Beautiful historical retrofit. I’m reminded of a particular James Bond level: any help?
Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, SP (via pedro kok)
tmblg: New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens “It’s Gay To Smoke”
Infographic: % of Americans falling behind on their mortgage payment segmented by income from the WSJ’s “The ‘Democratization of Credit’ Is Over - Now It’s Payback Time”
I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions.
— Dorothy Day (via ashbond)
Incredible.
David Rees, on “the townhalls”,
My question: Why don’t they round up all the pin-dicked douchebags who feel compelled to walk around with assault weapons at political events and drop them in one of those “free speech zone” cages that lefties were trapped inside of during the RNC convention? Since when did paper-mache puppets and bad “Bush” puns pose more of a threat than fucking assault weapons, which are deliberately engineered to kill people? Could somebody in charge please stop smoking crack and handle this?
It is part of the job to pretend to have emotions that you do not actually feel.
— Michael Ignatief on politics, written in a mea culpa on the Iraq War
Helen Thomas v. Obama
CNN: Over the weekend, we saw a shocking video of this woman, Neda, who had been shot in the chest and bled to death... What's your reaction?
THE PRESIDENT: It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. And I think that anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust about that... I have concern about how peaceful demonstrators and people who want their votes counted may be stifled from expressing those concerns. I think, as I said before, there are certain international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression --
MOTHERFUCKIN' HELEN THOMAS: Then why won't you allow the photos --
THE PRESIDENT: Hold on a second, Helen. That's a different question. (Laughter.) [Filler] ... All right. Thank you, guys.
…what follows is a quote from a New York Times article: the delay in Twitter’s maintenance reveals “the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country”. If only life was that simple, my dear friends at the New York Times: blogging services do not change history, not even if the State Department asks them; people do.
— A different take on the State Department’s Twitter request by Evgeny Morozov (via tylersoron)
Goldman Sachs is set to make a record bonus payout this year. [Guardian]
David Williams, an investment banking analyst at Fox Pitt Kelton, said: “This year is shaping up to be the best year ever for investment banks, or at least those that have emerged relatively unscathed from the credit crisis.
“These banks are intermediaries in the bond markets where governments and companies are raising billions of pounds of new money. There is also a lack of competition that means they can charge huge sums for doing business.”
Last week, the firm predicted that President Barack Obama’s government could issue $3.25tn of debt before September, almost four times last year’s sum. Goldman, a prime broker of US government bonds, is expected to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from selling and dealing in the bonds.
