Michael B. Duff

"Like an American, the shortcut you use for difficult issues is to judge their proponent as a proxy. If you don't like some ideas, look for hypocrisy, discredit the speaker. Which will be easy to do with me, I assure you. Heavy drinking, womanizing, misanthropic… maybe not even a psychiatrist. There. Do you win?"

Have we denied them history, with all its riches that enable us to interpret our own experiences with some perspective? Are the generations that follow us going to have to begin again to accumulate the understanding we so painfully accumulated for millennia? We have scoffed at tradition and ritual. They should be applied with skepticism, sure. But where did we get the notion we knew so much more than others learned from centuries of experience? And stranding the next generations in a desert, surrounded by institutions we have razed is not exactly a great gift to them.

His reaction? "What the f*ck, TSA? You're going to look at my junk, but miss this? My tiny junk is offended."

Looking at their findings, it seems like UPS is the winner.

Note that Mr. Gore refers to his knowingly selling his principles for votes as a “mistake.” Unless he means that his effort didn’t pay off with the top job in the White House, his soul-selling was no “mistake”; he knew exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. His soul-selling was an instance, pure and simply, of the hypocrisy and lying that is the stuff of too many political campaigns.

The negotiations don't seem like a smart idea to begin with. But now American officials have discovered after three meetings (including one with Karzai) that they have been had. One of the diplomats involved in the negotiations complains that "we gave him a lot of money," but not for value.

People familiar with the company's negotiations with Universal, Sony, Warner and EMI – it has been in discussions with EMI for more than a year – told the Financial Times Spotify is considering launching in the US without having all four on board at launch.

With today's $8.3 billion POMO monetization, the Fed's official holdings of US Treasury securities now amount to $891.3 billion, which is higher than the second largest holder of US debt: China, which as of September 30 held $884 billion, and Japan, with $864 billion.

When women were barred from most jobs and wives had no legal right to own property, madams in the West owned large tracts of land and prized real estate. Prostitutes made, by far, the highest wages of all American women. Several madams were so wealthy that they funded irrigation and road-building projects that laid the foundation for the New West. Decades before American employers offered health insurance to their workers, madams across the West provided their employees with free health care. While women were told that they could not and should not protect themselves from violence, and wives had no legal recourse against being raped by their husbands, police officers were employed by madams to protect the women who worked for them, and many madams owned and knew how to use guns.

If you get rewarded by your actions, you are more likely to continue them. If punished, you are more likely to stop. Over time, you begin to predict reward and punishment by linking longer and longer series of events to their eventual outcomes.

"It's not political correctness, it's fundamental respect. If you think the swastika symbol should be re-evaluated by societies all over the Earth, I think that's great. Your Xbox Live profile or in game logo, which doesn't have the context to explain your goal, is not the right place to do that."

Netflix is preparing for the day when getting DVDs by mail is as old-fashioned as going to the video store. It's hoping to wean people from DVDs with a cheap plan that offers movies and old TV episodes exclusively through online streaming. It will cost $8 per month, matching a recent price cut by rival Hulu.

None that we've heard of. The TSA will say, "Oh, we're not allowed to talk about successes." That's actually bullsh*t. They talk about successes all the time. If they did catch someone, especially during the Bush years, you could be damned sure we'd know about it. And the fact that we didn't means that there weren't any. Because the threat was imaginary. It's not much of a threat. As excess deaths go, it's just way down in the noise. More than 40,000 people die each year in car crashes. It's 9/11 every month. The threat is really overblown….

Freighters carrying aid shipments of rice and instant noodles are being sent to North Korea, the first food aid the South Korean government has sent to the North since President Lee Myung-bak was elected here in early 2008. [Story from Oct. 25]

North Korea fired dozens of artillery shells onto a South Korean island on Tuesday, killing one person, setting homes ablaze and triggering an exchange of fire as the South's military went on top alert.

Overall, 49 percent give Christie a thumbs up, compared to 39 percent who give his job performance a thumbs down.

The best-case scenario, then, is that the EU bailout will kick the Irish can three years down the road. But in implementing the plan, Ireland’s banks will effectively be nationalized and any future mortgage losses will have to come straight out of these bailout funds. Which aren’t remotely sufficient for such a task. If the spike on mortgage defaults comes sooner rather than later, this particular bailout package could prove to be very short-lived indeed.

But then look at where Portugal’s CDS curve goes after that: straight up, to the point at which the country is now considered more likely to default at 3 years out, and on from there. The implication is clear: any bailout now only serves to make a future default more likely. Which is not, I’m pretty sure, the message that the EU is really intending to send.