- He pretended to run Russia for four years so “Bad Vlad”
Putin could pose as prime minister and fulfill the requirement that he take a
break after serving consecutive terms as dictator/president. Now, Dmitry
Medvedev is filling a role compatible with the second banana status he has
always held in relation to Putin and as prime minister, Medvedev is in charge
of expressing the appropriate amount of outrage over failures in his country’s
space program. Medvedev kicked his ire up a notch over the weekend when he
proclaimed that Russia is losing prestige and money due to botched space projects. His
comments came after Russia junked two satellites in the latest launch failure
to beset the once-pioneering industry. The United States is scaling back its
efforts in space, leaving the door for celestial dominance open for the
Russians, only Russia cannot capitalize. Last Monday, a workhorse Proton rocket
failed shortly after its launch, causing the multimillion-dollar loss of
Indonesia's Telkom-3 and Russia's Express-MD2 satellites. The Russian space
agency Roskosmos cited an engine failure in the rocket's upper stage, called
the Briz-M, for sending the craft into the wrong orbit. Having the problem
occur on the heels of a similar problem that caused the loss of a $265 million
communications satellite last year pushed Medvedev to an angry place. "I
don't know the reason for the loss of our satellites — whether it is the upper
stage, mechanical damage, elementary negligence or everything together — but we
cannot stand this any longer," Medvedev said. "We are losing our
authority and billions of roubles." He plans to hold a meeting on the
issue this week and ordered a government investigation into the recent
failures. "They must report their recommendations on who to punish and
what to do further,” he declared. In addition to the two satellite failures,
the Russian space industry also endured a series of mishaps last year,
including the failure of a mission to return samples from the Martian moon
Phobos. It’s almost enough to convince a country to abandon its space program
in favor of more important endeavors…………
- Cue the headline writers of every entertainment media
outlet furiously trying to craft the most original take on “Winning!” that they
can possibly dream up. While the world has been busy paying attention to other
entertainment options, like a slew of summer blockbuster movies and the
Olympics, Charlie Sheen’s new FX series “Anger Management” has quietly built a
loyal following and the cable network is so happy with the show’s performance
that it is expected
to order a whopping 90 more episodes. Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer announced
the decision Friday after the show’s first season averaged 3.4 million viewers
per episode, including 1.7 million in the coveted 18 to 49 year old
demographic. Ninety episodes is essentially four seasons at least and the ast
is expected to film the next 44 episodes beginning Sept. 24 and follow up with
46 more episodes with an end date of October 2014.
One can imaigne that the
contract extension would be vindication for Sheen and knowing his propensity
for shooting off his mouth first and asking questions never, he had to have
something to say to all of his critics with his new deal in hand, right? It turns
out that his manager, Marc Burg, was the one looking to say that he told
everyone so. "To all those network execs who passed on hearing our pitch,
(I say), 'You should have heard it. You should have bought it,” Burg said. "Lionsgate
TV and (executive producer) Bruce Helford have done a great job of including
Charlie in the production process, something Warner Bros. TV and Chuck Lorre
never did."
Ah, and the unnecessary shot at Lorre, the show runner for
Sheen’s former sitcom, “Two and a Half Men,” always predictable from Sheen and
his crew. Perhaps one of the most impressive feats for Sheen is successfully
piggybacking off what was a truly mediocre move, 2004’s “Anger Management,” starring
Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson, with a successful show………….
