Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city’s surveillance network has claimed.
via BBC NEWS
Monthly Archives: August 2009
Why Did the Autobot Cross the Road?
The Decepticons frequently jet around, but why do the Autobots insist on driving everywhere?
Marvel Comics Biggest Problem
I’ve said it before, but the biggest problem I have with Marvel movies is that they waste so damn much time on origin stories. Give us a Star Wars scroll with “Peter Parker was bit by a spider and got powers”. As much as I enjoy the characters, most of the origin stories are just plain dumb and stupid and repetitive as hell.
____ was ____ and got powers.
Hulk was irradiated (gamma bomb) and got powers.
Fantastic Four were irradiated (solar radiation) and got powers.
X-Men were mutants and got powers.
Daredevil was blinded/irradiated and got powers.
Punisher’s family got killed and he got guns.
Invisible Elderly
In this country of twittering youth, Mr. Singh and his friends form a gathering force: the elderly, who now make up America’s fastest-growing immigrant group. Since 1990, the number of foreign-born people over 65 has grown from 2.7 million to 4.3 million — or about 11 percent of the country’s recently arrived immigrants. Their ranks are expected to swell to 16 million by 2050. In California, one in nearly three seniors is now foreign born, according to a 2007 census survey.
via NYTimes.com.
People of Wal-Mart Backlash
This whole idea that this is somehow offensive to the underclasses is very patronizing. These people are hardly representative of most poor people. Poverty doesn’t cause you to buy a pair of shorts that are seven sizes too small.
More Taibbi on Thomas Friedman
I wish I had the balls to first spend six long years madly cheering on an Iraq war that not only reintroduced Sharia law to the streets of Baghdad, but radicalized the entire Islamic world against American influence—and then write a book blaming the spread of fundamentalist Islam on the ignorant consumers of the middle American heartland, who bought too many Hummers and spent too much time shopping for iPods in my wife’s giganto-malls.
via Flat N All That.
Chris Wallace Fellates Cheney
Now look: there are softball interviews; and then there are interviews like this. It cannot be described as journalism in any fashion. Even as propaganda, which is its point, it doesn’t work – because it’s far too cloying and supportive of Cheney to be convincing to anyone outside the true-believers. When it comes to Cheney, one of the most incompetent vice-presidents in the country’s history, with a record of two grotesquely botched wars, war crimes and a crippling debt, Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers.
via Andrew Sullivan.