See context here, here, here, here, here and here.
Stolen from Dr Boli, but then, if he’s going to start a religion he can bloody well afford to spare this, eh?
Category Archives: government
the subprime mortage crisis, explained, plus bonus Jérôme Kerviel details
The Long Johns, John Fortune & John Bird, explain in interview just exactly how the subprime mortgage crisis really happened. Realer than you’d think (stolen from Valleywag)
My current favorite banking scandal-related fact: Jérôme Kerviel, the mild-mannered French rogue banker who lost over €4.9 billion in one month and may have thereby perpetrated the current market cliff-jump, had eleven friends on Facebook.
Parenthetical: Richard Milhous Nixon probably has more friends on Facebook and he’s for reals dead, not just career dead!
But the best part is, after the news broke, one by one as the day continued those eleven friends de-friended him while the journalists of the world watched and snickered. Justice in action! The internet’s revenge is swift, ruthless, and public.
From the Guardian:
There was speculation he could have been trying to prove himself to the bank, to create his own spectacular method of making profits or simply prove the system could be broken. Union officials warned he might have been caught in a quest for a good bonus…”If he was a genius, then we didn’t spot it, ” said Dominique Chabert, his university tutor. He was “not a student who made an impression on his year, either in a good or bad way”.
Apparently France’s tolerance for tragically mediocre Walter Mitty figures is less than its tolerance for Mickey Rourke.
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When Worlds Collide: The Pot Vending Machine
In a post sure to incite frantic giggling and mild sweating all over the blogosphere, Thrillist (via Defamer)has announced that the State of California now offers medical marijuana in vending machines available at four locations, 24 hours a day.
They open for business on Monday, will be closed by Tuesday to extract the bodies of overly-eager clients from underneath their crushing bulk.
After cinching up your doctor’s consultation, hit an AVM location to get your prescription approved, fingerprint taken, and a prepaid credit card loaded with your profile: dosage (3.5 or 7 grams, up to 1oz a week) and strain preference (choice of five, including OG Cush and Granddaddy Purple, the mildly hallucinogenic forebear to Prince). Then day or night, all you do is hit a machine and walk away with enough vacuum-sealed, plastic-encapsulated cheeba to adequately treat your illness, and guarantee your car never smells like new leather again.
No, they don’t carry the Root Beer strain.
No word on whether they carry Doritos.
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Quote o’ the Day: The Man
This is the smartest thing I’ve heard in ages. From tonight’s meeting of The Shebeen Club.
Me: “And I’m all, like, fuck The Man!”
Ian: “You know, sometimes The Man just needs a little foreplay.”
Happiness versus Fun: the American Nightmare
It’s called the American Dream because you have to be unconscious to believe it.
George Carlin
For most of the world, America is the great entertainment factory. The New Jerusalem envisionsed by the Puritans has turned out to be the world’s leading manufacturer of amusement and cheap thrills. The colonists and their descendants did indeed build them a shining city on a hill — but they called it Disneyland. In the Declaration of Independence they enshrined, along with life and liberty, the inalienable right to pursue happiness. But happiness is hard. Happiness takes work. Even worse, happiness is a long shot. So America settled for fun, perfected it, and sold it to an eager world. Pop music, Hollywood movies, the seductive sound of ice chattering in a silver cocktail shaker — they are the tangible, consumable expressions of the lofty principles in the Declaration of Independence,
the free culture of a free people.William Grimes, in
Straight Up or On the Rocks, The History of the American Cocktail
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raincoaster 