This is a pretty good collection. You can access links to each one here.
Tag Archives: news
Magazine cover of the week (updated)
Oh my! And yes, this is the real cover.
Update: Here is a link to the article in Newsweek.
Excerpt:
In some respects, he’s more weenie than wimp—socially inept; at times awkwardy ingratiating, at other times mocking those “below” him, but almost always getting the situation a little wrong, and never in a sympathetic way. The evidence resonates across too many years to deny. What kind of teenager beats up on the misfit, sissy kid, pinning him down and violently cutting his hair with a pair of school scissors—the incident from Romney’s youth that The Washington Post famously reported (and Romney famously didn’t really deny) back in May? The behavior extends, through more sedate means, into adulthood. The Salt Lake Olympics remains his greatest triumph, for which he wins deserved praise. But to many of those in the know, Romney placed a heavy asterisk next to his name by attacking the men he replaced on the Olympic Committee, smearing them in his book, even after a court threw out all the corruption charges against them.
And what kind of presidential candidate whines about a few attacks and demands an apology when the going starts to get rough? And tries to sound tough by accusing the president who killed the world’s most-wanted villain of appeasement? That’s what they call overcompensation, and it’s a dead giveaway; it’s the “tell.” This guy is nervous—terrified—about looking weak. And ironically, being terrified of looking weak makes him look weaker still.
Harvey Mansfield, the Harvard political philosopher, is a godhead to conservatives. He wrote a book while Bush was president called Manliness. It was a self-parodic volume, but conservatives loved it. In 2006 an interviewer asked Mansfield his definition of manliness, and he said: “confidence in a situation of risk.”
By this definition, the conservative definition, Romney is a total bust. He’s the most risk-averse major politician to come along in ages. He accepted the job at Bain Capital only after wringing out of Bill Bain a promise that, if the venture failed, Mitt would be welcomed back to Bain & Co.—at his old levels of compensation and seniority—and that the press and public would be fed some happy talk about how it had all gone as intended. And why didn’t he leave Bain in 1999 to go run the Olympics, as he always said he had, but instead take his now-famous “leave of absence”? To have the option of coming back; to minimize the risk. Even his flip-flopping, his taking of positions all over the map, is a form of risk aversion, being all things to all people, able to placate any audience, never stuck out on a limb unable to satisfy.
Touchy touchy
One of RIM’s Co-CEO’s (in itself a concept that I cannot begin to understand) is out promoting their new mini-tablet, the PlayBook. During an interview on BBC, the interviewer asked the Co-CEO a question and he terminated the interview. Take a look.
Touchy touchy.
(via Daring Fireball)

Its the end of the world
Or it is not the end of the world. You decide.
Mark Morford has his own thoughts on the issue that are well worth a read.
Excerpt:
Reports are flooding in from around the world that the Fukushima meltdown was one of the worst disasters in mankind’s short history, a game-changing horror of unimaginable scope and psychological timbre that will wreak emotional and environmental havoc for years, decades and even millennia to come, spreading radioactive particles over thousands of square miles of Japan and beyond.
What’s more, none of that is really true, the disaster isn’t really all that bad, the radiation levels are relatively low and Japan is feeling much better already, thanks for asking.
The Fukushima meltdown is easily as terrible as 1979′s Three Mile Island, which, it turns out, wasn’t all that bad, depending on who you don’t care enough to ask. Fukushima is probably the second worst disaster of its kind in history, even though no one really knows how to measure the full extent of these things so that’s probably false as well, although we do know it’s not as bad as Chernobyl because nothing could ever really be that devastating ever again, except for the fact that it totally could.
Live video news from Japan
NHK, the large Japanese television network, has an English live feed. You can watch it below.
