...making her the latest spectacular victim of the bad debt crisis and nationwide recession

After 18 paragraphs that demonstrate that photographer Annie Liebovitz spends money (her own and other peoples’) like water, including the $24 million she hocked her work for less than a year ago, this is how the writer spins her: a victim of recession and “the bad debt crisis”. No hint that she actually lost money due to investments collapsing under the weight of someone else’s bad debt, mind you, just a firm deflection of responsibility.

The interesting question is what, precisely, she hocked, her work or her copyrights. Given that the lender (possibly slimed here as “a high-end pawn broker”) specializes in high-dollar art, probably the latter, which would pretty much cut her off from any future revenue. And with Goldman Sachs also asking for a piece of the pie, she’ll likely lose her home and equipment as well, leaving her dependent on new clients. Not fun.

This is just… sad.

Not so much because there’s a cartoonist who’d draw it, as because I’m seeing it linked approvingly by people who have access to wet matches, with which they can obviously no longer be trusted.

So, in a story about a well-placed State Department official on trial for spending the last 30 years spying for Cuba, what sort of direct quote do they lead off with?

"We were all appalled by the Bush years"

Because, y’know, that puts everything in perspective. If proven guilty, what we have here is someone who turned traitor because he started hating America during the Carter administration, but somehow, it’s still all about Bush. Fits the established narrative better, y’see.

Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “Earth Day” 2009:

I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism. Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind's going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you'll dispatch that first. People talk about, 'Oh, we need baseload.' It's like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don't need mainframes, we have distributed computing.

(via The National Review)

From CNN, a little something for the folks who insist that paying tribute to pirates is a perfectly sensible economic transaction, and one that the recipients deserve for the hardships the West has inflicted upon them:

Piracy accelerated after the fall of the Somali government in the early 1990s and began to flourish after shipping companies started paying ransoms. Those payments started out being in the tens of thousands of dollars and have since climbed into the millions.

Oh, and yesterday they opened fire on the US-flagged food-aid ship that was transporting the American captain who had been held hostage by that other group of deprived, honest fishermen (who didn’t get the millions of dollars they politely requested at gunpoint).

[update 4/26: two recent data points worth noting]

Earlier Sunday, Kenyan maritime groups said Somali pirates had released another Yemeni freighter and its 15 crew members. The ship was seized in January with a cargo of petroleum products.

...

Separately Sunday, the captain of an Italian cruise ship said his security staff fought off a pirate attack in the region Saturday with pistols and a water hose. Commander Ciro Pinto told Italian media the ensuing gunfight damaged the ship, but the 1,500 passengers were unhurt.

Pirates who attacked a ship off the coast of Somalia got more than they bargained for when it turned out to be a naval vessel - from an international force against piracy, Nato said.

The pirates apparently mistook the FGS Spessart for a commercial merchant ship when they targeted it in the Gulf of Aden, between Somalia and Yemen.

(via The Daily Express)

It’s not a new idea, but it would be nice if they sent a few more merchant-ish naval vessels into the area, to thin the herd.

[Update: yup, they’re region 1 NTSC!]

List of (most likely region 1 NTSC) DVDs presented to the British Prime Minister, according to those crack journalists at MTV. Dear ghod, I hope they’re kidding.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Casablanca
• Chinatown
• Citizen Kane
• City Lights
• E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Lawrence of Arabia
• On the Waterfront
• Psycho
• Raging Bull
• Schindler’s List
• Singin’ in the Rain
• Some Like It Hot
• Star Wars: Episode IV
• Sunset Boulevard
• The General
• The Godfather
• The Graduate
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Searchers
• The Wizard of Oz
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Vertigo

Pardon me, but Lawrence of Arabia? Never mind how stupid and thoughtless the gift is in the first place, but Lawrence of Arabia? What, didn’t anyone think that Brown might already be vaguely familiar with this insanely famous and critically acclaimed British film?

When reporting that a popular scholar has been detained by the Chinese government, it doesn’t sound good to suddenly switch to the past tense in the last two paragraphs:

He was a popular commentator in the Japanese media and appeared at panels and a symposium on Sino-Japanese relations.

Jin was from Yanji, an ethnically Korean area near China's border with North Korea.

I can’t decide if it’s a simple editing mistake, or a sudden outbreak of honest reporting.