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POPSSmoke a Pack a Day... or move to Cairo This comes as no surprise to me. The entire time I was in Cairo I coughed, hacked and eye watered my way through each day. I asked my chain smoking friend why he bothered to smoke when he could just breathe the air. Worst pollution I personally have ever had to live through. Luckily enough I was able to escape by heading home, unlike most everyone else stuck there.
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POPSMichael Crichton 1942 - 2008 But what a strange career the man had, from Harvard Medical School to the top of the book and movie charts to Hollywood blockbusters to odd best-selling jeremiads against Japanese businessmen and global warming activists. The consistent themes of his work are the consequences of man's own hubris and a thoroughgoing paranoia. Someone is always coming up with a brilliant notion in Crichton, and it always goes hideously kablooey. Bring dinosaurs back to life? Okay, but they'll escape and gobble you up. Organ transplants? Fine until the medical establishment starts harvesting them for profit. Robots? Forget about the robots: they'll shoot you down ("Westworld") or come after you with knives ("Runaway"). Plastic surgery, biotech implants, chasing tornadoes? All terrible, terrible ideas ("Looker," "The Terminal Man," "Twister").
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POPS“Teach me to dance, will you, Zorba?” Down and Out — or Up..?. "There are people who fall hard and do not find their feet for a long time, if ever — a condition some psychiatrists call complicated grief. And the depth of this economic collapse has unceremoniously stripped thousands of far more than money: reputations have reversed; friendships have turned sour; families have fractured."
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POPSWill he jump? While some passers-by like 23-year-old Verena Kircher found the piece "alarming," others like Caroline van Kelst thought it was beautiful. "It is crystal clear that this is not a suicide," she said. "He has definitely got something about him which is majestic, not desperate."
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POPSCartoon SEX and Spanish Royalty don't mix "Spain has developed the most lurid pornography in Europe, with magazines and television shows dedicated to the sex lives of the rich and famous. King Juan Carlos, 69, has not himself been entirely immune from scandal. A decade ago he was upbraided for mixing during his summer holidays with a highly questionable set of Mallorca businessmen. Under Spanish law, introduced in 1995, anybody who insults the royal family can face up to two years in prison. The public prosecutor argued that the cartoon was "clearly degrading and objectively defaming" and was "obviously an attack" against "the honour" of the prince because of "the deliberate and unjustified use of his image, in evident and conscious contempt of the Crown, causing notable hurt to its institutional prestige"."
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POPSWhen DuPont Almost Overthrew the Government
* Irenee Du Pont - Right-wing chemical industrialist and founder of the American Liberty League, the organization assigned to execute the plot. * Grayson Murphy - Director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and a group of J.P. Morgan banks. * William Doyle - Former state commander of the American Legion and a central plotter of the coup. * John Davis - Former Democratic presidential candidate and a senior attorney for J.P. Morgan. * Al Smith - Roosevelt’s bitter political foe from New York. Smith was a former governor of New York and a codirector of the American Liberty League. * John J. Raskob - A high-ranking Du Pont officer and a former chairman of the Democratic Party. In later decades, Raskob would become a “Knight of Malta,” a Roman Catholic Religious Order with a high percentage of CIA spies, including CIA Directors William Casey, William Colby and John McCone. * Robert Clark - One of Wall Street’s richest bankers and stockbrokers. * Gerald MacGuire - Bond salesman for Clark, a
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POPSWho In Their Right Mind?! Gaddafi's Oddest Idea: Abolish Switzerland Relations between Libya and Switzerland soured in July 2008 when Gaddafi's son Hannibal and his wife were arrested by police in Geneva for allegedly beating their two servants at a local hotel. Gaddafi was so enraged by his son's two-day detention, he immediately retaliated by shutting down local subsidiaries of Swiss companies Nestlé and ABB in Libya, arresting two Swiss businessmen for supposed visa irregularities, canceling most commercial flights between the two countries and withdrawing about $5 billion from his Swiss bank accounts. Then came Gaddafi's suggestion that Switzerland be carved up like a wheel of Swiss cheese. During the G-8 summit in Italy in July, Gaddafi said Switzerland "is a world mafia and not a state," adding that the Italian-speaking part of the country should be returned to Italy, the German-speaking part given to Germany and the French-speaking part ceded to France.
