The Binary Circumstance

The release date for Oliver Stone’s movie Alexander has been pushed back to November 24. The delayed opening is reportedly due to studio execs who want more of the male-male sex cut out of the picture.

“Alexander was almost certainly bisexual, and [director] Oliver Stone wanted to portray that,” says the source. “So there are scenes between Colin [Farrell, who plays Alexander] and women, but there’s also some passionate scenes between Colin and Francisco Bosch.???

Bosch plays Bagoas, a Persian eunuch, who many historians believe was Alexander’s lover.

“Some of the suits at Warner Bros. think that the movie-going public just isn’t ready to see that,” the insider reports. “There’s some pretty heated arguments going on over it.???

The 24th is the day before Thanksgiving. That might also have had something to do with it.

Also see my previous post linking to the interview with the chief historian for the film.

I have written before about the high cost of prescription drugs and President Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit which is really a benefit to the drug companies because it specifically prohibits Medicare from negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs.

Misleader reports today on the Bush administration’s efforts to prevent reimportation of prescription drugs from Canada.

President Bush continues to oppose allowing American seniors to purchase lower-priced, FDA-approved medicines from Canada.(1) His administration has claimed those prescription drugs would be unsafe, and is working to block a vote on bipartisan Senate legislation to make reimportation legal.(2) But as a new drug industry whistleblower notes, the scare tactics are dishonest and untrue.

Dr. Peter Rost, vice-president of marketing for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, recently came out and debunked the White House’s argument, saying reimportation “has been proven to be safe in Europe” and that “The safety issue is a made-up story.”(3) Rost’s comments are consistent with the Bush administration’s own FDA officials who have been unable to provide any evidence that medicines from Canada are unsafe.(4)

Read the entire article for their references.

While Bush talks about his great drug benefit for seniors, the fact is that many of them often have to choose between eating, paying rent, or buying their prescription drugs. One reason is that the anti-free market policies of the current administration keep the cost of drugs artificially inflated.

While I approve in general of Bush’s idea to allow people to create tax-deductible medical savings accounts, those savings accounts, if they ever come into being, will quickly be swept into the pockets of the drug companies as long as Bush stands in opposition to free trade in the pharmaceutical marketplace.

Bush’s lies got us into Iraq and he continues to lie about conditions there. He is also lying about prescription drugs. In both cases, his lies are costing human life.

If you’re going to kill people, at least be honest about it.

An article from The Street.com compares the chicanery at Fannie Mae to the massive fraud at Enron and Worldcom.

Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage company whose financial statements were strongly criticized in a report by its regulator last week, looks set to join Enron and WorldCom in the hall of accounting infamy.

Lining up Fannie Mae alongside two of America’s worst corporate fraud offenders may seem a stretch to some. But a close reading of the report suggests that Fannie could have kept billions of dollars of losses out of earnings — as well as out of an important capital number that is used by its regulator to determine the company’s financial strength.

WorldCom is thought to have hidden around $11 billion of expenses to boost its earnings. But it’s possible that Fannie, which provides huge support to the U.S. housing market through billions of dollars of mortgage purchases each year, overstated the capital number by more than that. For example, at the end of last year, the capital number in question may have excluded as much as $11.6 billion in pretax net losses.

Implications for the housing industry

If Fannie did fail to include those losses in earnings and capital, it would have drastic ramifications for the company, investors and the structure of the U.S. housing industry. Fannie may have to raise far more new capital than Wall Street currently is estimating, leading to a further decline in Fannie’s stock. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) and Fannie announced Monday that Fannie must immediately go about raising its capital to 30% above its required level, but the final amount may be far higher.

[…]

In the third quarter of 2002, when plunging interest rates drove up derivatives losses at Fannie, the company easily could have been nearly 40% undercapitalized, if it was incorrectly excluding OCI losses from core capital.

There is absolutely no way that any banking regulator would allow a bank to continue normal business if it were that much undercapitalized. If Citigroup’s regulator were to come out tomorrow and say it was 40% undercapitalized, sell-side analysts would be quick to slap a sell recommendation on the bank.

But when Fannie’s regulator comes out and produces strong evidence that the company may have been similarly undercapitalized, Wall Street strangely rushes to Fannie’s defense.

That could be because the government would capitalize Fannie Mae with government (taxpayer) guaranteed loans from the big New York Banks.

The government has a long history of bailing out third-world governments, and failing U.S. corporations when they become undercapitalized by guaranteeing loans made by private banks. Banks love such loans because they can never go bad. The government just increases taxes to pay them off or prints more money. The banks owners never see a loss. (Read G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island for more on this topic.)

What this article is basically saying is that Fannie Mae never had enough money to buy up all the loans that they’ve been purchasing in recent years. By purchasing those loans, Fannie Mae props up the housing market.

Some of you might remember that when the economy was really weak earlier in George Bush’s term, it was being kept afloat by a strong housing market. But now it appears that the housing market was being propped up by fraud at Fannie Mae.

So where does that leave the housing market?

The war in Iraq has also been used to prop up the corporate world by shoveling billions of dollars into the pockets of defense contractors.

If Fannie Mae wasn’t cooking their books and there was no war in Iraq, I wonder if we would have any economy at all.

Julie Leung has some comments about history.

However, reading the chapter on Columbus shocked me. I was surprised at my own surprise. I know that no one is perfect and no one is as he appears in a history textbook. Yet I had forgotten or was never taught the extent of Columbus’ actions in the Americas. The atrocities and domination he perpetuated horrified me. I’m left with the dilemma of how to teach my children what happened in 1492. Do I tell my daughters that Columbus rewarded his lieutenants with the rape of native women? Whether or not he discovered America, that debate aside, it seems from Loewen’s arguments that a pattern of associating Christianity with conquering began in the Americas, thanks to Columbus and his contemporaries. False ideas about what God wants people to do to other people continue to this day in this continent.

Other chapters describe “the truth of the first Thanksgiving” (including the decimation of the native population that allowed the Europeans to succeed), “John Brown and Abraham Lincoln”, the myth of progress and stories from the civil rights movements.

I was surprised to learn that Lincoln was racist and was fighting for the Union, not for the abolishment of slavery. He valued the Union above abolition. Perhaps I did learn these things as a child, but I have forgotten them, and our culture only emphasizes “The Great Emancipator”, not his statements that black and white could never live together.

I’m reminded of that old saying, “The survivors write the history books.”