In case you’ve been wondering what happened to former Florida governor and senate candidate, RITO (Republican in tan only) Charlie Crist….
Marc Ambinder writes that 22 people were killed or captured in the raid on Bin Laden’s compound. And that the SEAL team had practiced at a model of the compound replicated at Bagram Air Base for more than a month. The latter fact reinforces that Bin Laden’s fatal error was becoming a stationary target. Reading all the preparation and layers the operation required shows that had he kept on the move, we could never have pulled something like this off.
Fortresses of solitude–he had no phone or Internet either–work only in the comic books.
Former Pakistan strong man Perez Musharraf is astounded that a fortress compound could be constructed in his country 800 yards from Pakistan’s major military academy to provide protection for Osama Bin Laden without the government’s knowledge. He is likewise aghast that the United States did not trust Pakistan’s intelligence to cooperate in the raid on this compound, as “we are fighting the same enemy.” Lastly, he is bamboozled, saddened, and chagrined that the US violated Pakistan’s sovereignty, which he would not have allowed, were he in any position to stop it.
In other news, enhanced CGI will allow casting the late Claude Rains as Musharraf in the upcoming Hollywood version of the raid and killing of Bin Laden, working title “Chickenhawk Down: They Saved Bin Laden’s Brain–Not!”
Why should boxing be legal, but not this?
At first, people wouldn’t talk. But Rolle “overheard a couple of conversations about the beatdown,” and started asking questions.
Several men explained that promoters and others from shefights.net recruited homeless men for the female domination fetish videos. The men were taken to a nearby townhome, where women beat them while someone videotaped the session. Sometimes, the men told Rolle, they were handcuffed or shackled and whipped or flogged.
Apparently litigants want some of that action, but if they were not beaten themselves, how do they have legal standing? Which would be worse: a beating by any of the women pictured here or one of the male specimens you typically find at a boxing gym? You can hire yourself out as a sparring partner, can’t you?
Regardless, I don’t see how a third-party gets to sue over it.
Via AceOfSpades.
Actually it’s the word “curate” that I hate. I’m sick of seeing it used all over the Internet as a pretentious substitute for some vague activity that, other than being the stuff of the aesthetically leechful–that is, I don’t think one would curate one’s own play–forms no mental image whatsoever. Entire domains and companies specialize in it:
- www.curate.us
- www.curatenyc.org
It is a word for people who don’t like words. Those who prefer nonverbal forms of communication such as images bristle at the specificity of language. Hence, an article on a film festival says:
Scorsese, who is curating The Director’s Cut, a unique four-night film season at the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall this June, clearly agonised over an opening film that would live up to the grandeur of the setting in 4,000 acres of Humphry Repton-designed parkland.
To quote Charlie Sheen, “What does that even mean?” That is, I’m pretty sure people using the word are repeating it as jargon and knowing what they wish to connote without even having the foggiest of what they wish to denote. They are as likely using it as a more refined form of the word “curing” (meat) as opposed to deriving it from the word meaning a person who cares for souls.
The NY Times noticed this trend in 2009, but clearly the sloppiness of usage has increased since:
Any activity that involves culling and selecting.
Searching for recent tweets using the word, however, shows it now has a chameleon-like quality:
Are you curating inside your organization?
That sounds like a discreet way of asking “are you stewing in your own juices?” Be that as it may, help stamp out the unfortunate new popularity of a dismal usage by appropriately sneering whenever you encounter curate in prose or conversation–at least of the non-ecclesiastical variety.
Not content as the number one state in the nation for executions, Texas wants to be swifter at subjects other than justice. Already featuring 520 miles of interstate with an autobahn-like speed of 80 mph, Texas plans to up the ante to 85.
Eventually the marginal cost of increasing the speed limit has to turn negative in the sense of reaching one’s destination in finite time presupposes reaching it at all. In other words, a traffic accident blows up the average time of a commute regardless of the legally posted speed–sometimes infinitely so.
