J-Love is hot...

It doesn't matter what she wears.

clipped from x17online.com

Drew is so hot

What else do I need to say about this picture, let me get a napkin for myself.

clipped from www.popcrunch.com

The poor is the US are not poor on a global standard

I don't understand what is so controversial here. I believe and Rand said steps could be taken to improve the lives of the poor in America. However when you look at not just the income available to many poor people, but the collective resources of the community, you get a picture of poor people who are lucky to be American.

clipped from bighollywood.breitbart.com The fact is, the richest person in a Third World country would trade that spot for the lowest rung on the American ladder. But I’ll go further and say the poor in the US – when viewed by the rest of the world – aren’t poor at all. The poverty level for us looks like something to shoot for. Fact is, there are too many countries to mention where citizens have a yearly income measured in hundreds of dollars. While our poor can still buy music, beer and Nikes, one purchase at the Footlocker cripples Liberia for a week.

Again Google... Really?

What about Buzz, or Orkut, or Google Connect or Google Wave. Listen, you are not Facebook, and you never will be - just be you Google.

clipped from www.wallblog.co.uk More details are emerging that point to Google launching a social media website, called Google Me, to rival Facebook as it emerges the web giant is looking for web users to take part in a “usability study”.

This sounds like double speak to me...

Are we really there to "balance" the power in the region, and do "many countries" really want us to take on that role. Two things, helping the countries in the region develop their own strength seems like a more sustainable path. Second, an increase in American force in the region is likely to encourage China to increase its force, which would make other countries in the region more vulnerable, not less.

clipped from www.time.com The Tomahawks' arrival "is part of a larger effort to bolster our capabilities in the region," Glaser says. "It sends a signal that nobody should rule out our determination to be the balancer in the region that many countries there want us to be." No doubt Beijing got the signal.

Did Rolling Stone harm America with its article?

I know people are happy Rolling Stone published "the truth", but lets look at what it published. It ran a story informing us that the top general in Afghanistan doesn't think highly of Obama and his leadership team. We got to read about him and his staff making fun of Joe Biden (doesn't everyone make fun of Joe Biden). But that isn't important.

What is important is the lives of the men and womyn serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. What is important is that as a nation we are informed about the circumstances of the war they are fighting and the deaths they are dying. Hearing people make fun of Biden is great (again doesn't everyone make fun of Biden) but getting information about our troops is critical.

Thanks to Rolling Stone and the story by Hastings, that is going to be harder.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a tightening of the rules covering the US military's dealings with the media. The move comes in the wake of the sacking of the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal, over a Rolling Stone magazine article.

I love this....

The best thing I read all day.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet's capacity for "an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer" has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch

It is time to leave Afghanistan

There is simply no good reason for us to be there anymore.

clipped from www.huffingtonpost.com On ABC's This Week, CIA Director Leon Panetta was asked by Jake Tapper how many al Qaeda are left in Afghanistan. "I think the estimate on the number of al Qaeda is actually relatively small," said Panetta. "At most, we're looking at 50 to 100, maybe less." Fifty! That means there are more Kardashians in Los Angeles than al Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to Panetta's figures, we now have 1,000 to 2,000 soldiers for each and every al Qaeda fighter who didn't get the change of address cards bin Laden sent out -- and we're spending $1 billion to $2 billion per terrorist this year.

EPA thinks milk is just like oil...

This has to be one of the dumbest things I have read in sometime. It is hard to understand how anyone can take such an obviously wrong assertion seriously.

clipped from www.marginalrevolution.com The EPA regulations state that “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Thus, containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria..."

How a kid plays a violent video game...

The writer tell how his kid play Grand Theft Auto, and instead of killing people, he saves them. While this does suggest people are not born bad, I don't know you can extrapolate from this that people are born good. It could just be one interesting interaction between one child and one game. It also suggests the impact of the group, and how the group can influence an individuals behavior just by exposure. Given 10 years, this child is likely to play the game more in line with how it was envisioned.

clipped from www.bitmob.com In all his time with Grand Theft Auto he never once encountered any of the controversy surrounding this notorious title. He didn’t beat any hookers with a baseball bat.  He didn’t deal drugs. He didn’t go on a murderous rampage. He certainly never once had a cup of hot coffee. He didn't avoid these things because I told him he counldn't try them. It just never occurred to him to commit these acts.

Where's the Beef?

I think this sums up a lot of what I felt about the president's speech. He started off with a history of the accident that everyone in America is familiar with, and ended it pushing what amounts to his personal political agenda. Are windmills a good idea, yes. I just think if President Bush had made a similar speech, he would have been criticized for capitalizing on the catastrophe. That is what I feel like Obama did.

clipped from hotair.com In the face of a crisis that has unfolded for almost two full months, Obama chose to talk about wind turbines.  A nation waited to see if a leader would emerge from the White House, and instead it got an absent-minded professor desperate to change the subject.

This is a strange idea... but think about it.

