Bill Ackman on PBS Charlie Rose

A hedge fund manager views governments through the lens of business and says that the US is very solvent despite the huge deficits.

He says that GM should be allowed to go bankrupt and restructured to remove debt from the balance sheet by having creditors relinquish claims to be paid back in exchange for equity in the new company which has a chance to make money after redoing all the labor contracts. They repeated a discussion others are having calling the current GM essentially a health care company. One might summarize this by saying he suggests GM go into bankrupcy to wipe out the creditors/bondholders also. If gov't does a bailout, equity holders always get wiped out, but creditors/bondholders (counter-parties) don't. Ackman says unless this is done, GM will limp along under very onerous loans to be paid back and need to be continuously bailed out by gov't.

On housing prices, he says 50% off and low interest rates begins to look attractive! (would be funny if it weren't true...)

But overall, he says equities seems to be on sale. Time to buy!

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Well looky looky here.  Was Ackman wrong?  The gov't bailout of GM turned out well and the gov't, while still in the hole a billion here or there, looks to have done the right thing.  Did the gov't force GM to do something more like what Ackman is advocating or not, I guess is the question.

Live Flesh (1997)

Not among Almodovar's best, but still an interesting human drama about a pizza delivery boy who falls for a drugged out girl. He confronts the girl after she has a change of heart and doesn't want to see him anymore and somehow the cops show up to arrest him. There's a struggle for a gun and a cop is shot. The boy goes to jail for six years. Now that he is out he wants revenge. The story is from a novel by British author Ruth Rendell. A young, almost handsome Bardem plays the cop. He's eclipsed by the pretty Liberto Rabal who plays the boy. Oh, but both girls and boys get naked in this flick.

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On another topic: bad artsy foreign films. Looking at foreign films' dvd covers, those films typically seem better than they actually are. Sure, you probably don't recognize the actors or maybe even the director, so you don't have that to go on. Foreign film cover art always shows awards from random film festivals. Still, when you watch these films, many suck donkeys. I am starting to realize how to figure out if you've got one of these bombs early on. First off, they take only single words from critics reviews, like: 'beautiful', 'stunning' and put them on the cover (probably even if the critic said: "any movie would be more beautiful than this piece of sh*t", the word beautiful gets put on the cover). Then if they waste a ton of film on a scene where a person is doing something mundane and uninteresting, and they shoot that mundane thing for the first 5 minutes of the movie after the titles. Then you know to skip the movie entirely or at least run it at 60:1 speed.

Leonardo Da Vinci @ the Tech Museum

A local show to Silicon Valley's Tech Museum attempts to clarify a little about the artist. Is Da Vinci a bit hyped as a genius artist? His paintings are a little too studied, too perfect. Like an engineer doing painting. He used mathematical methods, and mechanical devices to create realistic paintings. Still, if you look at his Last Supper or Mona Lisa they are unquestionably beautiful, and there is a soul behind them. His greater strength in this display especially was his investigations in anatomy, optics, engineering and inventions.

Not mentioned in the exhibition, Da Vinci was probably a homosexual. At the age of 23 he was charged with sodomy along with 3 other young men, but acquitted (possibly because he knew well how to curry favor among the wealthy and powerful -- later in life, he was friend and advisor to kings). It is believed also he had relations with his male assistants, and he wasn't known to have intimate relations with any females. (Oh, and he was a lefty.)