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Well, the starvation is shocking to those of us with an iota of compassion.

Also, some of the ridiculous follies of the government are just plain funny.

Example A: the worlds ugliest permanently unfinished hotel.

Example B: To save on electricity, traffic is directed by police, evidently only women and they only turn counterclockwise. I guess because dear leader only likes it when girls turn counterclockwise.

> He caved in a big way on health care

Here's his explanation:

http://www.esquire.com/the-side/qa/dennis-kucinich-health-care-bill-032210

While I agree with you in principle, I think that the act of burning holy books is usually intended in a very religiously intolerant light, if not as an incitement to violence. Here in South Africa, a court interdict was issued recently against a Muslim cleric who was going to burn Bibles in response to the chap in the States a while ago, which I agree with, personally, no-one should make public displays about how much they hate someone else's religion (or race or whatever else for that matter).

Desecrating holy objects has already been thoroughly studied under the auspices of Flag Desecration. Normally citizens of a country who burn their own flag in protest are not expressing hatred for their country, but unrest against the established government and policies of the country and with unquestioning adherence to an ideal that is not being lived up to.

It is a sign that patriotism has lost sight of common sense when allegience to a flag is considered more important than the quality of life of it's citizens. So to, it is clear that adherents to a religion have lost all perspective when burning copies of their book, drawing cartoons of their mascot, etc are seen as greater crimes against them than murder.

In short, unless you are spewing bile and using the stunt to draw attention to your bile, the act of desecration or blasphemy itself is not an act of hate, only an act of sensational protest. Anyone who brings up hate crimes are only trying to justify their outrage. The act of desecration is meant to highlight the fact that the offended party's priorities are dangerously skewed. When they react wrathfully, they are helpfully affirming that accusation.

Islam needs to learn what the rest of the internet figured out long ago: Simply don't feed the trolls. Grow a thicker skin and move on with your life. Christians honestly don't care if you burn a bible. And why should they? Athiests don't care if you burn On the Origin of Species, you can buy up or donate to a bonfire as many copies as you'd like, make any sort of dance that you want, as long as you are not absconding our copies to burn or depriving a jurisdiction if it's tax-funded library, then it's just your loss.

You'll also find not many people are doing that. Again, why would they? They will provoke zero irrational reactions from athiests. Christian bibles get burned sometimes, but again, who cares? They don't care, they have plenty. Invented the printing press and all. Lots of people hate Christianity and they know it, but they "turn the other cheek" and that's a good strategy.

Burning the Quran? That evokes irrational reactions. Since no people are harmed, no property is stolen and nothing of real consequence is transpiring, then the reaction itself is uncalled for and more people will try it in order to protest the reaction itself. This is one of the core things people (including myself) do dislike about Islam: putting idolotry ahead of the quality of human life.

That is wrong. I don't care if it's wrong because some people don't think before they react, or if it's wrong because a religious culture trained you to behave that way. Whatever the reason, it is wrong and I value my right to protest against it. To highlight it and to illustrate it.

Although this article esquire.com - marc morano is admittedly pop-media, it demonstrates that most of the fault here lies with reporting, not the science or even the scientists. The researchers at UEA have been doing the best job of measuring and analyzing that anyone can, yet when they are harassed by payed pundits and gadflys the objectivity of the media is completely lost. Even now that the researchers have been cleared of any professional wrongdoing, they are still being criticized (or apologized for) because they expressed frustration that their work was being misrepresented. If we should take away any message from this incident, it should be concern about how easily information can be corrupted in the public mind, even at times when clear public debate is critically important. Case in point: The Guardian is not the most balanced news outlet, and often has a sensationalist agenda of it's own.

Okay, plugging the leak is important, but why aren't BP also doing something like this to contain the effect of the leaked oil: use 'empty supertankers to suck the spill off the surface

The oil does not simply sit on the surface waiting for a giant supertanker vacuum cleaner. It pollutes the entire water column over a vast area.

Okay, plugging the leak is important, but why aren't BP also doing something like this to contain the effect of the leaked oil: use 'empty supertankers to suck the spill off the surface, treat and discharge the contaminated water, and either salvage or destroy the slick.' Instead, they're just rolling out containment booms and sending people out to mop up beaches, never mind trying to initially insist that the crude was red tide, dishwashing-liquid runoff, or mud. Oh wait, the supertanker idea costs a lot of money. Sorry, sorry, my bad.

