For once, marketers have told the truth: Modern Warfare 2 really was the entertainment industry's biggest launch ever.

First-day sales: 4.7 million copies, $310 million in North America and the U.K. Hollywood's biggest movie launch was The Dark Knight, which pulled in $158.3 million (and took three days to do it).

It wasn't an idle boast this past June by marketers that MW2 would blitz the world. Videogames are the future, movies are the past, at least in money terms.

Whatever happened to 9/11 and Bush's War on Terror? In MW2 you can even play a terrorist and shoot civilians at an airport massacre! And see Washington, D.C., go up in flames! Life's good.

Of course, there is the debate (see here and here) over whether such games contribute to real-life violence. Ho-fucking-hum. We're already an extremely violent society.

The reliance on e-mails as definitive, incriminating evidence of chicanery was once a given, but that didn't last long. Social media have now damaged the credibility of such e-mails, as the monumental Bear Stearns fraud verdict shows.

E-mails shooting back and forth during 2007 between Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin looked like bullets that hit the target, damning the two hedge-fund goniffs on charges of securities fraud. (See my previous item for details from the indictment.)

Such careless and stupid e-mails revealing crooked behavior doomed previous goniffs, like Jack Abramoff and his henchmen in the infamous Wampumgate corruption scandal of the Bush era. (The unmasking of that scandal was one of John McCain's finest moments, if you recall.) The e-mails wove a fascinating web of corruption extended to the religious right, several congressmen, and Karl Rove. And the e-mails not only brought Abramoff and crew to justice, but they forced congressmen out of their jobs.

But this is a new time, and texting and twittering have now convinced many people that e-mails are also thoughts on the fly that aren't necessarily proof or even strong evidence. That's obviously because we all now rue some of the thoughts on the fly that we text and twitter. And texting and twittering are even more careless and less thought-out than e-mails.

So cases built on e-mails no longer have the cred they once had.

But the problem is this: Those thoughts on the fly are often really good evidence of malicious or illegal intent. Twittering and texting have merely inured the common folk, blinding them to that fact. Just because someone twitters, texts, or e-mails incriminating statements doesn't make those statements not incriminating.

In any case, John Hueston, who prosecuted Enron's top crooks, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, says it best in this morning's New York Times:

Google's move to snap up mobile-advertising startup AdMob is a leading indicator that your smartphone is about to overtake your laptop as the instrument of choice.

Fortune's Jon Fortt has a smart piece, "The Race to Own the Mobile Internet (at least the annoying ads)," which notes the Street's strong approval of Google's pending $750 million purchase of the company that specializes in teeny-tiny display ads. (Click above for AdMob's ad campaign touting its ad campaigns.)

Fortt's skeptical that display ads will work all that well on the small screen — and right now, he notes, the annual money spent on mobile advertising is only $416 million, compared with nearly $24 billion spent on online advertising. But Google is Google, so bet against the giant Android at your peril. And get ready for a blizzard of display ads on your fancy little smartphone.

This season's entertainment blockbuster, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, is the whole shooting match: Your chance to shoot Russians (or, if you prefer, innocent civilians), investors' opportunity to score off game maker Activision, and jingoists answering a call to glory on Veterans' Day.

Already hailed as the biggest videogame launch ever (even worldwide), MW2 is shipping out up to 8 million units this week, probably a record. The Street already gave its approval last Friday: Activision's stock rose in anticipation of the game's release. (See GamePro's review here.)

As I pointed out in June, marketers vowed the biggest entertainment-industry launch ever for the game. Call of Duty veterans may be pissed off that MW2 tries too hard to lure first-timers, but that's the war business for you.

Forget film offerings like the next Twilight or James Cameron's Avatar, Reuters says. This is your week to celebrate war. As one analyst says, "This is the one game that could buck the economic trend for the holiday season."

Glenn Beck acts as if he's a prisoner of the Commie/Socialist Obama administration, and that's why he plays the courageous, "populist" rebel, throwing shit against the walls of his cell in protest.

But Beck's merely a monkey in a zoo, throwing shit around just for the sake of it. It's earned him attention, but he's a phony. It's not that I disagree with him, which I do. He's a phony because he doesn't speak from conviction or to raise hell but just to pander for his own celebrity.

The best satire yet of Beck's bullshit comes from a video "discovered" by Internet pioneer Lauren Weinstein (click above).

Net neutrality is a major big-business, privacy, and freedom-of-speech issue over continued open access to the Internet. The outcome of this fight will govern how we will use the Web for decades to come — and whether we will be able to use it unfettered. Beck calls net neutrality an Obama-endorsed "Marxist takeover" of the Internet.

