From the Financial Times:

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, has called for a change of Russia’s leadership and criticised the ruling monopoly of the United Russia party as a “worse version of the Soviet Communist party”.

In a press conference devoted to the 20th anniversary of the attempted coup by hardliners in August 1991, he both sought to defend his historical legacy, but also scold his successors in the Kremlin.

“Our senior management should be updated,” he told a packed hall of journalists on Wednesday. “There comes a time when you need to get out of this rut.”

. . .

“If the regime behaves just to increase its own power then this is already partially authoritarian,” Mr Gorbachev said . . . .

Video below of the only man in Russia with the stones to go after Putin.
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Posted by: rdbrewer at 06:09 AM | Comments (227)
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[Spare a thought and a prayer for the innocent victims of the terrorist attack in Israel.]

Look, I'm not going to call this a vendetta or anything. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Is globalization a failure? It's too soon to tell, in my view. It's made a lot of very poor people richer, and that's a good thing. But it also seems to have driven low-end jobs into a vicious downward spiral: that's not a good thing.

The stock market is sensing some heavy weather ahead.

This fear threatens to pull an already weakened economy -- trudging along with unhealed wounds like 9%-plus unemployment and a dilapidated housing market -- down into a double-dip recession.

If that happens, the logic goes, we'll face a protracted downturn because we have few tools left to resuscitate growth. Given the economic imbalances, excess debt and pure desperation out there -- represented by record long-term unemployment and a record number of Americans relying on food stamps -- it could very well be Great Depression 2.0.

For our President, every day is Opposite Day. When he says "I'm going to create jobs", he really means that he's going to kill jobs. It's a little game he picked up in Illinois.

Remember back when schools were meant to educate children rather than enrich adults? Yeah, me neither. Before my time.

Aw. Krugman and his boyfriend are on the outs. Here's some advice, Paul: make Bammer a nice arugula quiche and I'm sure this little tiff will blow over. (Also: "Firebagger"? What a lame sobriquet.)

The Greeks would gladly pay you Tuesday for a souvlaki today.

A meeting between Wisconsin rockstars: Governor Walker pushes Paul Ryan to run for President.

Gold is now over $1800 an ounce. People keep asking me if gold is in a "bubble" right now. My sense is: I don't think it is. It's overbought and may correct back down, but I don't think it's in bubble territory. It may correct downwards as the panic-buying recedes, but if the western nations cannot get their debt under control, gold will only keep going up.

Jobless numbers and inflation are both trending up.

The core index, which excludes volatile food and energy, rose 0.2 percent. That's below the 0.3 percent rise in each of the previous two months.

Prices are 3.6 percent higher than they were a year ago, matching the 12-month increase in May and June. Core prices are 1.8 percent higher than they were a year earlier, the largest increase in two years.

The next time someone says to you that inflation is low, ask them if they've bought any food recently.

Millionaires go missing.

It's an old story: The best way to produce income equality is to destroy trillions of dollars of wealth. Everyone loses, but the rich lose relatively more than the poor and the middle class. By that measure, if few others, Obamanomics has been a raging success.

UPDATE 1: The European debt crisis deepens. I get the feeling that some kind of endgame is drawing near.

UPDATE 2: Obama promised to bring equality back to America. We may be poor and hungry...but at least we're equal. (I hasten to add that there are very few authentically "poor" people in the United States. Poor people do not own video game machines, flat-screen televisions, iPods, cellphones, and laptop computers. Compared with a beggar in Calcutta, our "poor" live the lives of the idle rich.)

UPDATE 3: Gold is way up (at $1822 as I write this); stock markets promise to open way down. Somehow I don't think that's helping His Majesty get his message to the plebs out there in Jesusland.

UPDATE 4: NYSE invokes Rule 48 on open.

UPDATE 5: Morgan Stanley: US and EU "dangerously close to a recession". Which means that we're probably already in one. (Or, more likely, never actually got out of the last one.)

UPDATE 6: Philly Fed report: pants-shittingly bad. 10-Year Treasury yield? At an all time low. Wheeee!
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Posted by: Monty at 05:05 AM | Comments (222)
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As with all developing news stories, reporting is subject to change as more information becomes available.

What we know right now is that a series of terrorist attacks have struck southern Israel. It appears that off-duty Israeli soldiers are the target.

In the first incident, Egged bus number 392, traveling from Beersheba to the southern resort city of Eilat was ambushed by a three-man terror cell. Over a dozen people were wounded in the attack, which took place on Highway 12, about 30km north of Eilat, near the Ein Netafim junction.

[...]

Soon after that a second incident was reported, involving multiple roadside bombs and rocket fire at IDF forces patrolling the Israel Egypt border fence.

Note, that "rocket fire" has also been reported as "mortar fire from the Egyptian side of the border. It has also been reported that the first bus was carrying soldiers on their way home from border duty.