Localized problem? Maybe now, long after the fact, but at the time...

"Four hundred times more radioactive material was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The fallout was detected over all of Europe except for the Iberian Peninsula"

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

And as for the worst disaster ever...

"The suck-and-salvage technique was developed in desperation across the Arabian Gulf following a spill of mammoth proportions -- 700 million gallons -- that has until now gone unreported, as Saudi Arabia is a closed society, and its oil company, Saudi Aramco, remains owned by the House of Saud. But in 1993 and into '94, with four leaking tankers and two gushing wells, the royal family had an environmental disaster nearly sixty-five times the size of Exxon Valdez on its hands..."

-- http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf-oil-spill-supertankers-051310

Which doesn't mean this isn't the worst disaster the Western Hemisphere has seen, which is very likely will be by the time it's done.

Similar, but different authors. Earlier story you point to does has more technical info and includes some cool photos, including one of the user interface.

Sorry, not on the tip of my tongue (or fingers). I remember there was a great Scientific American article about the technology in December of 2005. Unfortunately, they have changed their web site and you have to have a subscription to read it. SciAm is a good source of info on this topic. Here is a link to search results on SciAm's site. And here is a link to a talk by the scientist who is promoting the technology (I know. Esquire?).

I've seen something similar, too: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2008/bringing-back-the-dead-1208

http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/julie-sex-pic-0609-lg-11217105.jpg

There's a pic of his wife topless if you read the article.

They will fondle themselves in front of you, throw stuff at you, and even be very violent should it be their wish

I'll just leave this here.

There really isn't any reason not to do both. Few would argue that it is and either / or situation, although the specifics about who gets what and when can lead to some heated debates. Unfortunately because money is the limiting resource.

The US is a huge economy, even when it's tanking. There really isn't any reason not to fund NASA on a reasonable, sustained budget. That would go a long way to being able to make rational choices as to how to apportion money to the various aspects of space exploration. And it isn't even a matter of diverting funds to / from environmental issues. Who put most of the satellites that we're using to measure the planet up? NASA. How do you improve planet wide models of heat distribution (and hundreds of other issues) - you go somewhere else and explore other environments. Who does that? NASA.

Sure, they're bureaucratic, inefficient, wasteful and slow - but it is a complex human endeavor so what do you expect.

A better piece in Esquire and one linked to TFA is a short, humanistic blurb by Buzz Aldrin. Says it better.

This guy looks like that austrian guy, Fritz, who rapped his daughter...hmmm, I see a pattern here.

Fritz: http://blogs.kansascity.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/11/fritz.jpg

Mad scientist (Mark Roth) : http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/1g/mark-roth-mad-scientist-1208-lg.jpg

Coincidence I THINK NOT!!

Blacks not voting for Palin/McCain is like blacks not voting for David Duke (no big surprise)

While I don't know about David Duke specifically, it's pretty amusing that even some of his fellow Nazis were for Obama.

Just goes to show, while they may be pinheaded racist redneck pieces of shit even they're not stupid enough to vote McCain ;-)
Really says something about those who were.

Three Cheers to Ms. Berry!

I look way better than that guy on the cover!

Tolabrew

http://www.esquire.com/features/recycle-e-ink-cover

"Simply tear off the cover and dispose of the display unit in your recycling."

Colour me very surprised if the council don't just landfill the thing because it is too much effort for them to split it up into it's component parts...

ugh, lame. and as if you needed anymore reason not to support this: how it was made

Greetings hackers: Esquire's special E-Ink cover includes two flexible displays that should last for a few months. But the flashing could last longer if you want to try to replace the embedded batteries or find other sources of power. If you come up with inventive ways to extend the power or to hack the circuit board, displays, or the E Ink technology itself, let us know by sending an email to editor@esquire.com and we'll post your results here on Esquire.com. We should tell you, it's not easy and requires some expertise... but you're pretty clever, right? Show us something we don't know.

Read this:
http://www.esquire.com/features/recycle-e-ink-cover You will see instructions on proper disposal.

http://www.esquire.com/features/recycle-e-ink-cover

http://www.esquire.com/features/michael-hensley-0708
this guy was really excited about creating democracy in iraq.

