Posts Tagged ‘product placement’
Thursday Morning
* Fox News is unbelievably terrible. Jon Stewart reports.
* Today in Taser news: Man Tasered to Death After Running Stop Sign.
* Now you can tag products in your Facebook photos! Finally!
* Mike Huckabee’s Time Travel Academy. Not a hoax! Not an imaginary story!
* Silicon Valley needs humanities PhDs! Probably two or three of them.
All the Things That Happened Today
* Sad news: Terrorist attack at Moscow’s busiest airport.
* Rumors are swirling that the Wachowskis may pull a Lucas.
* Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult.
* SOTU 2011: “How We Win the Future.” Warning: climate change may not exist in the future.
* Will big-name Republicans sit out 2012?
* The problem with regarding the photography of suffering as ‘pornography.’
* Killjoys keep debunking the “twin suns in 2012” Betelgeuse supernova story. Can’t I have just this one thing?
* Soccer science! As game theory predicts, legitimate falls far outnumber fake falls, Wilson reported at the meeting. Only 6% of the 2800 falls were highly deceptive dives. Players were two to three times as likely to dive when close to the goal, where the payoff was huge: Statistics show that there is an 80% chance of scoring from penalty kicks. Almost none of the highly deceptive dives resulted in free kicks against the diver. And referees were most likely to reward dives that occurred close to the goals—perhaps because the players were farther away and the deception harder to detect, he noted.
* James Kochalka is Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate.
* Headline of the day: Man admits mailing hundreds of tarantulas.
* I don’t want to alarm anyone, but it appears the Bush administration may have broken the law.
* Genghis Khan: history’s greenest conqueror?
Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion actually cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
So how exactly did Genghis Khan, one of history’s cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today’s environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.
Over the course of the century and a half run of the Mongol Empire, about 22 percent of the world’s total land area had been conquered and an estimated 40 million people were slaughtered by the horse-driven, bow-wielding hordes. Depopulation over such a large swathe of land meant that countless numbers of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests.
For certain values of “green”… Via MetaFilter.
* And also via MetaFilter: Vermont vs. corporate personhood. Republicans vs. the Internet. Rahm Emanuel gets Chicago’d. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. The United States of Shame. Teacher salary? Damn you North Carolina!
Ev’ning Links: Slouching Towards Idiocracy
Ev’ning links.
* It is totally, 100% appropriate to have paid product placement on the morning news.
* Slouching towards idiocracy: the L.A. Times is shutting down its book section.
* It hasn’t been a very good week for John McCain. Having successfully goaded Obama into making a tremendously successful overseas trip that has managed to erase any lingering justification for McCain’s own candidacy, he’s now reduced to bitter rants that even a Villager like Joe Klein characterizes as scurrilous and desperate:
John McCain said this today in Rochester, New Hampshire:
This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.
This is the ninth presidential campaign I’ve covered. I can’t remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad.
* I hadn’t heard very much crowing from early Obamaniacs on the internets, and I’m glad of that, but the netroots should really be breathing sighs of relief that they didn’t get their way about John Edwards:
The National Enquirer spent months chasing John Edwards and digging into his relationship with Rielle Hunter before busting him spending the night in a hotel with the woman and the former Democratic presidential candidate’s alleged love child.
* And The Edge of the American West remembers the Detroit riots, 41 years ago today.