Nicholas Kristof’s piece today on the genocide in Darfur is just harrowing. Pictures really do have an impact that words don’t, you know? But, at the risk of seeming unduly cynical – does Sudan have oil? [THX to Brian Angliss of Daedalnexus for passing this along.]

You’re going to love this. We know that the government can condemn your property and claim it “for public use, in exchange for payment of fair market value” (more). But now there’s a case coming before the Supreme Court that would, if some real estate weasels and the New London, CT local officials who appear to work for them win,

Look what I just learned how to do!

Long-time co-conspirator Ralph Steadman has a nice piece remembering Hunter in The Independent online edition today. He was in a hurry. “Drive your stake into a darkened heart in a red Mercedes-Benz. The blackness hides a speeding tramp. The savage breast pretends. But never mind the nights, my love, because they never really happened anyway.” Read the story…

myths_americana has a nice brief on Thompson, too.

I heard the news today, oh boy… One of the brightest lights in the American firmament blinked out Sunday. Word of Hunter Thompson’s death arrived at our house via the crawl on the network happy news this morning , and there’s irony enough in that fact alone. I barely know where to start. Most of us don’t get a lot

I’ve been waiting to see what was going to happen here, and finally Steve Moore has announced that he’ll be filing suit in his attempted maiming by Todd Bertuzzi. Some thoughts: 1. I’m no lawyer, so it will be interesting to see how the decision to file in Colorado plays out, since the actual assault took place in Vancouver. 2.

Ah, yes. The first three explain about 95% of my life these days… ___________________________________ The Washington Post’s Style Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year’s winners: Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas

Okay, I have now done something that most of the people calling for Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ head have not done – I have read the transcript of his actual comments at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce. If you recall, this controversial speech included remarks some took as suggesting that women simply lack the same

On Thursday Lt. General William Wallace, commander of US Army forces in the Persian Gulf, said “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against”….As Slate’s Fred Kaplan pointed out on Friday, however, Wallace’s statement simply isn’t true. “Militia fighters did play a crucial role in a major war game designed to simulate combat in

Bush swears that there will be no draft on his watch, period, and I continue to be skeptical. If I buy all I’m being told, and then do some basic common sensing around some things the administration is pointedly not saying – out loud, anyway – I can’t help concluding that we probably don’t have the manpower we need to

ChoicePoint Inc., a national provider of identification and credential verification services, says it will send an additional 110,000 statements to people informing them of possible identity theft after a group of well-organized criminals was able to obtain personal information on almost 140,000 consumers through the company. According to a statement on the ChoicePoint Web site, the incident was not the

First, is there some way I can get HP to fire me? Seriously – I don’t even need the $45M they paid Carly Fiorina to go away. Give me, say, $2M and I swear, you’ll never hear from me again. In return, I’ll guarantee you more in the way of measurable results than Carly ever did. For a mere $2M