I may be lazy, but at least I’m not journalist lazy

A strange news item caught my eye on the front page of CNBC.com this morning – about a blogger who allegedly has a ‘leak’ of the results of the US Bank Stress test – the results of which are supposed to be released on May 4.

The name of the blogger sounded vaguely familiar. I read my share of conspiracy theory forums and sure enough, the guy’s known for being a serious white-supremacist nutjob.

Just a little further digging reveals he’s been behind several hoaxes lately:

One was about a bank run in October that, conveniently

“echoes rhetoric being used by the White House and the Federal Reserve in order to ram through the widely despised bailout bill, by using economic terrorism and the fear of total collapse of the financial system to get the message across, just as Bush, Bernanke and Paulson have been ferociously doing for the past two weeks.”

http://www.congresscheck.com/2008/10/03/hoax-bank-closure-story-peddles-bailout-propaganda/

He also claimed that the US was dumping the dollar in favour of an ‘Amero’ coin – for ‘proof’ he used a photo that was actually lifted from a website marketing novelty coins.

Even worse, this alleged leak was actually plagiarism:

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS180066+06-Apr-2009+BW20090406 from a ‘study’ issued last week by a Dr. Martin Weiss. While I make no claim either way as to his reputation, this really should be treated in the media as the ‘source’, and NOT the nutty blog that lifted it, claiming to be an ‘inside leak’.

It took me all of ten minutes doing a couple of searches in Google to conclude that this blog post was basically a steaming pile of crap.

That’s not to say that banks are all solvent and the picture is as rosy as this latest round of earnings tried to report, or that there aren’t some serious structural problems that remain.  At the same time, as one person (not me) commented on Zero Hedge,

If a scumbag like this has the ability to get insider information about the stress tests, I would much rather our economic system crash and burn to the ground.

Ironically, there is one more interesting item about this Hal Turner:

according to some sites, he works for the FBI.

Regardless of what one might think of the genuine state of the US Financial System, this particular post does NOT merit front page MSM attention.

Movie – The Watchmen

I have to admit, I never before read the graphic novel series The Watchmen, though I plan to now.  I’d also recommend, for those who haven’t seen it, to read it first.

By the end of the movie, I really liked it but until about 2/3 of the way in I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t familiar with any of the characters and only had a basic idea of what the premise was, so I found the first half pretty jumbled. Fortunately as the movie progressed, the plot made more sense and I could see the need for everything to have been kept in.

The opening credits set to Bob Dylan’s The Times They are a-changing were very entertaining, particularly with The Comedian as Kennedy’s assassin in this ‘alternative’ history. At the same time, the focus on the older generation of superheros did add to the confusion.

One of the major strengths comes with the deconstructed comic-book archetypes.  I found bitter, angry Rorschach to be the most compelling character and strangely likeable. The ethereal Dr. Manhattan’s depth came, paradoxically, from the character’s being at the same time utterly self-absorbed, seen mostly in his treatment of Laurie, aka the younger Silk Spectre – especially when he said to her, “when you left me, I left Earth. Does that not show you I care? “.

The Night Owl was that nice guy that girls always want to be ‘just friends’ with, though in this case, he does get the girl in perhaps the strangest scene in the movie, set to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

The weakest area I found, was in the casting or perhaps even just in the development of the character Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. The actor reminded me too much of one of the Kids in the Hall and his background story could have been developed more than it was.

All in all, I did think the movie was worth seeing, while still in the cinema. One word of warning, however: if you are a straight guy and squeamish about full-frontal male nudity I’d advise against seeing it in Imax.