The as-yet untitled film, which will be made for Paramount Pictures, will tell the true stories of the last two men to be rescued alive from the ruins of the collapsed World Trade Center in New York.

"It's a work of collective passion, a serious meditation on what happened, and carries within a compassion that heals," Stone said in a statement issued by producers.

Oscar-winning star Cage will take the lead role of New York Port Authority policeman Sergeant John McLoughlin, who was trapped along with one of his fellow officers in the mangled wreckage of one of the twin towers that crumbled after being hit by hijacked passenger jets.

Oliver Stone to make first major US film about September 11 - Yahoo! News

I’ve spent a big chunk of the last four years writing about how technology is changing the way battles are fought. Now it’s time for me to witness those changes close-up – and see how war still remains brutally, awfully the same. I’m leaving for Iraq on Saturday morning, on assignment for Wired magazine.

For the moment, I can’t go into too many details about what I’ll be doing there. It’s just too tasty a story to let out of the oven before it’s baked. But here’s what I can say: I’ll be embedding with a high-tech Army unit – one that’s playing an absolutely central role in the counterinsurgency there. If these soldiers fail in their missions, the entire coalition operation could go up in smoke. If they succeed, lots and lots of American and Iraqi lives will be saved.

I came across this blog yesterday. It contains a number of really good links. It also looks like some good first-hand content is on the way. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this one.

Also found via this blog, ArmsControlWonk.

Defense Tech (.org)

BME:  How did you decide what exactly to cut off?
GILLIAN:  That was obvious — it had to be our ring fingers. We were both just out of rough relationships, and wanted to both reclaim and be rid of those fingers... this has a permanence to it as well. You can take a ring off your ring finger, but you can never put your ring finger back on once you take it off. It’s something that will last forever — it’s a physical testament to how much I actually do love him.
CLIVE: And if we ever break up we’ll just tell people it’s a permanent shocker.
Think about it...
BME: Did either of you have an interest in amputation before this?
GILLIAN: No, and to be honest I never thought I would do one, but I think it’s one of those things that’s hard to understand until you feel it. It just sort of happened, and it feels right.
CLIVE: Like our love.

Diamonds are out. The deBeers control of the market for tetra-carbon be damned, people are coming up with new and more insane ways to show their commitment to each other.

I put my ring finger in Clive’s mouth and he put his ring finger in my mouth with our teeth resting right on the last joint. We looked in each other’s eyes, nodded, and bit down as hard as we could. It was a little disappointing because we couldn’t actually get all the way through, but we did pop the joint open and tear it a little. We cut the rest, just some skin and the tendon, the normal way.

Don't miss the pictures.

Update: This had been an April Fool's joke. Good one..

Love at First Bite

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

And because I think that would be a disaster, it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult. It takes a village.

Friedman: If It's a Muslim Problem, It Needs a Muslim Solution

Redstone, a regular guest at the annual Sun Valley conference, had been keeping a low profile at this year's event. On Friday he agreed to speak to reporters in the lobby of the resort as other key players in the media world including News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Time Warner Inc. CEO Dick Parsons strolled past.

Will sanity return to issues of media ownership? I don't think it was ever there to begin with..

Redstone: 'The age of the conglomerate is over'

Decius wrote:
An odd thought occurs to me as I contemplate this. How do you kill a scene? How do scenes actually die? Scenes die because they cease to be cool. Because they get coopted by the thing they exist to resist, so that participating in them no longer means what it once did. Because the Gap opens up on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Because the gangster rappers have million dollar video budgets and all drive luxury cars. If there is anything that can take the cultural iconography of radical islam and shuck it of any possible meaning it is our consumer marketing system. Jihadi Cola, indeed.

This idea seems too trite to be reasonable. Its the sort of thing Gibson would use for irony. Maybe you can offer a better one...

Here is another thing Gibson could use for irony:

Despite their differences, most major world religions warn that attachment to fleeting material objects is an obstacle to spiritual transcendence. Therefore, religious fundamentalists, who try to strictly follow the tenets of divine scripture, ought to care little for worldly possessions like cars and clothing, says Nancy Wong, assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Tech College of Management.

However, fundamentalists actually tend to form strong personal connections with particular product brands, according to a new study conducted by Wong in partnership with Aric Rindfleisch, associate professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and James E. Burroughs, assistant professor of commerce at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Nancy Wong is cute.

Study: Religious Fundamentalists and Brand Loyalty

Rattle wrote:
Please do that. You are MemeStreams's woman on the scene...

Aside from some delays getting a hotel room and a ride from the airport, Elonka reports London is as normal as it could be after experiencing a terrorist attack.

News channels aside, the people themselves (at least those I've been running across), have been taking it in stride. There are a few clusters of people around the news feeds, but other than that life is pretty much normal. On the plane from Manchester, it was mostly business travelers doing what seemed to be a daily commute. I eavesdropped on a few conversations, but the closest I heard to any concern was two seatmates who commented that the taxi situation at Heathrow might be a bit rough, and there'd be some cab-sharing going on. After we took off, the pilot did an announcement but simply said that he didn't forecast any flight delays due to "earlier events in London". And from what I've been seeing of live news feeds around the city, life on the street seems to be chugging along pretty much normally. Sort of like the bombs were small splashes that made a few ripples, and then the normal flow of London life moved back in and erased any sign of what had happened. The main signposts remaining seem to be a couple closed tube stations, and some quickly-erected barriers around the bus that was blown up. I'm a little fuzzy on exactly what happened with that one. For example, one report says that the bus was packed with people who had streamed out of the tube stations after the initial explosions. And the top of the bus was clearly blown off. But there are only reports of two fatalities on that bus. The main carnage seems to have been below ground.

Signing off for now, your Memestreamer in the field,

Thanks for the report!

RE: London Terror Attack - 7/7

... What did they see?

Cameras are all around London...

MemeStreams user and Nashville 2600 organizer Dolemite has put together a page listing public WiFi hotspots using the Google Maps API. Good job Scott! This is a great resource!

Nashville Public WiFi Hotspot Map

The group Al Qaeda in Iraq said today that it had executed the top Egyptian diplomat there, carrying out a threat to pursue diplomats in retaliation for their links to the new Iraq government.

The group said in a statement posted on the Internet that it had killed the envoy, Ihab al-Sharif, but it did not say when or how. The group announced "that the verdict of God has been implemented against the ambassador of the infidels, the ambassador of Egypt, thank God."

"Egypt is one of those at the forefront of the war on Islam and Muslims," the statement said. "Its jails are full of mujahedeen." It showed a video of the blindfolded diplomat identifying himself but, unlike in cases of other kidnappings, it did not show the killing itself, according to The Associated Press.

It also said that Egypt was among the first to support the training of the Iraqi police and soldiers - whom it referred to as "apostate" forces - in service to the "crusaders."

Zarqawi Group Says It Killed Egyptian Envoy - New York Times