use the government funds includes: PNC Financial Services Group, $7.7 billion; the Capital One Financial Corporation, $3.55 billion; the Regions Financial Corporation, $3.5 billion; SunTrust Banks, $3.5 billion; Fifth Third Bancorp, $3.4 billion; KeyCorp, $2.5 billion; Comerica, $2.25 billion; the State Street Corporation, $2.0 billion; the Northern Trust Corporation, $1.5 billion; Huntington Bancshares, $1.4 billion; the First Horizon National Corporation, $866 million; the City National Corporation, $395 million; Valley National Bancorp, $330 million; Washington Federal, $200 million; and First Niagara Financial Group, $186 million.

I really cannot believe that this is the way it's going to go down (?!) Capital One is on this list. You know Capital One right? The company that is constantly bombarding you with multi-million dollar television commercials, advertising their product. The company that charges you 14% for the privilege of using their wonderful card. Yeah them. They're taking 3.5 billion of your tax dollars on top of that. You're cool with that, right? Because "whatevs", there's plenty to go around. This is America after all.

Ron Paul Says No to the Bailout

For more details and links to contact your representative visit the Campaign For Liberty. UPDATE: Links to senators Clinton and Schumer are currently "busy and unable to connect" Democracy in action! (insert screeching eagle of Liberty SFX)

Washington Mutual on Avenue A in the East Village

Quotes On the Bailout

"I'm not going to fire you; you can still be called Congress. But you don't have any power."

      — Jon Macey, Yale Law School professor and deputy dean, providing an allegory for Secretary Paulson's proposal

*

"As of now we [journalists] are, as a group, behaving just as we did the
last two times the administration sought to rush through a hastily
thought out, ill-conceived plan. Why in the world are we being so
gullible and naive?"

      — Former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston

*

"What the proposal actually did...was explicitly rule out any oversight, plus grant immunity from future review... [I]f Paulson can't be honest about what he himself sent to Congress... there is no reason to trust him on anything related to his bailout plan."

      — Paul Krugman

*

"If you think the Bailout of All Bailouts...won't saddle American taxpayers with billions, if not trillions, of risky obligations, you don't know politics... Never before in the history of American capitalism has so much been asked of so many for...so few."

      — Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor

*

"We are talking about ten thousand dollars per household, and that money
cannot simply go into a black hole of bad debt."

      — John McCain

*

"Americans can no longer trust the economic information they are getting from this Administration... Secretary Paulson's market predictions have been consistently wrong in the last year."

      — Republican Senator Jim DeMint

*

"This is scare tactics to try to do something that's in the private but not the public interest. It's terrible."

      — Allan Meltzer, former economic adviser to President Reagan
and Carnegie Mellon professor of political economy, quoted in the New York Times

*

"Watching Washington rush to throw taxpayer money at Wall Street has been sobering and a little frightening."

      — Newt Gingrich

*

"Many economists argue that taxpayers ought to get more than avoidance of the apocalypse for their dollars: they ought to get an ownership stake in the companies on the receiving end."

      — New York Times front-page analysis by reporter Peter S. Goodman

*

"Seriously, is there anybody out there willing to write George Bush a blank check?"

      — Democratic Activist Christine Pelosi

I'm MAD AS HELL, and I'm Not Going To Take It Anymore!!

Obama '08.

So is the Government Going to Bail Me Out?

This will come as no surprise to anyone, but according to Lee Pickard (former director, SEC trading and markets division) the SEC allowed "special exemptions" (ie. insane and irresponsible deregulation) for the five big brokerage firms. Goldman, Merrill, Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley. 

The events of the past year are not accidental, but rather the result of an SEC decision to allow these firms to legally violate existing net capital rules that, in the past 30 years, had limited broker dealers debt-to-net capital ratio to 12-to-1. Instead, the 2004 exemption -- given only to 5 firms -- allowed them to lever up 30 and even 40 to 1.

David Foster Wallace – R.I.P.

Excerpted from the Times.

Much of Mr. Wallace’s work, from his gargantuan 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” to his excursions into journalism, felt like outtakes from a continuing debate inside his head about the state of the world and the role of the writer in it, and the chasm between idealism and cynicism, aspirations and reality. The reader could not help but feel that Mr. Wallace had inhaled the muchness of contemporary America — a place besieged by too much data, too many video images, too many high-decibel sales pitches and disingenuous political ads — and had so many contradictory thoughts about it that he could only expel them in fat, prolix narratives filled with Möbius strip-like digressions, copious footnotes and looping philosophical asides. If this led to self-indulgent books badly in need of editing — “Infinite Jest” clocked in at an unnecessarily long 1,079 pages — it also resulted in some wonderfully powerful writing. The writer was found dead was found dead in his home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide.

 

Large Hadron Colider Goes Online - World Not Sucked Into Black Hole ... Yet

 

After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date.

At 4:28 a.m., Eastern time, the scientists announced that a beam of protons had completed its first circuit around the collider’s 17-mile-long racetrack, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border. They then sent the beam around several more times.

Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.

Some worried about speculation that a black hole could emerge from the proton collisions, referring to it a doomsday machine, to the dismay of CERN physicists who can point to a variety of studies and reports that say that this fear is nothing but science fiction.

The only thing physicists agree on is that they do not know what will happen — what laws and particles will prevail — when the collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang.

“That there are many theories means we don’t have a clue,” said Dr. Oddone. “That’s what makes it so exciting.”

Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.

But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider were a car, then what physicists did Wednesday was turn on an engine that will now warm up for a couple of months before anyone drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of five trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.