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POPSWho Voted for Sarkozy In sociological terms, the vote was relatively predictable. Mme Royal won among students, public-sector employees, blue-collar workers and the unemployed. M. Sarkozy won among private-sector employees, small businessmen, professionals, farmers and the managerial classes. He won an absolute landslide - 82 per cent - among shop-keepers and small tradespeople who suffer from the highly-taxed and bureaucratic French economy. Via Max Sawicky
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POPSIt's the most kawaii stun gun ever! I'm not sure if the product's name is Lovely Pink Seal Stun Gun Lovely Taser Weapon or Pink Seal Charm "Ouch!" Lovely Pink Seal Taser. Anyway, you should be able to fend off sleazoids before you get to finish saying the thing's name. *kawaii means cute :)
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POPSBlushing Blair's Bitch Belatedly Bits Bush Butt! Yes look, he does look like a real cowboy. Here a 'real cowboy' is a lower form of life than a second hand car sales person. Cowboys over here are totally disreputable door-to-door shyster (A shyster is someone who acts in a disreputable, unethical or unscrupulous way or a con artist. While now applied in a non-ethnic-specific sense, it originated as a reference to disreputable Jxxish businessmen and criminals.) Unusual given his pro-Nazi past. Bet he's practising riding off into the sunset, pursued by a real posse for his war crimes. Mao and Stalin escaped. Will Bush? I hear he never really learnt how to ride a horse. Some Texan!
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POPSIran Prepares For War, While Obama Sleeps!
What damage has been caused by Obama’s withholding this information from the world? Yet, he praised the Islamic Republic of Iran and apologized for America’s actions in the Middle East. He held out his hand to a regime that denies the Holocaust while plotting to commit another one, and has a history of lying repeatedly to the international community while murdering away around the world (including its own citizens, uh..subjects). Obama has given Iran more time to develop nuclear weapons. But is there more damage that Obama has caused? He has allowed Iran time and wiggle room to escape the brunt of the one type of sanction that once held promise to restrain Iran: crafting and enforcing sanctions on companies and nations that export refined gas to Iran. In the last year, threats of sanctions on those few companies and nations that supply Iran with gasoline and heating oil have been partially effective. But the serious pressure would have come from sanctions passed by .
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POPSBush: Not the worst president ever Michael O'Hare lists five presidents who are worse than Bush: Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Gambia's Yahya Jammeh, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, and Turkmenistan's Sapurmurat Niyazov.
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POPSCapitalism in Crisis
An interesting column by Richard Posner on the background of and some lessons from the financial crisis. In short: 1) Capitalism is risky and is prone to bubbles and depressions (take home message is not that capitalism is 'bad' but that one must diversify and hedge); 2) The crisis is a consequence of deregulation (not that deregulation is 'bad' but that deregulated capitalism carries with it more of the bubble/depression risks). But in the end, as with so many, Posner concludes that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of government. This is not the right conclusion, not that government is not the responsible party, they are. But the key issue that underlies the government's failure is not that government is inherently 'bad' as many are often led to conclude but that it was made that way. A systematic attack and undermining of governance has occurred in the U.S. since the early 1980s. Not all was bad, likely much of it early on was needed, but like so many other human expe
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POPSWoman Challenges Putin and Saves World's Oldest & Deepest Lake
Environmental activism is growing increasingly hazardous in Putin's Russia. With growing limitations on freedom of speech in Russia, if you oppose a state company, you can expect to come to the attention of the state security services. But Rikhvanova, a biologist and veteran environmental crusader, was devoted to saving Lake Baikal, she won even Putin's ear after organizing protests, petitions and flash mobs. (Last year her adult son Pavel was one of 20 people arrested after an attack on her group's environmental encampment). Baikal, also known as the "Blue Eye of Siberia", is the world's oldest and deepest -- and largest -- freshwater lake, home to more than 1,700 species of plants and animals, two thirds of which can be found nowhere else in the world. Rikhvanova is now organizing to block the expansion of a state-run uranium enrichment facility at Angarsk, just 50 miles from Lake Baikal, where the Russian government is planning to import nuclear waste from around the world
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POPSThe Family: The Hidden Christian Fundamentalist Power in the U.S. A journalist's penetrating look at the untold story of christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful They are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls.
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POPS Senator Reid's Gitmo Truth Now remember the 17 Uighurs at Gitmo. They have admitted to being trained and committed terrorists. Incredibly, a military review board said they are no threat to America when they are all associates of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. The ETIM has a long relationship with al Qaeda and its founder swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden. On April 9, 2009, the Obama administration added the ETIM’s current leader, Abdul Haq, to the Treasury Department’s terrorist list. As they pose a direct threat to Chinese businessmen and diplomats here, who wants to risk becoming collateral damage?
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