A third attack killed five more people on another bus. Israeli and Egyptian forces are searching for the perpetrators.

More: The blog Israel Matzav, which so competently covered the war last year, is liveblogging the attack. He seems to have much more information than the news services. Apparently two children were killed in an attack on a private car.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:30 AM | Comments (184)
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The details are everything.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:03 AM | Comments (49)
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Welcome to the Seventh Day of Blogging After America. On the Seventh Day, God rested. But Steyn never rests when there's DOOM to spread!

This was the toughest chapter to summarize. So my little extracts and high points won't be as coherent as previous days.

This chapter's theme is Fallen America as a jigsaw puzzle. Steyn looks at each piece - for example: Detroit, the fallen city. Sexual Revolution and the fallen family. Illegal immigration and fallen local govts.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:08 PM | Comments (26)
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On Obama's fully official, "not a campaign tour at all oh no" visit to the Midwest today, a local expressed concerns about new regulations coming from his administration that would be onerous to his livelihood. Captured in this Jake Tapper twitter thing by Slublog this morning.

Farmer: Hey, are you fixing to kick our ass using the EPA to regulate dust?

Obama: Hahahaha.. you should check with the Department of Agriculture to assuage your silly fears.

Farmer: Ok!

...

Hey WTF?!

Hah. Obama lied, people...shouldn't grow crops.

According to a letter sent from some US Senators to the EPA, current dust standards have already been virtually impossible for western farmers to abide by.

Dust is kind of, everywhere there. I guess when you stir the soil- let's say, doing something foolhardy, like farming- dust just comes shooting straight up outta the ground. Strange place. Like an alien planet. To the Reality Based Community, anyway.

Now the EPA wants these farmers to tighten their deadly dust output by half. From the Senators' letter:

We respect efforts for a clean and healthy environment, but not at the expense of common sense. These identified levels will be extremely burdensome for farmers and livestock producers to attain. Whether its livestock kicking up dust, soybeans being combined on a dry day in the fall, or driving a car down the gravel road, dust is a naturally occurring event.

Just to be clear: the EPA considers farm soil a pollutant.

Why is food so expensive? Because the federal government is out of control. It has unleashed its regulatory agencies.

Unrealistic idiots, obsessed with inconsequential bullshit. Who you never voted for.

That's why.

UPDATE from lauraw: A Midwestern beet farmer prepares for harvest.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:09 PM | Comments (151)
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This is Your Brain on Fap

Hey if you're a scientist with an expensive (and unattended) MRI machine lying around, eventually you're gonna get curious. And then once the thrill wears off, you're going to try and publish papers on your 'experiments' and make them sound all science-y:

Georgiadis argues that the OFC [orbitofrontal cortex] may be the basis of sexual control - and perhaps only by letting go, so to speak, can orgasm be achieved. He suggests this deactivation may be the most telling example of an "altered state of consciousness" and one not seen, as yet, during any other type of activity.

"I don't think orgasm turns off consciousness but it changes it," he says. "When you ask people how they perceive their orgasm, they describe a feeling of a loss of control." Georgiadis suggests that perhaps orgasm offsets systems that usually dominate attention and behaviour. "I'm not sure if this altered state is necessary to achieve more pleasure or is just some side effect," he says.

Is this kind of science useful? Why yes, it is. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:15 PM | Comments (706)
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We don't have the full context, which probably includes a series of questions before this, and O'Donnell's increasing frustration that she was being asked about stuff that isn't really central to the book.

It should also be noted that the media treats the people it doesn't like contemptuously, such as when Piers Morgan here tells O'Donnell she's being "weird" about refusing to answer questions. With someone like Obama, Morgan would have changed the subject per request, rather than deciding this was now a Battle of Wills he had to win.

That said, I don't really get it. If there's a great deal more impertinence from Morgan before this (and I imagine there is some more), O'Donnell might appear more justified.

But... There really is no rule that hosts only ask about your current project. There never has been. They ask about that politely for a minute then talk about other things, because no one really wants to hear from most people plugging their new book.

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Posted by: Ace at 05:06 PM | Comments (63)
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The first ten minutes of this movie seem designed for me. An unkempt, unhealthy-looking writer named Eddie Morra -- "someone without a drug or alcohol problem shouldn't look like this," he says in narration -- with a crappy apartment and inability to write his book or keep his girlfriend. By chance, he's met on the street by an old passing acquaintance -- who immediately asks "Are you living on the street?" -- who was once a drug dealer and now claims to be a pharmaceutical rep.

The guy gives the haggard writer a brain-expanding drug, NZT...

...and suddenly writes half his book overnight, then cleans his apartment, gets a haircut, and learns French and Italian. Oh, and he bangs everything in sight. Because now he's just mesmerizing. And also, because he's suddenly lighted all the time by flattering golden light, rather than the jangly wired blue-white light he'd previously been surrounded by.