And we know this is wrong since as most of us know, Al Gore invented the internet.

Actually, Vint Cerf, who practically did invent the Internet (or at very least the protocol upon which it currently operates) has said that Al Gore really does deserves a great deal of credit for his role in making the Internet available to civilian and commercial use.

"Did anyone seriously expect anything else?"

Reference Admiral Fallon who was either fired, or resigned yesterday as head of Centcom, because of his excessive honesty in this Esquire article or General Shinseki who had his head taken off for pointing out the Iraq war was being waged with to few troops and they wouldn't be able to control Iraq during or after the invasion. Someone what Fallon said in that article completely escape censorship, but it didn't certainly "shorten" his career. I wager he was so sick of the Bush administration he didn't care if his career ended, just so he could get away from them.

Honesty in military chain of command is an incredibly complex problem. You can't really have loose cannons saying controversial things or publicly contradicting their superiors especially the Commander in Chief. The military has to answer to chain of command and to its civilian leaders in our system. If they don't you risk a coup and military dictatorship.

On the other hand when the Commander in Chief and Secretary of Defense are completely incompetent, and do stupid things, which appears to be the case with Bush and Rumsfeld(Gates is a lot better than Rumsfeld) you have to hope that the men and women in the military will know when to say no, reject wrongful orders, and tell the American public the truth, even if it costs them their careers.

For example, the day the White House authorized the use of torture, something Bush once again endorsed with a veto last week, was the day the military had just cause to reject the legitimacy of their Commander in Chief and chain of command. The men and women in the military have the highest stake in upholding the Geneva conventions and military code. If they ever become prisoners of war they have no basis for demanding the protection of those same conventions, if they are torturing prisoners and violating those conventions themselves. You can argue semantics whether "enemy combatants" fall under those protections, and Al Qaeda may torture its prisoners, but its a simple fact if you torture you completely lose the moral high ground, and the damage you do to your cause far out weighs any benefit you got from the suspect intelligence you get through torture when the victim will say anything to make you stop. For example I seriously doubt Al Qaeda was planning to attack the library tower in Los Angeles because it has no strategic value. But because someone being tortured said it was a target, the Bush administration has used it ever since as a "success" story in stopping an attack an in rationalizing the use of torture.

Here's just a snippet, you really should read the entire thing:

It is, of course, television that has allowed Idiot America to run riot within the modern politics and all forms of public discourse. It is not that there is less information on television than there once was. (That there is less news is another question entirely.) In fact, there is so much information that fact is now defined as something that so many people believe that television notices it, and truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.

"You don't need to be credible on television," explains Keith Olbermann, the erudite host of his own show on MSNBC. "You don't need to be authoritative. You don't need to be informed. You don't need to be honest. All these things that we used to associate with what we do are no longer factors.

....

Idiot America is a bad place for crazy notions. Its indolent tolerance of them causes the classic American crank to drift slowly and dangerously into the mainstream, wherein the crank loses all of his charm and the country loses another piece of its mind. The best thing about American crackpots used to be that they would stand proudly aloof from a country that, by their peculiar lights, had gone mad. Not today. Today, they all have book deals, TV shows, and cases pending in federal court.

I'm very happy with my results. It took a little longer than expected but I'm enjoying my longer, fuller penis. Sex is better. My confidence in bed and in general is higher. I just love it

Sounds straight out of the back of Esquire. (They're notorious for accepting "better sex" ads).

Ok, we all know that the movie Memento also deals with this memory condition. To be somewhat more helpful, here is the short story it was inspired by.

Here's a great article originally in the Hindustan Times about a perplexed Indian visiting the states.

I worked TDY in our reservations center in London (for my former employer, an airline) and was asking the lady to give me her address so we could mail the tickets. And she said "two ten" and I said "two ten what?" and she said "two ten!" and I said "two ten what?" and she "Tooting! It's Tooting you idiot!"

If you want a REALLY hilarious article regarding cultural differences and language confusion read Jesus Shaves by David Sedaris.

Well, you at least contest my examples here, although I'm still waiting for some counterexamples. Quickly:

The people of California watch the news, some of them even watch Fox.. Command came down from on high because the people on high at Fox wanted Arnold to win.

