Obama Family in Russia

Trunk Monkey

This is really funny and well worth watching.

Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression

This is a fascinating article about Goldman Sachs’ role in the current American financial meltdown.

From Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

Four more pages online. Continued here.

I was no al-Qaeda ally, Saddam told FBI

SADDAM HUSSEIN told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews just released. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Saddam, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect it [Iraq] from threats in the region”.

The then US president George Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. At the time Bush administration officials strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001.

Saddam, who during the interviews was often defiant and boastful, at one point wistfully acknowledged he should have permitted the United Nations to witness the destruction of Iraq’s weapons stockpile after the 1990-91 Gulf War.

How India Helped Me Find My Purpose in Life

by Sharell, an Australian who married an Indian, at WhiteIndianHousewife.com.

I was reading a feature in the Mumbai Mirror yesterday, about six people who left their high paying professional jobs to follow their passion and pursue a career in cinema.

It made me start thinking of myself and the giant leap of faith I took. However, the big difference between me and those people was that I had no idea of the direction I wanted my life to go in when I left my job. And I was hardly enthusiastic about creating my new reality.

I had to be pushed by a crisis of mass proportion.

2005 wasn’t a very good year for me. In fact, it was the toughest year of my life. I’d been working in the same government office for 10 years. I was unfulfilled and unmotivated by my choice of career as an accountant, but I tolerated it because it paid very well. The only thing I enjoyed about my job was writing reports. In order to break the monotony of my life, I spent too much time partying, shopping, and taking long lunches. Life had fallen into a very predictable and unproductive pattern.

Then, my long term relationship came to a traumatic end. Along with it went all my plans for the future.

I was completely lost. Nothing of what remained of my life inspired me. I had no choice but reinvent myself. How though? My situation was made even more difficult by the fact that I hated change.

I decided that the only solution was to completely throw myself out of my comfort zone, open myself up to new possibilities, and accept every opportunity that came my way — no matter how much it scared me. And the best way to do it would be to go to India. Having travelled there twice already, I knew of no place that could challenge me more. To take my mind off my woes, I resolved to do community work for five weeks. I chose Kolkata simply because it was a place in India that I hadn’t been to.

I took six months long service leave from my job, left a friend in charge of my home, packed my bag, and boarded a flight.

Then, fate stepped in. Along with it started the long chain of events that led to me to be where I am today — living in Mumbai, married to an Indian guy, and writing about India travel for a living.

I met my husband-to-be within a week of arriving in Kolkata.

Story continues here.

Who Says Magic Powers Don’t Exist?

Wim Hof (born April 20, 1959, Sittard) is a Dutch man, commonly nicknamed Iceman. He holds nine world records including a world record for longest ice bath.

In 2007, he attempted, but failed, to climb Mount Everest wearing nothing but shorts. Hof has been criticized for his stated justifications for this attempt, “Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mount Everest was a testament to human achievement, my climb of Mount Everest in my shorts will be a monument to the frivolous, decadent nature of modern society.”

Wim broke his previous world record by staying for 1 hour 13 minutes and 48 seconds immersed in ice at Guinness World Records 2008. The night before, he performed the act on the Today Show.

Dr. Kenneth Kamler monitored the event to explain the effects of using the Tantric practice Tummo to control your body temperature. Tummo has been practiced by Yogi monks in Tibet. Apparently Wim is the only known non-monk to have mastered Tummo.

Wim describes his ability to withstand extreme cold temperatures as being able to turn his own thermostat up by using his brain.

Wim Hof has recently broken the ice endurance record by standing fully immersed in ice for 1 hour and 31 minutes in Lelystad in May 2008.

In February 2009, Wim Hof reached the top of Mount Kilimanjaro in his shorts within 2 days. It took him only another 2 days to climb down.

His next challenge will be to do a marathon of 50 kilometres above the polar circle filmed by an English from firecrackerfilms, who work for both BBC and National Geographic.

He has four children with his late wife, and one child with his present girlfriend.

Megan Fox in Transformers 2

This movie should not be called Transformers 2. It should be called Megan Fox and Other Hotties. This movie is stuffed full of hot chicks – more than any other I can think of.

Michael Jackson is Dead

Who is the real Sacha Baron Cohen?

HE flew through the air with the greatest of — well, if not exactly ease, at least accuracy.

The first thing Eminem, lolling among his dudes at a music awards bash, saw was Sacha Baron Cohen’s G-string-clad backside hurtling towards him. A look of horror spread over the rapper’s doughy features but only until those features vanished into Baron Cohen’s crotch.

Splat! Another one bites the … but let’s not go into the details. The recent stunt was a classic piece of Baron Cohenism. It had colour, ingenuity, shock value and, so it seemed to almost everybody watching, a victim incapable of seeing the joke. The muffled whimperings from the spot where Eminem had last been seen soon turned into a furious protest, followed by the rapper storming out with his entourage. Only when the laughing stopped did anyone seriously begin to question whether it could all have been for real.

Now that we know it probably wasn’t, another question arises: does that make it any less funny? At the core of Baron Cohen’s outrageousness lies a peculiar strain of comic uncertainty. How much of him is an act? What do his characters represent? Should we find him as entertaining as we do?

