the most satisfying aspect of the game is breezing past traffic, running tollbooths, fishtailing around corners, rear-ending cabbies, breaking all those traffic codes you wish you could in real life. Racing games have allowed you to do all that but it's not very satisfying to weave through traffic just to go in circles, or to do so in a cityscape that could care less.

Running down pedestrians happens, usually just because they're in the way... but anyone who's ever tried to drive in a major metropolitan area, let alone NY, can understand the slight bit of satisfaction that results.

Don't those goddamn joggers know that these are my streets?

I've got people to meet, cars to steal, gangers to kill. I don't have time for red lights and crosswalks.

But all of the anti-social fun available in the game doesn't have nearly the impact of getting beat by your cousin at bowling or reading emails from you mom. Niko and Roman's relationship rivals that of any video game pair ever created; it's right up there with the tension between Revan and Bastila or The Nameless One and Morte.

by definition don't exist. Maybe intellectual pragmatists? No, that doesn't work either.

And the impetus behind the creation of behavioral economics was much more about achieving accurate models and efficient policies than some sort of ideological aversion to firm policies.

And behavioral is still bogus, but it's less bogus than most conventional economics.

China's posturing has already become as obnoxious as 15 debutante. It's their party and noone better be crying about anything but them. They want to be viewed as one of the cool kids now, a sovereign socialite that needs to be taken seriously. So what if they have locked their siblings in the basement and are using prison labor for the caterers?

They don't really care about the opinions of the upper echelon cliques, the Group of 7's or the G8's. They just want everyone else in the world to see China as a major player, one who can stage a show just as well as anyone else.

Those third world nations need to be shown that when they allow Chinese "private" companies to come their country to harvest their resources, that all the resulting unpleasantness will be kept under wraps.

Seriously though, how can anyone fault KK for using a quote from a British journalist? Who else that lives in China would dare spout anything but the party line? Chinese citizens would be safer in a mountain school.

Not that it matters, but I too will be abstaining from the Olympics. China's just the final straw. Their totalitarian antics pale beside the soul destroying words of one Jimmy Roberts.

I think Mr. Bolt knows geometry better than you think he does.

As bad as it seems now, everything that has happened so far is just the house creaking.

What happens when China decides to pay us back for the sly way in which we forced them to buy and hold our currency while we devalued the ink out of it.

The tornado is coming.

So glad that these toadies had the "courage" to advocate for torture.

I would hope that intelligence officers "must believe there is permanence in the legal rules that govern their actions." Following the U.S. Law would have protected them against any future prosecution.

Instead, those who tortured believed that the rules had somehow changed.

"Just following orders" is no way a defense or an excuse for torturing.

The Chicago School lauds all things Friedman, and yet has pushed far past what Friedman actually said or believed. Their models are based on ideological assumptions that have to be defended at all costs, even at the expense of hard data. Experimental and historical results that don't fit their assumptions of rational actors and desirable market equilibriums are quietly shifted and massaged with even more complex models and formulas. Heretics are ridiculed and punished.

They are as valid today as Ptolemaic Astronomers were in 1600, 60 years after Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.

Who ever reads introductions?

College students have far too much to read as it is. Only those students firmly entrenched one side of this "debate" are going to read it, either to prop up their shaky world view or for a little comedy.

More information has been released about the timing of the affair. It apparently occured prior to Letterman's marriage, which would mean that it wasn't adultery, at least not as defined by New York state.

It's what plants need.

These groups are for men who never grew up, who never learned that they won't always get their way. The groups are a collective temper tantrum.