Regarding the press secretary request, I concede your point. It was Ari who suggested it first, I forgot. But Fox pushed it enthusiastically. Everyone else kinda said "WTF?" for the reasons I outlined in an earlier post. Your point is true, but the distinction is not really important.

The fact that you believe the Plame affair to be a minor issue is telling. It's a felony. I'm sure you've seen the Bush Sr. quote about revealing sources by now. But what bothers me is not so much that it happened, but that no one really seems to care if the felon is caught. If I were a true partisan this would please me; the Democrats can prove logically that there's a guaranteed felon in the White House and the only way to get rid of her is to elect a new administration. I mean, at least Poindexter had been pardoned.

Murdoch vs. Turner: Turner is no liberal. Nor is he married to Jane Fonda any longer. Besides, CNN has taken a giant step to the right to try to keep up with Fox's ratings. There was a FAIR study documenting this rightward shift on reliable sources; viewers can see it for themselves. I seek documentation to the contrary, that CNN, or NPR for that matter, is a liberal news outlet. You assert but do not prove this.

Which only proves the blindness of the left. While those of on the Right will concede you guys exist (but are hopelessly misguided, delusional, borderline anti-american, but you DO exist) you guys think the political spectrum goes from Joe Stalin to Joe Lieberman and anything to the right of there is only howling madness.

This is what I mean by calling names. You're not making an argument, you're calling me insane. This is not reasonable discourse, it's ad hominem attack. Besides, I, like you, have mostly libertarian leanings- I'm concerned foremost with an empirical basis for policy making. Clinton was quite good at this, the Bush Administration is famously afraid of it. I live in Pennsylvania, I've voted for Arlen Specter (but Rick Santorum scares the living daylights out of me). But you seem to think I'm some wacko because I don't see a communist conspiracy in the media.

This or this.

Richard Dooling wrote a great story for Esquire magazine about this. It's a fictional first-person account with possible social and economic implications.

Although the (sometimes)crappy CGI and that nipple revealing suit would fuel your statement. It is simply not true.

Although the (sometimes)crappy CGI and that nipple revealing suit would fuel your statement. It is simply not true.

It's not that they're dumb, they're just not thinking. Check out this article this article in Esquire.
They come up with these things, not having any idea about how they're going to implement it, or whether they will implement it at all. If it sounds good, and makes them look good, they're for it.
For many of the folks in the administration, government simply cannot ever do anything good for anyone. The only thing the government is good for is keeping track of who's saying what about you, and bombing the hell out of countries so piss-poor and beaten that they can't possibly fight back.

"Scientifically, it's far, far safer for us to take nuclear waste and bury it deep in some mine shaft somewhere than to continue dumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning gasoline and diesel. We're contaminating our entire environment now because people are afraid of nuclear energy."

(Well, I'm not afraid of nuclear energy, I just know its waste is about the most poisonous stuff there is...but the man's got a point.) Anybody ever think about how much crap we spew into the environment on a yearly basis by using petroleum? Why not? You breathe it.

I've sold fiction and non-fiction works. The effort in getting something published that is also suitable for human consumption is much larger than most people realize. Anyone can publish on the web, but, as agents and editors often point out, who's doing the quality control? I don't think that weblogs are suitable for writing or reading compelling fiction. Good writing is hard, and demands endless revisions, rewritings, and editing. Any professional writer knows this. Consumers seldom see the first draft of an article or story.

OneStepFromElysium indicated that Memento might be a good work produced as a blog. I beg to disagree; the novella and the movie are very carefully crafted. I believe a novel COULD BE MADE TO LOOK like a weblog, much like Bram Stoker's Dracula is made to look like a collection of journals, telegrams, and newspaper clippings. The nature of real weblogs may hinder character development, plot development, and narrative.

For comparison, check the original Memento story out, published by Esquire Magazine. Could something like this have been written as a weblog? Hm... something to think about...

Cheers!

Memento got nominated for best original screenplay ("written directly for the screen"), even though it's based on a short story.

Here's the original short story that inspired the movie, by Jonathan Nolan. It's very different from the movie and in some ways it's better. Read it if you get the chance - it gives away nothing about the movie that you couldn't deduce from the Memento trailer.

The second time I saw Memento, I brought a pad of paper and took copious notes. Here are the results: a chronological list of Memento scenes. Warning: SPOILERS there.

-Josh