I am amused

At how every promo for Ringer makes it seem like this will be the episode that Andrew finds out about Bridget's identity! Except of course, it always turns out that the characters were discussing something else.

My assumption is that Andrew has to stay in the dark long enough for Bridget to angst over whether to sleep with him. Therefore, until that happens, we can all rest assured that the promos are misleading.

I am so glad this is getting more coverage!

I'm really pleased that Judge Rakoff's order is forcing more coverage of this issue:

Promises Made, and Remade, by Firms in S.E.C. Fraud Cases

When Citigroup agreed last month to pay $285 million to settle civil charges that it had defrauded customers during the housing bubble, the Securities and Exchange Commission wrested a typical pledge from the company: Citigroup would never violate one of the main antifraud provisions of the nation’s securities laws.

Citigroup’s main brokerage subsidiary, its predecessors or its parent company agreed not to violate the very same antifraud statute in July 2010. And in May 2006. Also as far as back as March 2005 and April 2000.

Citigroup has a lot of company in this regard on Wall Street. According to a New York Times analysis, nearly all of the biggest financial companies — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America among them — have settled fraud cases by promising that they would never again violate an antifraud law, only to have the S.E.C. conclude they did it again a few years later.

A Times analysis of enforcement actions during the past 15 years found at least 51 cases in which the S.E.C. concluded that Wall Street firms had broken anti-fraud laws they had agreed never to breach. The 51 cases spanned 19 different firms.

For example, Bank of America’s securities unit has agreed four times since 2005 not to violate a major antifraud statute, and another four times not to violate a separate law. Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America acquired in 2008, has separately agreed not to violate the same two statutes seven times since 1999.

The S.E.C. can target repeat violations. It could bring civil contempt charges against a company for violating one of orders, but it rarely does. The S.E.C. does not publicly refer to previous cases when filing new charges.

I ... do not understand this

What Does Wonder Woman’s New Origin Story Mean For Her Feminist Symbolism?

In the course of an interview with Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, who are writing and drawing DC’s rebooted Wonder Woman, Geoff Boucher raises an interesting question. What does it mean to change Wonder Woman’s origin story, turning her from a statue brought to life by Aphrodite for Queen Hippolyta to Zeus’s daughter:

CC: If you went to the average person on the street and showed them a picture of Wonder Woman they would recognize her immediately. Ask those people her origin story and some of them might know the clay story but many, many others would not know that at all. That’s not a problem you have with Superman or Batman; everyone knows their origin. By making her the daughter of Zeus, we’ve gotten a big driving force behind our story.

That’s a sort of Buffy-ization of the Wonder Woman mythos that accords with a lot of recent stories that explore scenarios where there are a lot of people with varying degrees of power in the world. The idea that we’ve all got a little Wonder Woman in us has been part of the feminist mythos since the founding of Ms., which put her on the cover of its inaugural issue trying to halt the advance of the Vietnam War, striding past a billboard with the slogan “Peace and Justice in ’72.” A mythology that makes that possibility explicit raises the possibility of a pantheon of new superheroes. But it also risks reducing Wonder Woman to a permanent and perpetual mother-protector role, constantly rushing around defending her divinely-inspired relatives.

Umm, hello? As far as I'm concerned, WW's origin story is that she comes from Paradise Island where she lives among the super-strong Amazons, which, incidentally, was unquestionably the origin story in 1972. What is this clay statue business of which you speak?

*feels very old*

Apparently, it may be that the clay story was part of the Paradise Island story that I remember? Wiki is a little unclear and apparently her story changed over time.

Sign of the Times

( Spoilers for the latest Nikita )