The idea is you are born with 75 percent ownership of yourself as a corporation, parents are given 20 percent and the government 5 percent (no other taxes). Through your life you have the right to sell shares of yourself as a corporation to raise money for education, or other interests. As you made money, it would be distributed to the owners of the shares of you - as a corporation.

clipped from www.marginalrevolution.com "What if," answered Hektor, without missing a beat, "instead of giving two, three, four dollars a month for a charity's sake, you gave ten dollars a month for a 5 percent share of that kid's future earnings?  And you, of course, get nothing if the kid dies.  Now you have a real interest in making sure that kid got that pair of shoes you sent.  Now it's in your interest to find out if he's going to school and learning to read and write.  Now maybe you'll send him that box of old clothes you were thinking of throwing away.  Under your system you write a check and forget about the kid, who'll probably starve anyway.  Under our system, you're locked into him.

A word to Mexico's President

Go home and leave the governing of Arizona to the people of Arizona. Spend more time making your country one people aren't running from in droves and less time concerned about American politics.

clipped from www.mediaite.com Mexican President Felipe Cadleron spoke this morning to a joint session of the U.S. Congress and took the opportunity to blast the controversial new immigration law recently passed in Arizona. Calderon said “I am convinced that a comprehensive immigration reform is also crucial to securing our common border. However, I strongly disagree with the recently adopted law in Arizona.”

When ever you kill a leader you take a risk...

that it will only make their message that much more powerful. But not killing them allows them to spread their message in ways it wouldn't if they were dead. It is a hard choice.

clipped from newsbusters.org Even leaving aside the constitutional questions (al-Awlaki is an American citizen), doesn’t Obama see what a gift the killing of this imam would be to his cause? Just ask the Romans how their anti-Jesus-movement strategy worked out. (And Jesus’s followers didn’t have their leader’s sermons saved in ready-to-go video and audio files; al-Awlaki’s resurrection would be vivid indeed.)

What a silly claim for Maher to make....

Mainstream Media, or liberal media, or whatever you want to call it has taken a fair number of shots at religion - and Christianity. It has also done a fair amount of supporting it as well. I'm not sure why Maher would even make a claim, that on the surface can so easily be shown false.

On a side note, S.E. looks hot on her book cover.

clipped from newsbusters.org On Friday night's Real Time, HBO talk-host Bill Maher berated conservative (and fellow atheist) S.E. Cupp for her new book Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity. “Liberals are not atheists any more than conservatives are. Michael Moore is religious! Chris Matthews is religious! Al Sharpton is religious!” Maher went so far as to insist the liberal media has “never” attacked religion:

What happened to freedom of speech?

This bill clearly violates the first amendment, people should be able to share ideas, and communicate with others without having to register with the government.

clipped from www.ij.org Simply put:  Even if you never talk to an elected official but spend as little as $500 merely to communicate with your neighbors and friends about state policies, you must register with, and provide information to, the government, which then proceeds to disseminate the information on the Internet.  Failure to register can lead to an investigation, significant penalties (including treble damages, the costs of the investigation and the government’s attorney’s fees), and a revocation of the ability to engage in any political activity that might qualify as “grassroots lobbying.”

Why no flood coverage?

This is a good point, more news channels doesn't mean more news coverage - just like more news magazines didn't mean more news. What happens is the networks compete to cover the "big" stories more in depth than each other. In the process other stories are neglected. And don't get me started on media coverage of media coverage.

clipped from www.aim.org So why the cold shoulder? I see two main reasons. First, the modern media may be more multifarious than ever, but they're also remarkably monomaniacal. In a climate where chatter is constant and ubiquitous, newsworthiness now seems to be determined less by what's most important than by what all those other media outlets are talking about the most. Sheer volume of coverage has become its own qualification for continued coverage. (Witness the Sandra Bullock-Jesse James saga.) In that sense, it's easy to see why the press can't seem to focus on more than one or two disasters at the same time. Everyone is talking about BP and Faisal Shahzad 24/7, the "thinking" goes. So there must not be anything else that's as important to talk about. It's a horrible feedback loop.

Could a hacker take down the whole internet?

The problem with the internet is it doesn't have a central structure, and lacks a strong organizing body. Well, maybe it isn't a problem. Those factors are also what makes it such a powerful tool for communication around the world. The trick moving forward, will be to maintain the loose, freely connected nature of the internet and find some way to protect traffic.

clipped from dailycaller.com In 2008, Pakistan Telecom tried to comply with a government order to prevent access to YouTube from the country and intentionally “black-holed” requests for YouTube videos from Pakistani Internet users. But it also accidentally told the international carrier upstream from it that “I’m the best route to YouTube, so send all YouTube traffic to me.” The upstream carrier accepted the routing message, and passed it along to other carriers across the world, which started sending all requests for YouTube videos to Pakistan Telecom. Soon, even Internet users in the U.S. were deprived of videos of singing cats and skateboarding dogs for a few hours.

The balance of power...

The article as a whole is a defense of liberal policies over the last 50 or so years. I picked this out, because it struck me as important. Liberal ideas have done a lot for this country, but so have conservative ideas. One taken without the other each can be dangerous, and bad for the country.

clipped from www.mercurynews.com Is liberalism the bastion of perfection? No. Moreover, when liberalism is in power, it needs the contrarian conservative voice lest it become consumed with its own arrogance; and the same holds true for the other side.

Left to die on the streets of New York...

I don't know what to say about this, other than wow.

clipped from abcnews.go.com Why did passersby leave a Good Samaritan bleeding to death on a New York sidewalk last week, with one even pausing to snap a photo of the dying man who had been stabbed after thwarting a mugging?