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Longwood Gardens. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Aerosmith (w/ Johnny Depp) - Stop Messin' Around
News and Opinion
Oscars 2013: Predicting the winners with data and critics
Best Picture
Having picked up many of this season's movie awards already, "Argo" is turning out to be the likely favorite to win the best picture trophy.
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Best Director
PredictWise's data reflects the movie writers' picks, putting Spielberg in the lead with 81.3 percent.
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Best Actor
All eyes are on Daniel Day-Lewis for the lead acting honor.
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Best Actress [...]
"This is such a close call between Jessica Chastain, who's almost demonic as a CIA operative obsessively tracking Osama bin Laden, and Jennifer Lawrence, who's one of the most endearing damaged souls to hit the big-screen in ages," wrote Germain.
EW Predictions
Supporting Actor
Will Win: Robert De Niro, Silver Linings Playbook
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Supporting Actress
Will Win: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables
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Adapted Screenplay
Will Win: Chris Terrio, Argo.
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Original Screenplay
Will Win: Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained
Read the whole thing -- the talk about anti-heroes, Ben Affleck's interview with Bill O'Reilly, interactions with the Obama administration, etc.
CIA shifts Hollywood gaze to its best side
Ben Affleck, by any measure a Hollywood liberal, paid a warm tribute to the “clandestine services” at the Golden Globes when accepting an award for Argo , about the CIA rescue of hostages held in Iran after the shah’s fall in 1979.
Best Actress awards on the same night for film and drama series were won by Jessica Chastain, for Zero Dark Thirty , and Claire Danes, for Homeland.
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“There has been a major shift in the way the agency has been represented,” said Tricia Jenkins of Texas Christian University, the author of a new book on the CIA and Hollywood.
The CIA was late to the game with Hollywood, not establishing formal ties until the mid-1990s, its leaders desperate to restore its public standing in the wake of its belated discovery of a damaging Soviet mole, Aldrich Ames.
“They started to work with Hollywood in preproduction and that approach has benefited them,” said Ms Jenkins.
In 1997 the CIA created an entertainment industry liaison section, which, according to its website, aims to give an “accurate portrayal” of the agency and its agents’ “skill, innovation, daring, and commitment to public service”.
A 9/11 Victim’s Family Raises New Objections to ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
The survivors contend that Ms. Ong’s voice, recorded on a call from American Airlines Flight 11 before it hit the World Trade Center, was improperly used in an opening sequence of “Zero Dark Thirty.” They are demanding an apology at the Academy Awards ceremony for using the call without consent, should the movie or any of its makers come up a winner, Harry Ong, her brother, said in an interview on Friday. [...] they want Sony Pictures Entertainment, which is distributing “Zero Dark Thirty” in the United States, to include a credit for Ms. Ong and a statement on both its Web site and on home entertainment versions of the film making clear that the Ong family does not endorse torture, which is depicted in the film, an account of the search for Osama bin Laden.
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“I thought it was just outrageous, and totally poor judgment, and an abuse of the voices,” Mr. Ong said of an opening scene that included recordings of Sept. 11 victims and responders as they dealt with the Sept. 11 attacks. The letter acknowledges that use of the recording “has First Amendment value.”
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Responding on Friday to the new claim, Mr. Boal said, in an e-mail, “As the 9/11 commission justly proclaimed, Betty Ong is without a doubt one of our national heroes.”
Must read.
Torture, Lies and Hollywood
In fact, torture led us away from Bin Laden. [...] Portraying torture as effective risks misleading the next generation of Americans that one of our government’s greatest successes came about because of the efficacy of torture. It’s a disservice both to our history and our national security.
While filmmakers have the right to say what they want, government officials don’t have the right to covertly provide filmmakers with false information to promote their own interests. Providing selective information about a classified program means there is no free market of ideas, but a controlled market subject to manipulation. That’s an abuse of power.
When agents heard senior officials citing information we knew was false, we were barred from speaking out. After President George W. Bush gave a speech containing falsehoods in 2006 — I believe his subordinates lied to him — I was told by one of my superiors: “This is still classified. Just because the president is talking about it doesn’t mean that we can.”
Some of these memos, and reports pointing out their inaccuracies, have been declassified, but they are also heavily redacted. So are books on the subject, including my own.
Meanwhile, promoters of torture get to hoodwink journalists, authors and Hollywood producers while selectively declassifying material and providing false information that fits their narrative.
The creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” attempted to document the greatest global manhunt of our generation. But they did so without acknowledging that their “history” was based on dubious sources.
