Signifying Nothing

Conditions: Gloomy

The Sky Is Falling?

And so Standard and Poor have downgraded the U.S credit rating to AA, essentially as a result of all the stupid dithering Washington had been doing over preventing financial Armageddon.

A cornerstone of the global financial system was shaken Friday when officials at ratings firm Standard & Poor's said U.S. Treasury debt no longer deserved to be considered among the safest investments in the world.

S&P downgraded the U.S. government's AAA sovereign credit rating, an unprecedented action that could send shock waves through the global financial system. WSJ's Money & Investing Editor, Francesco Guerrera, reports. (Photo: Getty Images)

S&P removed for the first time the triple-A rating the U.S. has held for 70 years, saying the budget deal recently brokered in Washington didn't do enough to address the gloomy outlook for America's finances. It downgraded long-term U.S. debt to AA+, a score that ranks below more than a dozen governments', including Liechtenstein's, and on par with Belgium's and New Zealand's. S&P also put the new grade on "negative outlook," meaning the U.S. has little chance of regaining the top rating in the near term.

The unprecedented move came after several hours of high-stakes drama. It began in the morning, when word leaked that a downgrade was imminent and stocks tumbled. Around 1:30 p.m., S&P officials notified the Treasury Department that they planned to downgrade U.S. debt and presented the government with their findings. Treasury officials noticed a $2 trillion error in S&P's math that delayed an announcement for several hours. S&P officials decided to move ahead, and after 8 p.m. they made their downgrade official.

- online.wsj.com

See, it kind of blunts their authority a little bit when they make a 2 trillion dollar error in math. So while American politicians look like a bunch of idiots, the Standard and Poor people look a little bit stupid as well. Who will watch the watchers?



Film Review: Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon

Ordinarily when you see a bad movie you feel a bit pissed off, annoyed that all the effot and money was wasted, along with your time and money. However by the end of the third Transformers movie I was really just left feeling sad. Sad to see what these actors have been reduced to. Sad to see what these fine animators, and lighting technicians, and sound designers have been reduced to. And I guess sad of all to see director Michael Bay, stripped of his mystique, of all his success and assurance, visible now as just a hack, desperately pedaling the same old tired shit, serving up yet more high-gloss crap, long since shorn of any actual meaning or worth. The latest and hopefully last installment of the robot toy franchise delivers up the exact same story as the first film, and the exact same story as the second film: Robots plotting, Shia Lebouf facing personal troubles, robots fighting, and then shit getting blowed up. There's a half-assed attempt at a historical tie in by making the 1960's space race actually a secret mission to explore a crashed space ship. All in order to bring in the latest bad guy, ...something Prime (voiced by Leonard Nimoy), who wants to take over the world.

Who bloody cares. It's an absolute wreck of a film, completely incoherent and so over-the-top it actually finds a new level of pathetic-ness. The actors, when not screaming their lines at each other, desperately run from one explosion to another while above them the various twirling bits of metal whir and crunch about, yet somehow continue to fail to impress the audience with any actual feeling of weight or presence. One particularly ridiculous sequence involves some kind of gigantic mechanized worm that mows it's way through a skyscraper our heroes have found refuge in. They fall into the building. They fall out of the building. They fall through the building. They even fall in the building. And yet, not one scratch! Are the human characters now made of metal as well?

This film is stupid. How come if the autobots are meant to be some giant secret, two of them are kept by Sam as pets? And their secret military base is in the middle of a city? And if the decepticons wanted to turn on this giant space bridge in order to bring Cybertron to earth, why didn't they just do that instead of resorting to tricking the autobots into reviving Spock Prime? What is the purpose of transporting the entire Cybertron planet to earth anyway? And if you're a 40 foot tall robot and two humans jump on your head, why don't you just crush them like bugs?

Perhaps the biggest thing I don't understand is how these films could have gotten worse over time? I mean, somehow the jokes are worse, the characters are even more shallow than they were when we started out, and the story, well, I mean what can you really say. Shouldn't these guys be getting better as they get more experience? To say this film insults your intelligence does not go far enough. This film insults everyone's intelligence. It insults the intelligence of our entire civilization. For God's sake, Bay introduces the new Hot Girl who's replaced Megan Fox by essentially sticking the camera up her ass. This has to be, please let it be, the height of teenage pandering. We deserve much better than this in a summer blockbuster film. We pay our money in the hope of being entertained in some way, but to sit there and be battered by gigantic relentless explosions, and then in between be battered by senseless and ridiculous performances, for two and a half hours, stretches the limits of human endurance. Zero whirs out of Five.


- Peace Out