Good grief. So, to back up a little, the crux of the SEC’s case against Goldman Sachs is that it was never disclosed that, when Paulson & Co assembled a motley pile of CDOS for an outfit called ACA to sell to our German bank friends, Paulson actually intended to short against those CDOs. (In popular parlance, “to bet against” those CDOs. And when that package went south, Paulson cleaned up.) So! And now it turns out that a Paulson guy, Paolo Pellegrini, went to the assemblers at ACA and informed them of this! He had an entire meeting scheduled with ACA’s CDO person devoted to this topic. Based on what we know now, which of course is not everything, we’d say: Updated chance of Goldman conviction: 1%. Updated chance of Goldman paying out a settlement: SOME HUGE NEGATIVE NUMBER.

The post-retail era in American pop has resulted in Rapidshared collections of songs becoming a semi-legitimate way to find out about new tracks from big artists, and Tapemasters Inc’s every-so-often “Future Of R&B;” series of mixes is probably my favorite example of this trendlet. The just-released 32nd edition bears a few oldish songs (the Jamie Foxx/Justin Timberlake collaboration that soundtracks NBA-playoff ads, Mary J. Blige’s dreadful violation of the “No Stairway” rule) alongside newly minted tracks; the first-listen standout is the sample-drenched “For The Sake Of Love” from the Virginia-born Trey Songz, on which the singer thankfully stops singing about the Internet and employs his falsetto to great effect.

Consider the general election in Britain now OFFICIALLY underway, as the first dairy-related splattering of the campaign season occurred earlier this morning. (British elections are a time when the nation comes together to put down its knives and pick up some eggs, with occasional fisticuffs resulting.) Today’s victim was Conservative leader David Cameron, who was struck on the shoulder while campaigning at a college in Cornwall. Does the choice of Cameron to be the initial recipient of an ovoid attack suggest that his chances of winning an overall majority have now improved? Stay tuned: The Race to Run Knifecrime Island is ON!

A black bear in Vermont is once again free to pursue his ursine frolics after being rescued from a milk can in which he had gotten his head stuck. “It was literally a Winnie-the-Pooh situation,” says Forrest Hammond, the Fish and Wildlife biologist who helped extricate the bear from its steel headcage.

“Over by the jambalaya, Alan Greenspan picked up some Mardi Gras beads and placed them around the neck of his wife, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, who bristled and quickly removed them.” That’s the second most-fascinating moment of this coming Sunday’s New York Times mag cover story on Politico’s Mike Allen. (The disclosure about how the reporter of the piece intimately knows and has worked with everyone involved is the third-most interesting moment, no doubt.) Well, there are probably criticisms to be made of this piece from all sorts of angles-the Times commenters all seem baffled but in different ways, mostly depending on their political orientation. But I couldn’t help but I feel I just hadn’t learned anything about the general from the very specific that is digital-age Mike Allen.

But.

Choire: “Allen sends out Playbook using Microsoft Outlook to a private mailing list of 3,000. A few minutes later, an automatic blast goes out to another 25,000 readers who signed up to receive it. An additional 3,000 or so enter Playbook from Politico.com, which adds up to a rough universe of 30,000 interested drivers, passengers and eavesdroppers to the conversation.”

Choire: I enjoy Mike Allen! And… but… that = a 8000+ word NYT mag cover story??

Balk: He drives the conversation!

Choire: I am waiting for the proof of that!

Balk: The proof of that is an 8000 word NYT mag cover story, no?

Choire: Oh.

“Anne was fairly good with criticism; in fact it is rumored she was the last person to take criticism well in this country. After reading the review, she wrote [James] Dickey a letter and befriended him. In short order he was eating out of her hand. She did this with most of her antagonists, the mark of every disturbed disposition.”
–Any excuse to reread the letters of Anne Sexton should be taken.

Oh, man, the Treasury Department’s reboot of the $100 bill is tight. I don’t think I’ve ever been this moved by currency before. I mean, sure, I’m impressed by the symbols of American freedom they’ve added to the face, and I think the controversial decision to change the vignette of Independence Hall to a rear, rather than front, view, actually paid off-it’s bold and different, yes, but also confident and a little aggressive; it makes a statement-but it’s the new security features that really have me all atingle. This is money that tells you it is coming from the future.

The blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the new $100 note contains images of bells and 100s that move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note. The Bell in the Inkwell on the front of the note is another new security feature. The bell changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it seem to appear and disappear within the copper inkwell.

It’s like we’re living in a science fiction novel! I’m glad I lasted long enough to see something like this. Mock me for my exuberance if you must, but I really think this new $100 bill is going to change all of our lives for the better. You know, if we can ever get our hands on one. [Via]

If you would like to emulate rock’s idols of yore by hunting for buried coins the same way they do, the Bill Wyman Signature Detector, designed by the former Rolling Stone, could be for you! “It is child’s play to use and you don’t have to worry about technical controls,” according to the official site, although there is no word on whether or not it will find you a young wife who will later renounce you for God. [Via]

Aol. blogger Jeff Bercovici was totally unable to digest his dinner last night because he was SCANDALIZED and OUTRAGED about Gizmodo’s “checkbook journalism” regarding the new iPhone. Sure, Gawker Media had already long-ago returned Steve Jobs’ missing iPhone, but that would not settle his OUTRAGE. He writes: “Gawker Media brazenly, publicly flouted the law. It subsidized a crime: the selling of stolen merchandise. Then it published a misleading, whitewashed account of the seller’s actions meant to make it look as though he was not acting with criminal intent. It published this account in order to disguise its own culpability in the matter.” Oh mercy!

Slate actually handled this pretty well, however. And first, it’s been well-explained why Gizmodo pointedly stated that they weren’t ever quite sure this was a real next iPhone until Apple confirmed it with their request for a return: without being “sure” who the rightful owner is, well then, to whom are they supposed to return the property?

And Slate wrote, about Apple’s options in light of trade secret law:

When it comes to the disclosure of trade secrets, it doesn’t matter that Gizmodo bought the phone from a secondary source. Purchasing lost property isn’t that different from purchasing stolen property in that what matters is whether the buyer knew (or should have known) that the item was obtained unlawfully. Gizmodo wouldn’t have paid $5,000 for the device unless they suspected it was a valuable prototype…. At best, the company could try to recover some monetary damages from Gizmodo. They could recover the advertising revenues that the blog earned as a result of its scoop-that’s more than 1 million hits in one hour on Monday-but that would be peanuts to the computing giant. They could raise the stakes by saying that their competitors are now racing to copy the new features, and the disclosure will result in a significant loss of sales. If a court bought that argument, the damages might be so large that Gawker Media (which owns Gizmodo) wouldn’t be able to afford to pay.

And then Slate goes crazy in the last sentence:

If a court bought that argument, the damages might be so large that Gawker Media (which owns Gizmodo) wouldn’t be able to afford to pay. Apple sold more than $4 billion worth of iPhones last year. Gawker Media is worth $170 million in total.

That is so weird that they just totally invented a valuation of a private company!

Bercovici also goes crazy at the end.

In those rare cases where a journalist commits a crime and receives the benefit of prosecutorial discretion, it’s usually because he can demonstrate there was a compelling public interest at stake. There is no such interest here. The only parties who benefited from Gizmodo’s story are Gawker Media and Apple’s competitors.

I don’t think anyone will be asking for “prosecutorial discretion” here but that seems to me to be true for any piece of journalism, no matter how down and dirty, that offends institutions. Replace “Apple” with “Halliburton” and “Gawker Media” with the “Washington Post,” for a hypothetical story of the same circumstances that might be viewed in a different light. Is unveiling a prototype of a silly new gadget life-changing reporting? Not really, at all! But it sure does have news value.

A group of retired military officers has identified perhaps the most disturbing repercussion of our national obesity epidemic thus far: School lunches are making the youth of today so fat that they are unfit for military service, which makes the issue a threat to national security.

Noted former Joint Chiefs chair Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, “Since 1995, the proportion of recruits who failed their physical exams because they were overweight has risen by nearly 70 percent. We need to reverse this trend, and an excellent place to start is by improving the quality of food served in our schools,” where students are estimated to receive 40% of their daily calories. While it is indeed worrisome that our high-calorie lunches might prevent the dull-eyed, sexting youth of today from becoming the IED fodder of tomorrow, remember this: Predator drones always stay trim. If a couple of extra villages need to be bombed accidentally because our kids are too tubby to pull the trigger face to face, it’s probably a small price to pay. I mean, on our part. The people in the mistakenly bombed villages probably have a different opinion.