- Adios, Lane Kiffin. The always arrogant, abrasive USC
football coach has to be feeling pretty good about himself right now. He has a
team widely believed to be a national championship contender, he landed coveted
running back Silas Redd when Redd elected to transfer from Penn State and the
Trojans have endured NCAA sanctions that included a postseason ban and scholarship
reductions because of previous rules violations. Those positives would have
Kiffin in a positive frame of mind if only USA Today and Grant Teaff, the executive director of the American
Football Coaches Association, would roll off of him and stop cramping his
style. This season was to be Kiffin’s first as a voting member for this
season's USA Today college football coaches' poll, but he’s hitting the eject
button on the experience after one vote for the preseason standings. His
decision to quit came after he told reporters last week that he wouldn't select
his as the No. 1 team, when, in fact, he did. Arizona coach Rich-er
Fraud-riguez was the one who exposes Kiffin’s vote to the media and after
Kiffin denied what he had done, USA Today publicized his vote Thursday to
"set the record straight to protect the poll's integrity," two days
after the coach made his proclamation. Kiffin defended lying by saying his
players would have found out one way or another if he hadn't put the Trojans
No. 1. Votes in the poll are normally kept confidential until the final poll of
each year, so exposing his vote was a bad play on Fraud-riguez’s part and USA
Today selling him out isn’t much better. Still, Kiffin maintained that he had
nothing to apologize for. "Not a big deal. You guys asked me about RichRod
and I was saying I wouldn't put us No. 1," Kiffin said. "I was saying
that because of our issues with numbers, from (the perspective of) other
people. Did I vote us No. 1? Yeah. I said that when they called me, before they
even told me." To alleviate any further drama or controversy, Kiffin has
stepped down as a voter and will now focus on coaching his team of elite
athletes/University of Spoiled Children student athletes as they look to earn
the No. 1 ranking on the field that their coach has already ascribed to them………
- When the world
looks at America and laughs at the bumbling super power, occasions like this
one (and the United States’ rampant obesity) are the reason why. As
dysfunctional as it has ever been, the federal government is actually brawling
with itself. Punching oneself in the face generally seems like a bad idea, but
one branch of the government attacking another is apparently a brilliant idea
for the
House Oversight Committee, which is in the process of drafting and filing a
civil contempt suit against Attorney General Eric Holder. The lawsuit is the
committee’s latest attempt to force Holder to release documents from the Fast
and Furious gun-walking operation. Holder testified before the committee about Operation
Fast and Furious, in which agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms allowed thousands of weapons to fall into the hands of traffickers for
Mexican drug cartels. Some of those guns were later used to kill American law
enforcement agents and now Congress wants internal emails and memoranda
regarding a now-discredited letter to Congress from the Justice Department that
denied any "gunwalking" had occurred. The Justice Department informed
Congress the letter was incorrect and that gunwalking had, indeed, gone on but
that Holder knew nothing of it at the time, but a chance to score a takedown of
a member of the opposing party for the Republican-led House of Representatives
is obviously too much to pass up and so the House voted to hold Holder in
contempt on June 28 for failing to turn over thousands of pages of subpoenaed
documents. The Justice Department has maintained that it is withholding
documents under White House executive privilege, but that wasn’t enough to keep
17 Democrats from voting with 238 Republicans in the 255-67 vote for contempt. Democratic
leaders labeled the contempt vote a "political witch hunt,” although the
odds of Holder actually being burned at the stake are disappointingly low.
Nearly every possible party has weighed in on the debate and a federal judge
even ordered the executive branch to turn over the disputed documents. A
subsequent compromise led to some of the documents being turned over, but not
enough to placate the angry Republicans. After the Department of Justice
announced it would not pursue a criminal case against its own Attorney General,
that left a snippy civil lawsuit as the next step in the process…………
- More shocking
news has dropped in the world of science, where researchers have revealed that
men under stress have lower standards for who they’re willing to have sex with.
A study published in the journal PLoS ONE and conducted by researchers at the
University of Westminster in London put 41 men to the test with a
stress-inducing task. Afterward, the men were asked to rate the attractiveness
of female bodies ranging from emaciated to obese. Their responses were then compared
to a control group of 40 men who did not undergo the stress task. The stressed
men rated a significantly heavier female body size as the most attractive, and
they rated heavier female bodies as more attractive in general. While those
findings might seem odd, they’re not. Men under a heavy amount of stress simply
are not going to have the energy and wherewithal to retain their normally lofty
standards for female attractiveness. Simply put, dudes who are tired and
mentally frayed would more likely to for a woman they know isn't as attractive
and would therefore be easier to pick up on as opposed to putting in extra time
and effort to bag an actual hottie. Our body size preferences are flexible and
can be changed by environment and circumstance," explains Martin Tovee,
one of the study's authors. "We need to understand the factors shaping
body preferences." Some short-sighted minds have suggested that this study
alters the classic stereotype that men prefer thin women in general, but those
people simply are not very bright. This is not the first study to show that men
also prefer heavier body sizes during times of duress, for example when
resources are unpredictable or unavailable. Maybe this has to do with thin women
in ancient times being ill or malnourished, but being FAT and having additional
energy reserves stored up isn't exactly an issue for most humans these days. In
this study, the stressed men gave higher ratings to a wider range of female
figures than did their unstressed counterparts, further underscoring men’s
willingness to lower their standards when they are under duress. And that
explains that……….
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