[Emphasis added]
High praise from the LA Review of Books, Richard Beck. He comes right out and says: "Of course torture played a role in bin Laden’s death" and invests a lot of words into taking down liberal critics, going as far as to say that we are really just unwilling to understand ourselves as the intended audience. To understand what's really going on with this movie, and to understand the mindset of the people behind it, I think this is the best article to read. It's one of the most important pieces out there, imho, and I've read a
lot of them (as you know!) My intense interest in this movie and all the writing around it is not just about one movie, it's the sophisticated propagandizing of the American people, empire, and a number of bigger issues.
Mission Accomplished: On "Zero Dark Thirty" by Richard Beck
I found this moment intensely moving, as I did much else in Bigelow’s film, which is a masterpiece. 9/11 was a mass murder, but it was also designed as a media spectacle. The whole point of flying planes into skyscrapers was to set off explosions high in the air where everyone could see. When the United States launched the War on Terror in reply, one important goal was to cook up images that could compete with or erase the fireball, the billowing smoke, the blue sky. Saddam Hussein’s statue toppled by an armored truck in Firdos Square; President Bush in a flight suit on an aircraft carrier deck — the only thing undermining these images was their fraudulence. But there are no iconic images in Zero Dark Thirty, no riffs on the Abu Ghraib torture photographs, no poses struck. Bigelow’s camera keeps moving, as though to fend such images off. The movie opens instead with the sounds of 9/11: dispatchers’ instructions, desperate calls, voice-mails. These intimate recordings play out over the audience in total darkness.
One of Bigelow’s first films, The Set-Up, screened at the Whitney Museum in 1978, and it features one man beating up another on a city street. The blows were apparently authentic, and Bigelow remains interested in what it means to watch real violence on screen. In Zero Dark Thirty’s opening scene, a CIA torturer named Dan pauses with Maya, an intelligence analyst and the film’s protagonist, outside a locked shed. There is a man inside, tied up with ropes and pulleys, and Dan is about to go back to work. “You know there’s no shame if you want to watch from the monitor,” he says. Later, beginning to piece things together, Maya spends a long night, or series of nights — it’s unclear — doing exactly that. She views tape after tape of interrogations, different men in different undisclosed locations, tied up in different ways yet all repeating the same significant name. Later still, in the manner of somebody half-watching an unimportant football game, she sees a drone strike play out in real time. She is chatting on the phone with a friend, who tells her there will be lots of wine at some party. “Cool, bring me back a bottle,” she says, as the monitor’s light bathes her face.
Maya watches these videos not because she is a sadist or a voyeur but because she is a professional. The one question posed by her environment — “Are you doing a good job?” — is a question that lacks a moral component of its own. During the torture years, liberals argued endlessly with the Bush administration about whether torture “worked.” As a result, they accepted the amorality of strict professionalism, whether they knew it or not, and this decision left them in a rather weak negotiating position when Bush’s more competent successor took office. Today, al-Qaeda’s leadership have been decimated. Guantanamo is still open, but people have mostly stopped complaining. The drones always manage to kill somebody. Obama’s War on Terror may not be more ethical than the first version, but there is no doubt that it is being run by qualified experts who know what they are doing. One of the things these experts did, in 2009, was to send an email to all senior Pentagon staff. “This administration prefers to avoid using the term ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror,’” the email read. Under Obama, the conflict’s official name is Overseas Contingency Operations.
The CIA Goes To Hollywood: How America’s Spy Agency Infiltrated the Big Screen (and Our Minds)
It’s hard for the public to contextualize what we’re told are the CIA’s spectacular feats; it’s relatively easy for the CIA to bury inconvenient, illegal, or catastrophic failures. For example, the producers of Argo chose not to explore why, precisely 20 minutes after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 inaugural address, Iran released all remaining American 66 hostages after a 444-day ordeal. It smelled like a secret deal, though its exact nature was buried in controversy. (Prominent in the arrangement with Iran was William Casey, the Reagan confidant who went on to become CIA director immediately after the hostage release.) The basic point, not mentioned in Argo, is that parties in the Reagan camp were pushing Iran to delay the hostage release until after Carter lost the election. If proven, that would be treasonous. In any event, the relationships evolved to be known as Iran–Contra, which would have muddled Argo’s happy message. By minimizing or ignoring the bookends of the 1953 coup and the 1980 hostage release, Argo could stand alone as a heroic feel-good tale. The rest of us still live with the real-world consequences.
For your consideration. I don't have an opinion either way (have not studied either well enough yet). Claims the Bloomberg article about bank profits being all taxpayer money is wrong.
Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks A Subsidy of $83 Billion Per Year, Or Any Other Made-Up Number For That Matter?