Waking up the next day with a Charlie type hangover -- Gee, I'm not that smart again -- he goes to see the guy who gave him the pill, to get more. To do anything to get more.

That guy, you'll not be surprised to learn (no spoiler alert, geeze, what did you think was going to happen?), has been murdered.

But Eddie wants those pills, and searches the apartment until he finds a Great Big Huge Stash of them.

The first half hour of the movie is fantasy wish-fulfillment porn, and it's reasonably watchable, as that sort of thing usually is. (To this day, I am certain that John Grisham's The Firm became a runaway best seller only because the first 100 pages were entirely about the huge sums of money and luxe apartments being offered to the young fresh-out-of-law-school lawyer.)

This is the part where Unanswered Questions begin. Cliff diving in some Riviera paradise, he realizes he has a Purpose and he can somehow Improve Humanity, but the movie never gets around to sharing his plan with us. Honestly, I didn't even notice this until the end, but now I've seen the end, so I know that I don't know his Great Piercing Insight As To How To Save The World.

Conflict and Danger and Goal now established (even if not shared with the audience), the story proper begins, but it's not really a story. It's more like a series of interesting, intersecting events. Which isn't a complete slam, as I do say they are "interesting" events.

Let me explain. If you're doing this movie, based on what I've told you so far, where do you go next?

You might go to the cliched place. That the Villain is the Corporation producing this pill, and they will Stop At Nothing to have their stash back.

You might then figure, "Hey, that 'chance meeting' on the street wasn't chance, maybe," and decide the Corporation set out to give Eddie the drug, because they want to test him. (Let's say he's a good test subject, for whatever reason.)

Then you might have Eddie fleeing the Corporation's goons, but eventually captured. And of course brought into a Polished Steel Laboratory, and strapped to an operating chair, and given truth serum, interrogated to find out who else knows about the drug.

And at this point the Corporate Scientist and Eddie could have a Philosophical Argument about Things Men Was Not Meant To Experiment With, and/or Whether All People Should Share In This Bounty Or It Should Be Restricted To The Elite, and so on.

Okay, that's all a cliche. I admit that. But at least that sort of story would answer some questions the movie never addresses.

By the end of the movie, I still did not know any of the following (indeed, no one in the movie even thought these questions interesting enough to ask about):

1. Why did that guy on the street have the drug at all? Who was he working for?

2. Where do these drugs come from? Who makes them? This is an especially important question because while Eddie gets a big stash, it is not big enough to be permanent; he needs more. So, he would naturally use his "four digit IQ" to find the company making the pills, and try to secure a permanent supply. But he doesn't.

3. Why are these drugs not being more widely sold? Bear in mind, the title "Limitless" could refer to their value -- how much would you pay to be the You You Always Wanted To Be? Further, you take ten of these pills for ten days, you can yourself make $10 million dollars in day-trading. (Eddie makes $12.5 in seven days, I think.) So what would be the value of a pill? You can literally charge a million dollars a pill and people would find that price economically reasonable. So -- why aren't they being sold? And why was loser-ish Eddie given a million dollar pill in the first place?

4. This has nothing to do with my hypothetical plot, but there is a very significant murder that happens in the movie, and the identity of the perpetrator is very important. For reasons I won't explain. So who killed that person? No idea. The movie doesn't tell you, and you have two perfectly good suspects. You could go either way on it.

Now, the movie avoids the cliched plotline I've outlined. That, I suppose, is good. But the good thing about that cliche plotline I suggest is that by establishing the movie is all about NZT -- where it came from, who it's given to, why Eddie got it -- the movie spends its time naturally answering those questions.

But in avoiding that cliched outline it goes spinning off in directions which, while admirably unexpected, take us well away from answering the early mysteries posed in the set-up.

These are questions I have, but because the movie avoids them completely, maybe this is just me thinking of the Cliched Plot and resisting deviations from it.

On the plus side, because it spins into unexpected (if somewhat random and unsatisfying) directions, I also can't say the movie was "predictable."

It's good to see a movie that doesn't go Exactly. Where. You. Expected. It. To Go. At Every Turn.

Even if you wind up questioning why they chose to take the route they did.

Overall, I guess I give it two and a half stars. It's not boring, it's not dumb. Bradley Cooper is pretty good, and Robert DeNiro is good for a change. (He sleepwalks as usual, but he does what's needed with his small role.)

It's a little original, even, just because it doesn't seem to understand what this sort of movie is supposed to be like. I think on the whole maybe that's a good thing.

Though I really would like to know who committed that murder.

I paid $4 for it on Amazon direct video. I think it's worth paying for, if you dig the basic premise.

Posted by: Ace at 04:20 PM | Comments (100)
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Looking for stuff to post but coming up with sidebar type stuff.

Like this.

or this.

Wee wee, monsieur.

Posted by: Ace at 03:23 PM | Comments (211)
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