Ace of Spades - Chances of a Robust Recovery over the Whole Next Decade? Somewhere Between Grim and None Not sure I am buying this. If I recall correctly the same was predicted during the 80's, the 92 recession and the '00-'01 recession.
Hot Air - Dem consultants tell HuffPo: “If the election were held today, we’d lose the House” I can believe it, but Novemeber is still a long ways away. The GOP needs to start emphasizing a plan now, and it needs to address peoples concerns it can't just be a cosmetic change from the crap the Dems have been feeding us.
Hot Air - Science: Actually, you can beat sense into your kids Quick more parents and teachers need to be made aware of this groundbreaking research.
Instapundit - Remembering the giddy futurism of Omni magazine
The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science—which always seemed to cover hypersonic travel and AMC carburetors in the same page—and the lofty Scientific American, whose rigor was alluring but still impenetrable to me. But with equal parts sci-fi, feature reporting, and meaty interviews with Freeman Dyson and Edward O. Wilson, Omni's arrival every month was a sort of peak nerd experience.
"Omni was different," the erstwhile Penthouse publisher mused in his first editorial for the magazine. "It was a creation of pure joy."
I loved Omni, it was one of those magazines that even when it was being pessimistic it was still optimistic about the power of science to solve problems. We could use a little more of that today. A couple years ago I linked a piece that looked at some of their predictions for the future.
Slashdot - Best Buy $39.95 "Optimization" At Best a Waste of Money What a surprise
"The Consumerist deconstructs the appalling "optimization service" that Best Buy has been pushing on consumers in recent weeks. The retailer charges 40 bucks to give you a slower PC, and make bizarre claims that it makes it go 200% faster. 'We ran the 3DMark 2003 graphics benchmark on each laptop, comparing optimized and non-optimized settings. For two of our samples, the Gateway and Toshiba, performance changes were negligible. On the Asus laptop, however, optimized tests actually scored about 32% worse than the non-optimized setup. We have been unable to isolate the source of this performance change. On none of the three tested laptops did the optimized settings give a performance boost in our test.'"
The Other McCain - The Apocalypse of Culture: People Spend $1 Billion to See Sucky 3-D SciFi Movie Sorry to disagree but the 3D was the best I have seen and the rest of the effects were good. The story was that same lame one that was told in Dances with Wolves and Last Samurai but it wasn't as horrible as I had thought it would be or as preachy as I had heard.
Newsweek - Private Intel Service Warned of 'Catastrophic' Airline Attack Deploying Same Bombing Method Used Against Saudi Official
A private intelligence service warned last September that a novel bombing technique used by Al Qaeda in Yemen to try to assassinate Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism chief represented an important "tactical innovation" that could "have a catastrophic result if employed on an aircraft."
The report by the Stratfor intelligence service, which was widely distributed and published on the service's Web site could raise questions about comments Sunday by John Brennan, President Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, that there were "no indications" that Al Qaeda might try to use the same underwear bombing technique it had attempted against the Saudi official on a civilian aircraft.
Also
Exclusive: Intelligence Agencies Reported Last Fall on Threat of Bombs Hidden Under Clothing:
Two intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security circulated a paper within the government last fall which examined in some detail the threats which bombs secreted in clothing -- or inside someone's body cavities -- might pose to aviation security, Newsweek has learned from US national security officials who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.
...
The officials added that the paper also discussed the problems such bomb designs might pose for existing airport security procedures. The officials said that experts believed that while enhanced security measures and devices such as pat-down searches and body scanners -- which were not in widespread use last fall but have been rushed into effect since the underpants bombing attempt -- in many or most cases could successfully spot bombs secreted under clothing. However, such equipment or procedures might be considerably less effective in spotting bombs hidden inside body cavities.
At this point I am not even outraged. I just want us to learn from this and move forward with an improved air security system. The problem is I am not sure how to accomplish that.
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