You can go ahead and evaluate that claim if you want; they cite 2005 and 2006 papers on how ratings determine bank spreads. There is probably some truth to the fact that, within the banking sector, ratings correlate with spreads, though which way the causation flows is less clear. I am unaware of any evidence that markets trust Fitch’s “Support Rating” as an accurate indicator of likely external support. This is irrelevant if you believe that the mechanism for bank credit is (1) Fitch determines a bank’s individual credit strength and likelihood of external support, (2) Fitch uses those determinations to make a rating, and (3) the market then reacts to that rating by pricing higher-rated banks tighter than lower-rated banks. That mechanism seems … I’m still going with problematic? But, okay, fine.
A perhaps bigger problem is Bloomberg’s blind use of the midpoint of the effect on funding costs. Here is how Ueda and di Mauro describe the funding advantage of a three-notch ratings uplift: “5-8bp for an A rated bank, 23 bp for a BBB rated bank, 61 bp for a BB rated bank, and 128 bp for a B rated bank.” Then it uses the midpoint and gets 66.5bps, which becomes 80bps for the 4-ish notches of uplift that banks get in 2009. Fine whatever.
No, this isn't The Onion.
Move Over Apple — Hedge Funds Have A New Favorite Stock
The Goldman Sachs equity strategy team is out with its new list of the most important stocks in the hedge fund world, and "after three consecutive years as the top hedge fund holding, AAPL has slipped to third pace, with 67 funds (11%) holding the stock as a top-10 position versus 109 last quarter (19%)."
The new top stock: AIG.
Jamie Dimon defends dual leadership roles as shareholders call for him to give up title
With that in mind, Lindsley and others expect that a higher percentage of shareholders will vote in favor of the split at the bank’s annual meeting in the spring. A date has yet to be set.
“Even a Master of the Universe can be swallowed by a London Whale,” AFSCME President Lee Saunders said in a statement.
Regardless, JPMorgan is unlikely to make changes to its leadership structure. That’s due in part to the fact that the so-called advisory proposal is symbolic and not legally binding.
What’s more, the bank’s board believes that Dimon’s ability to ring up record profits will be his best defense, insiders say.
Pete Peterson's Puppet Populists
Fix the Debt is the most hypocritical corporate PR campaign in decades, an ambitious attempt to convince the country that another cataclysmic economic crisis is around the corner and that urgent action is needed. Its strategy is pure astroturf: assemble power players in business and government under an activist banner, then take the message outside the Beltway and give it the appearance of grassroots activism by manufacturing an emergency to infuse a sense of imminent crisis.
Behind this strategy are no fewer than 127 CEOs and even more “statesmen” pushing for a “grand bargain” to draw up an austerity budget by July 4. With many firms kicking in
$1 million each on top of Peterson’s $5 million in seed money, this latest incarnation of the Peterson message machine must be taken seriously.
Pro Publica
Four Disturbing Questions About the Mumbai Terror Attack
The 35-year prison sentence imposed on David Coleman Headley, a terrorist scout and Pakistani spy convicted in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has closed the U.S. chapter of a case with explosive international implications.
But justice remains elusive. Neither the U.S. nor Pakistani governments have fully answered critical questions about the case â including why most of the accused masterminds remain at large in Pakistan despite evidence implicating them.
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Q. Why didn't U.S. authorities stop Headley sooner?
A. ProPublica has explored in detail the repeated warnings about Headley to the FBI and the missed opportunities to stop him between 2001 and 2009.
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With Little More Than a Note, Obama Deploys US Troops To Niger
West African nation that will host fleet of US drones will also have armed US soldiers with "boots on the ground"
In the era of executive authority—almost entirely enabled by the annually renewed Authorization for Use of Military Force enacted after the events of 9/11—the question remains, at what point will Congress reassert its right to control declarations of war and at what point will the US public begin to question a "war on terror" that can deploy US soldiers in a foreign nation with the quick delivery of a simple presidential note?
Fed Meeting Shows Dissent on Measures to Lift Job Growth
WASHINGTON — There are widening divisions among officials of the Federal Reserve over the value of its efforts to reduce unemployment, but the authors of its bond-buying policy remain firmly in control, according to an official account of the January meeting of the Fed’s policy-making committee.
What Your Culture Really Says
The monied, celebrated, nuevo-social, 1% poster children of startup life spread the mythology of their cushy jobs, 20% time, and self-empowerment as a thinly-veiled recruiting tactic in the war for talent against internet giants. The materialistic, viral nature of these campaigns have redefined how we think about culture, replacing meaningful critique with symbols of privilege. The word “culture” has become a signifier of superficial company assets rather than an ongoing practice of examination and self-reflection.
Culture is not about the furniture in your office. It is not about how much time you have to spend on feel-good projects. It is not about catered food, expensive social outings, internal chat tools, your ability to travel all over the world, or your never-ending self-congratulation.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts
Patti Smith - People Have The Power (w/Johnny Depp)