Actually, plenty of right-wingers (including the Christian Coalition and Gun Owners of America) strongly support net neutrality, because they're rightly worried that ISPs (Internet service providers) will exert enormous control over what we do online unless there is net neutrality.

See the Christian Coalition's argument that net neutrality "is extremely important to America's grassroots organizations and to those Americans who want to ensure the cable and phone companies controlling access to the Internet will not discriminate based on content."

In fact, the Christian Coalition's argument is one of the most well-reasoned and concise explanations of net neutrality. Beck is ludicrously accusing the Christian Coalition and many other right-wing groups of a "Marxist plot."

Here's Beck's smear of shit against net neutrality. Not clever enough to be a self-parody, it's typically hysterical monkey business by the cynical Beck.

The current big phase of the technology revolution, startlingly taking place while the country is in the grip of a major recession, is once again cutting the heads off the print industry.

The American Booksellers Association is pleading with the Justice Department to probe the price war among Amazon, Target, and Wal-Mart that has resulted in dirt-cheap hardcover prices.

Too late. Kindle itself is the No. 1 bestseller in all categories at Amazon, which just reported an astounding 69 percent increase in profit for the third quarter.

Bestseller hardcover books by John Grisham and Stephen King, among others, are being sold on those sites for about $9; they typically retail, Bloomberg says, for $25 to $35. The industry group calls it "illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and is harmful to consumers."

At 247wallst.com, Douglas A. McIntyre more accurately describes it merely a price war: "The sale of hardcovers is essentially just a 'loss leader' to pick up customers who may also buy consumer electronics. clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, and gardening supplies to put under the Christmas tree as gifts."

Newspapers are on their way to becoming loss leaders for their websites, Kindles and E-Readers are jostling for position, and the new generation of smartphones may even replace laptops, let alone drive the final nail in the coffin of major print outlets.

U2, seeing the success of The Beatles: Rock Band, are hungering for their own version, Industry Gamers reports.

This is not believed to be part of Bono's trifecta publicity crusades of his war on world poverty, rubbing elbows with Paul Wolfowitz and other pols, and landing on the cover of Time. (See George Monbiot's roasting of Bono from 2005 for giving legitimacy to the those responsible for keeping much of the world in poverty.) Below, Bono and Wolfowitz making war plans during the Bush Era:

Cisco's $2.96 billion purchase of Norwegian tech giant Tandberg "expands its lineup of videoconferencing products." Sorry to bring that development to staffers worldwide who will have to set up even more of those dog-and-pony shows. Tandberg's the world's largest maker of videoconferencing equipment.

Above, a video story about one of George W. Bush's rehearsals for a 2007 videoconference. Unfortunately, I can't locate the infamous October 2005 staged videoconference starring one of the Defense Department's flacks as a phony grunt lobbing a carefully rehearsed softball question to the president from Iraq — the identity of the flack was a fact that I revealed back then.

Even geezers get it. Books are history — and not just history books, but history. E.L. Doctorow and ex-longtime Random House editor Jason Epstein are huckstering the Espresso Book Machine this week.

The author and editor, buddies from the print days, gathered at Harvard Book Store for the book machine's formal debut. It prints, binds, and trims a book at the goddamn bookstore — on demand, like ordering a Big Mac.

This is shaping up as a momentous week in the tech/money universe: Google's Wave is finally rolling, and now the book readers get a formal unveiling of a cool tool.

Bank of America to Pay for Merrill Backstop, Faces SEC Trial (Bloomberg)

Ken Lewis trying hard to buy his way out of trouble, saying BofA will pay $425 million to cancel one piece of unused federal guarantee of Merrill Lynch's assets. Lewis frantically trying to reduce "reliance on government support and return to normal market funding." Will it help fend off the government? SEC says it will "vigorously pursue" its bonuses case against the bank, and maybe the SEC means business now that federal judge Jed Rakoff is on the agency's back.

Liquidation of CDOs aids banks (FT)

Market has loosened up for the assets underlying the complex, toxic securities that crashed Wall Street. An estimated $123 billion of these bullshit, defaulted securities that fed the Street's excessive greed have been liquidated.

Is This a Sucker's Rally? (Seeking Alpha, Jeff Miller)

A good roundup of bloviations good and bad.

Why haven't any Wall Street tycoons been sent to the slammer? (McClatchy, Kevin G. Hall)

In search of a "poster child for the Great Recession." Hank Paulson's always a candidate.

Envoy seeks to ditch 'bullying' US image (FT)

Louis Susman, Obama fundraiser and now U.S. ambassador to the U.K., announces that the Bush Era is officially over: "We are not a dumb power, we are not a bullying power." He adds: "To compare it to the previous relationship, well, some people might say that relationship wasn't healthy. Many people here in the UK didn't think it was healthy because it was without questioning and interaction."

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