The Blog of Record

I hope the girls giggling at the back were not executed, Sun Tzu style.

From here.

Tiger’s sex scandal has reduced shareholder value in his sponsor companies by 2.3%, or about $12 billion:

A new study from the University of California, Davis, estimates that shareholders of Woods sponsors Nike and Gatorade maker PepsiCo have lost $5 billion to $12 billion in market value since news broke about the golf champ’s marital infidelity.  

While the public has focused on how the scandal has hit Woods’ endorsement earnings, the UC Davis study said the loss to shareholders of the companies who sponsor him would amount to decades’ worth of endorsement income.

When you want to make someone a key element of your entire marketing strategy, maybe it’s a good idea to vet him first. A lot of people knew what kind of man Tiger was.

Some of them, though, won’t get you very deep into space, and some others look impossible, while the possible ones require technologies we still don’t have. So what are we left with? For going out of the solar system, nothing, it seems.

If you’ve been wondering what kind of global warming it is while shoveling through twenty inches of snow this Christmas season, it’s not because you are overly suspicious:

A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years.

Don’t ask Avatar’s director for an autograph unless you want to hear, ”I don’t owe you a f***ing signature … Just get out of my f***ing personal space.”

Must be a first:

‘The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?’

With so many people carrying his genes, studying them could answer some questions about genes and health. Problem is, the doctors weren’t keeping track of the births, so the donor, Kirk Maxey of Northville, Mich., is now concerned that his offspring could start dating one another.

The physics of future space battles. We need to be prepared when Martian colonists rise up against the United Earth Empire in, say, 2776. And probably a lot earlier.

It’s Christmas Eve, and a guy can dream.

While Hollywood has turned the war movie into a vehicle for anti-American, anti-military propaganda with recent money-losers like Redacted and Lions for Lambs, the video game industry is making billions on war games in which American soldiers are the good guys.

Activision’s Modern Warfare 2, which is set partially in Afghanistan and lets you play as American and British soldiers hunting terrorists, is a cultural sensation.

When it came out Nov. 10, it became the biggest entertainment product launch in history, grossing $310 million in North America and the United Kingdom in its first 24 hours. In its first five days, Modern Warfare 2 sales hit $550 million.

Activision was quick to put that in perspective, noting that the largest worldwide five-day box-office take for any movie was Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at $394 million.

I’m sure Hollywood bosses realize that Americans don’t want to see movies depicting their country as the source of all evil in the world, but that’s how Hollywood people see it, and I guess we should respect them for being true to their convictions and putting their money where their hearts are, or something.

The blurred spot in the photo is the head of a man who is being stoned to death for adultery in Somalia as villagers are forced to watch. A wonderful Islamic custom whose beauty we are too inveterate in our cultural imperialism to appreciate, I am sure.

“Abstaining Boobies Get Sexier”. Hmm, what could this video be about?

Bernie Madoff, the godfather:

Inmate No. 61727-054 shares an unlocked cell at the medium-security prison at Butner Federal Correctional Complex with a younger man named Frank. He wears khaki prison garb and has been spotted walking on an outdoor track. He plays bocce, chess and checkers. He scrubs pots and pans in the prison kitchen.

The 71-year-old Mr. Madoff also is salvaging something that disappeared in the outside world the moment his fraud was exposed: respect. “To every con artist, he is the godfather, the don,” says an inmate interviewed earlier this week.

The KGB - whatever its current name – says that the remains of Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Goebbels’s family were secretly buried in 1946 at a Soviet military base in East Germany, and that in 1970 they were dug up, burnt on a bonfire, ground into ashes and thrown into a river. The Russians also claim they kept some fragments of Hitler’s body, which they still have.

He almost takes a break to pick his nose a couple of times, but I still like his version better than the original.

Some of the other 204 people who were nominated for the peace Nobel in 2009.

Here is a larger list, although it’s not official because the Nobel committee doesn’t disclose the list of nominees for fifty years.

A good summary of Obamacare by Robert Tracinski. Making health insurance more expensive while forcing you to buy it, turning health insurance into another welfare program, restricting you choice of coverage, and gutting the health insurance industry - what’s there not to like?