I suspect increasing from 80 to 85 approaches that limit. Texas at its widest point is 660 miles across. Hence, even if a driver could maintain the top legal speed going from end-to-end–and that’s a highly problematic “if”–he would reduce the time of the drive by only around one half hour, slightly fewer than 30 minutes. Moreover, gas mileage decreases in general at speeds over 55 mph. A tank will typically last only 75 percent as long at 85 mph as at 65 mph, so speedy Texas drivers will be filling up four times for every three times drivers in the rest of the nation do. That will shave a few minutes off that 30-minute advantage.
Sure it sounds like fun to keep pushing the speed envelope, but so is doing doughnuts and peeling out. That doesn’t mean we ought to build public roads for such a purpose, rather than regulating them so as to maximize the safe transport of people and goods from one place to another.
Japan has elevated the rating of the Fukushima “nuclear and radiological event” to 7, which is the highest number on the scale. The only previous event to achieve this rating is Chernobyl. Although Japanese authorities believe the radiation from Chernobyl to have been worse, they admit the levels around Fukushima are “massive” and “dangerous to human health.”
Thirteen US cities have detected radiation in milk, including some from samples as far away as Vermont.
Has the political class failed? James Poulos thinks so and cites the Trump talk as conclusive evidence it has:
The massive fact dominating it all is that never before has such a famous outsider jumped into national politics with such an aggressive critique of a sitting president and the direction of the country — and never before has the response been so immediate and positive.
I disagree with the evidence, but not necessarily the conclusion. Every election since at least 1992 has had similar rumblings–from Ross Perot to Jesse Ventura to Wesley Clark. Even Sarah Palin in 2008 somewhat fits the mold, although as a sitting governor she was not outside the political class. Nonetheless, her positioning has constantly been as outsider storming the ramparts.
The political class is failing, however, and that Trump is not the first such “great non-political hope” proves it more than if he were. Rather, like the deficit, we’ve had repeated warnings for decades and only now are the cracks so bad as to resist further wall-papering of them over.
A few days of media juice does not warrant believing this is Trump’s moment. We will know we have crossed the rubicon when a candidate like Trump either beats the establishment or makes it adjust. Otherwise, we may have to endure the death throes of the current two parties a while before the obvious successor emerges.
That’s what defense attorneys in the trial of Dr. Conrad Murray plan to argue, according to the Guardian. They say that Jackson’s finances were a shambles and, despondent over his almost $500 million in debt, Jackson took his own life. The judge in the case, Michael Pastor, is skeptical:
“I’m not going to turn an involuntary manslaughter trial into some kind of an escapade in analysis of the finances in Jackson’s entire life,” he told the court. “Right now this is major deep sea fishing.”
Defense attorneys have also asked for an autopsy.
It’s going to be a long election cycle. (Or do we even have cycles any more? Rather, isn’t it one nonstop election?) CNN’s Alexander Rooney leads with the headline: “Rubio to Trump: Lay off birther issue,” which naturally implies some kind of desire for confrontation on Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s part. It turns out, however, that as usual the media is manufacturing news.
If you watch the clip of the actual interview, Matt Lewis asked Rubio what he thought about the controversy, rather than Rubio volunteering his opinion. Rubio was thus put in the position of either endorsing the Birther controversy–and thus Trump’s embrace of it–or distancing himself. Rubio chose the latter, but his rhetoric was not a confrontational “lay off” at all:
I would suggest – if he asked for my opinion – not to focus so much on that issue.
One other note about Rooney’s piece: He calls Rubio the “current odds-on-favorite for the No. 2 spot on the GOP presidential ticket.” From the little I know of him, I like Rubio and think he has a bright political future. Nevertheless, the assertion is absurd. I checked Intrade, and Rubio is the front runner, but based only on a minuscule market. “Odds-on” means “better than even.”
If Rooney is willing to wager at those odds, I’ll take his bet.