A while back, my wife told me that one of her relatives was trying a new diet. The woman is plump but not obese, eats processed food, and only gets exercise at work, so I thought it might be a good idea. But then I heard that she had spent a thousand dollars up front for the diet. And just recently I learned the name for the diet: HCG Skinny. So I looked it up:
Anonymous — the amorphous online conglomerate who like to rumble with Scientologists and 11-year-old camwhores — usually live up to their name. The group (if you can even call it that) very rarely appears in public, and when they do, they typically hide their faces under signature Guy Fawkes masks.
The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun.
ISLAMABAD: An Additional Sessions judge Wednesday set free CIA contractor Raymond Davis, who killed two Pakistanis on a busy road in Lahore, after payment of blood money (Diyat) in accordance with Sharia law of Pakistan, sources said.
Whatever else this teaches us, it may well be that the major message is that failures that seem unlikely are not, in fact, inconceivable, except in the deeply wrong sense that Vizzini uses it. In a warming world, for example, it becomes even more urgent to acknowledge that outer limits may be crossed, (I do not, of course, mean to imply any connection between earthquakes and global warming, merely noting the dramatic increase in natural disasters that is attributable to climate change) and that betting against the probability of events is a risky proposition.
Enough. That's the title of Vanguard founder John Bogle's fantastic book about measuring what counts in life.
The title, as Bogle explains, comes from a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and novelist Joseph Heller, who are enjoying a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Vonnegut points out that their wealthy host had made more money in one day than Heller ever made from his novel Catch-22. Heller responds: "Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough."
A partial meltdown is likely under way at one nuclear reactor, a senior Japanese official has said, as operators frantically tried to keep temperatures down at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant's other units following a devastating earthquake and tsunami that may have killed as many as 10,000 people.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters on Sunday that a partial meltdown in Unit 3 of the Fukushima facility was "highly possible".
Japanese authorities and the U.S. military on Saturday were racing to find ways to deliver new backup generators or batteries to a nuclear power reactor whose cooling facilities have been crippled by a loss of power as a result of the earthquake.
The reactor, owned by Tokyo Electric Power Co., is currently drawing on battery power that may last only a few hours. Without electricity, the reactor will be unable to pump water to cool its hot reactor core, possibly leading to a meltdown or some other release of radioactive material.
In the seven years I’ve been subscribing to the U.S. Geological Survey’s email alert system, I have never seen anything like what happened today. Between 5:46 GMT and the moment I’m writing this (twelve hours later), there have been 86 earthquakes stronger than M 5.0 off the northeast coast of Japan. Of course it’s the initial quake that has grabbed headlines, and well it should: M 8.9 is a massive, massive earthquake. This one has already taken its position as the biggest in Japan’s recent recorded history (going back to 1891).
House Republicans took the first steps towards banning the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases, as the Energy and Power Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved HR 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011.
Pennsylvania has come under fire lately as pollution from drilling in the Marcellus Shale threatens water resources across the state. But instead of ratcheting up oversight, Gov. Tom Corbett wants to hand authority over some of the state’s most critical environmental decisions to C. Alan Walker, a Pennsylvania energy executive with his own track record of running up against the state’s environmental regulations.
You have to admit that John Cassidy’s anti-bike lane screed is beautifully written, but it remains an odd piece of argumentation. Like a lot of transportation rhetoric on both sides, it’s decidedly either/or: Either you’re for bikes, or you’re for cars. But Cassidy’s own case contradicts that approach.
