Jason Kottke marvels:
The share price for stock in H&H Imports, Inc. went up 290% between the close of market on Friday to the end of the day today. The reason for the move? Entertainer/investor 50 Cent, who owns a portion of the tiny company, tweeted all weekend about how enthusiastic he was about the company's success. (He also appeared on CNBC.) By one calculation, 50 made $10 million with those tweets.
An innovative new sing-along from The Aston Shuffle:
The Aston Shuffle – YOUR LOVE – from maxime bruneel on Vimeo.
Contra George Clooney et al, Larison is pessimistic:
[South Sudan] will have all of the problems of a failed state and petro-state and few advantages. … The default U.S. policy towards all of this seems to be full backing for a ramshackle South Sudan, but it is far from clear that this aids regional stability or peace, to say nothing of whether it is an appropriate use of U.S. resources.
Tyler Cowen explains the economic resilience of a non-libertarian paradise.
Emma Barrie has tips for you:
Decide you really don’t go to enough museums. Start making a list of exhibits you want to see. Turn it into a list of ex-boyfriends. Count how many of them wore glasses.
How many of them took you home for Christmas. How many of them smelled like Old Spice, or preferred obscure foreign films, or were in a band with a female lead singer with good bangs. Make a bar graph of how you felt about each of them throughout the time dated. Notice clear patterns of decline.
Decide you’re going to start taking naps during the day because you write better at night. Spend a lot of time lying in bed with your eyes closed, having day-mares about the rest of your life. In these day-mares, you are older and married and sexless, fighting about the price of private schools while you pee and your husband plucks his nose hairs. Everything about the way he talks annoys you, and everything about the way you talk annoys yourself. Imagine he owns orange Crocs or pre-frayed denim. Decide to never get married. Open your eyes. Write in the notebook on your nightstand, “Alternatives? Polygamy? Raising a baby on a farm with four of your best lady friends? …Screenplay idea?”
Assuming you're a twentysomething female writer living in Brooklyn, these should help.
A reader writes:
I'm a little shocked that you posted Ailes' remarks without comment, because there is so much going on in that single comment that undermines a lot of what he's intending to accomplish. The most notable is that by stating "the other side" he's explicitly admitting that his entire network is on the side of Palin/GOP and the right in general. Further: "Democrat Party"?? Forgive me if I find Ailes' call for sanity to be a little weak and disingenuous.
Another writes:
"Other side"? It’s telling that even the CEO doesn’t try to maintain the pretense of fairness and balance, his channel’s trademark.
Stop-motion graffiti genius Blu teases his DVD:
Adam Serwer calls out Frum's double-standard:
The Center for Disease Control cites 79,000 alcohol related deaths a year between 2001-2005. But we don't ban alcohol because the one time we tried it resulted in higher rates of violence, organized crime, and a plethora of other negative externalities. Alcohol use is also the most common addiction of people with schizophrenia.
Jacob Sullum questions Frum's suggestion that "such crimes would be more common if pot were legal".
Joan Acocella reads Stieg Larsson’s trilogy with an eye for the political implications:
Swedes think that their country is uniquely egalitarian (Larsson presents considerable differences between rich and poor), that Sweden is politically neutral (Larsson shows a burgeoning right), that the Swedish health-care system is the best in the world (Lisbeth is imprisoned in a state hospital), etc. Above all, the Swedes believe that their government is benign, and working for their benefit, whereas, in [writer John-Henri] Holmberg’s words, Larsson shows the Swedish state as “an instrument of violence, wielded against individuals who threaten the privileges and power of those who have managed to gain control of it.”
A reader endorses a tweet by Gregg Knauss:
If crimes "begin and end with the criminals who commit them," I think Sarah Palin just endorsed a mosque near Ground Zero.
Another writes:
In addition to the inconsistency of Palin's blood libel accusation, there is this to be considered. If associating her violent political rhetoric tangentially with the Arizona shooting is a "blood libel" (accusing her of something heinous to incite violence against her), then why is her unfounded accusation of "death panels" against liberals not one as well? I think she has finally stepped into the quicksand and doesn't have the self-restraint to avoid flailing.
The Dish 