Monday sees the Australian launch of the comedian’s new film, Brüno, in which he plays a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashion pundit. A taste of what to expect can be found in a recent edition of marie claire magazine, in which Brüno provides a personal A-Z of his fashion knowledge: A is for Austria “where people are raised to try und achieve ze Austrian dream – find a job, get a dungeon und raise a family in it”. L is for “Little black child … thanks to Madonna … it’s zis season’s vardrobe essential”.

The movie has not been without its problems. Some have reported that Baron Cohen wanted to call it “Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America For The Purpose Of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable In The Presence Of A Gay Foreigner In A Mesh T-Shirt”, which Universal Studios sniffily rejected.

Then, close to the film’s release, the production was hit by a lawsuit from a woman in California who claims she was left in a wheelchair after being tricked into taking part in a spoof bingo game. The suit, brought by Rachel Olsen, claims “Brüno”, whom it describes as “an extreme, outrageous, offensive caricature of a gay man dressed in sexually revealing clothing with an Austrian accent … offensively touched, pushed and battered her” when she tried to wrest back the bingo caller’s microphone, resulting in her falling to the ground.

The assault, claims the suit, was abetted by several camera operators who “attacked [her] for a period of one to five minutes to intentionally create a dramatic emotional response … while [they] recorded her humiliation and embarrassment”.

Universal hopes the film will match the success of Borat, Baron Cohen’s surprise 2006 box office sensation that grossed more than $260 million worldwide. The studio, though, has adopted a low-key approach to the release. The star is slated to attend the premiere at Sydney’s State Theatre. However, there has been little advertising and beyond the revelation that Brüno gatecrashes the Paris and Milan fashion shows and tricks Paula Abdul into accepting “an Austrian TV fashion award”, little of the plot has been disclosed.

Abdul ruefully recalls: “I was greeted by this futuristic dude with a mohawk and he’s flaming. I walk in and there was no furniture except a chair. And this guy Brüno introduces himself. He snaps his fingers and says, ‘gardeners’. And these two Mexican guys come in and they drop down to all fours. I see him paying them like 10 bucks.”

The singer says things turned “uncomfortable” when Baron Cohen kicked one of the Mexicans. “I said: ‘Get me out of here. This is not funny, this is discrimination. This is abusive stuff going on here.”‘

Of course, it isn’t only Abdul who thinks so. For every memorable Baron Cohen gag there is a mug on the receiving end and there are enough of these to raise the question of where comedy ends and cruelty begins.

“In Kazakhstan,” claimed Borat, in his role as a Kazakh television reporter, “the favourite hobbies are disco dancing, archery, rape and table tennis.” The country’s government didn’t quite get the joke. Nor did the inhabitants of a village in Romania who claimed the film had portrayed them as “savages” and then barely paid them.

Baron Cohen’s status as a chattering-class darling allows him to get away with send-ups of blacks, Jews, gays and the raggedy of the Second World.

This, we have to realise, is sophisticated humour, weapons-grade satire or, as the man himself puts it, “a dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity as much as rabid bigotry”.

It is hard to press Baron Cohen on the point. As British comedy’s foremost enigma, he rarely gives interviews and guards his privacy so closely his publicists once issued a statement denying he had attended a party.

He lives, following his success in the US, in a guarded, $20 million house in Los Angeles, with his Australian actress fiancee, Isla Fisher. “He’s protecting the product,” says Larry Charles, the director of Brüno and Borat. Yet there’s more to it than that.

Those who know Baron Cohen describe him as clever, likeable and sensitive but shaped heavily by his upbringing in an observant, high-achieving Jewish family in Hammersmith, London.

He was the youngest of three brothers; his Israel-born mother teaches dance, while his father runs a menswear shop. His upbringing was comfortable enough for Sacha to attend Haberdashers’ Aske’s, a private school in Hertfordshire, before going to Cambridge, where he joined the Amateur Dramatic Club and a Jewish theatre group.

His parents hoped he would become an academic but the showbiz bug bit deep. He broke through with the character Ali G of the West Staines Massiv, a bling-laden “voice of da yoof” on Channel Four’s The 11 O’Clock Show. As a representative of misunderstood suburban youth, Ali G landed interviews with the likes of Mohamed Al-Fayed and the former speaker of the US House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was so taken in that when he heard he’d been hoaxed, he refused to believe it.

Ali G made Baron Cohen famous but when his first movie, Ali G Indahouse, was picketed by black activists labelling him “the new Al Jolson”, it gave him a taste of the sensitivities even “sophisticated” comedy can touch on.

He keeps quiet now. Lets his act do the talking. Apart, perhaps, from a few words with Eminem before the show.

From here.

Martin van Beynen: David Bain is Guilty

Here is a very interesting summary of an article by a journalist Martin van Beynen who sat through the entire David Bain trial.

The reasons I am sure Bain killed his family are twofold.

The first is the incredible coincidences that we have to accept if Bain is innocent.

…the best evidence relates to the implausibility of Robin Bain shooting his family and then himself.