MetaFilter

A Saudi national has made a short film intended to illustrate how all religions can be depicted as preaching violence. The Daily Telegraph reports that "Schism" is Raed al-Saeed's answer to Geert Wilder's "Fitna".
comment posted at 7:34 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 7:47 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 7:59 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 8:07 AM on Apr-14-08

A couple years ago, The Inquirer noticed that the same college student was endorsing competitors Dell and Gateway. Readers started mailing examples of her selling UPS, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, Ford, Siemens, CNN, Greyhound, and quite a few others. After being dubbed The Dell Girl, she was promoted to The Everywhere Girl. People critized her shallow commitments to the universities she endorsed. Nonstop appearances across most of the western world must have been fatiguing. She's even in high demand among Christian and textbook publishers.
comment posted at 4:25 AM on Apr-14-08

Absolutely horrifying, not for the squeamish, you've been warned Canadian public service announcements. Also, the only slightly less gory German educational film "Forklift driver Klaus". An unaired and disturbingly violent Canadian PSA on domestic violence. Graphically violent Irish PSAs warning against speeding, terrorism and Harry Chapin. A French Canadian worker slowly and gruesomely loses his arm. An Australian PSA featuring a blood-covered baby. Finally, an essay (with linked video examples) by a marketing consultant on "Turn-off Tactics" in public service advertisements.
comment posted at 4:07 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 4:29 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 5:25 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 5:43 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 12:44 PM on Apr-14-08

A West Wing Writer Imagines a Deadlocked Democratic Convention
comment posted at 10:17 AM on Apr-13-08
comment posted at 3:34 PM on Apr-13-08
comment posted at 4:37 AM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 1:38 PM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 4:50 PM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 5:49 PM on Apr-14-08
comment posted at 5:13 PM on Apr-26-08

The pop music industry has sadly come to depend on “heritage acts” – wrinkled, dyed-hair, aging stars – to pack houses and make money.

“Whatever a future superstar act will be, it won’t be as ubiquitous as the acts from the ’60s because we were all listening to Top 40 radio.”
comment posted at 2:33 PM on Apr-11-08
comment posted at 2:43 PM on Apr-11-08

Lolgrues
comment posted at 2:00 PM on Apr-11-08

So anyway, here's a walrus dancing to Smooth Criminal.
comment posted at 2:25 PM on Apr-11-08

Charlton Heston has died at age 84.
comment posted at 5:59 AM on Apr-6-08

After just eleven months of operation, Skybus has ceased operations and declared bankruptcy. It's the third American airline to do so in the past week. That, plus the fact that the FAA is coming under fire for its failure to spot missed inspections, makes this a pretty ugly week in American aviation.
comment posted at 3:45 AM on Apr-6-08

Hillary and Bill Clinton's tax returns 2000 - 2007
comment posted at 7:16 AM on Apr-5-08
comment posted at 10:06 AM on Apr-5-08
comment posted at 12:07 PM on Apr-5-08
comment posted at 12:31 PM on Apr-5-08
comment posted at 2:33 PM on Apr-5-08
comment posted at 4:21 AM on Apr-6-08
comment posted at 6:39 AM on Apr-6-08
comment posted at 6:28 PM on Apr-6-08

Where has all the pubic hair gone? After sweating through the [eight-year-old girl's] eyebrow wax, Engle [...] was directed to give her pint-size client a … bikini wax. “But … there’s nothing there, right?” I ask Engle. “I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?” “Nope,” she says. “There’s not. Doesn’t matter. That’s when the mothers are starting them these days.”
comment posted at 9:27 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 9:51 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 9:57 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 10:07 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 11:02 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 11:36 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 12:46 PM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 3:00 PM on Apr-4-08

"In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in." Robert F. Kennedy on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., killed 40 years ago today.
comment posted at 8:24 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 9:08 AM on Apr-4-08
comment posted at 10:20 AM on Apr-4-08

James Clapper , undersecretary of defense for intelligence, has just recommended closing the Counterintelligence Field Activity program, a 1,000-man agency (mostly contractors with a secret budget) set up shortly after 9/11 to fight foreign terroristson U.S. soil, whose contracts are based on congressional earmarks (and administration insiders) were under investigation by the Pentagon and federal prosecutors (for domestic spying, the use of/deletion of data from the TALON (.pdf file) program (managed by the CIFA as JPEN )
comment posted at 1:34 PM on Apr-3-08
comment posted at 2:33 PM on Apr-3-08

Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear. "Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination."
comment posted at 1:43 PM on Apr-3-08

“You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A Vanity Fair reporter investigates the chain of command that tossed out the Geneva Conventions and instituted coercive interrogation techniques -- some might call them torture or even war crimes -- in Bush's Global War on Terror. UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo's now-obsolete 81-page memo to the Pentagon in 2003 [available as PDFs here and here] was crucial, offering a broad range of legal justifications and deniability for disregarding international law in the name of "self-defense." Others say that Yoo was just making "a clear point about the limits of Congress to intrude on the executive branch in its exercise of duties as Commander in Chief." [previously here and here.]
comment posted at 10:42 AM on Apr-3-08
comment posted at 11:20 AM on Apr-3-08
comment posted at 11:44 AM on Apr-3-08
comment posted at 12:00 PM on Apr-3-08
comment posted at 6:48 AM on Apr-4-08