Dalhousie University vs Rice University
University of Florida vs University of California Riverside (10pm)

Saturday 9pm (26th)

McGill University vs University of Colorado
Wilfrid Laurier University vs University of Central Florida (10pm)

Sunday (27th)

University of Houston vs New York University
University of Maryland Baltimore County vs University of Pittsburgh (10pm)

for the full schedule please visit : http://www.cstarleague.com/news/563/playoffs-schedule-announced

Long live Liz! Acting legend Elizabeth Taylor is dead at 79.

IBM vs. IN: IBM declares (legal) war on the state of Indiana.

Prime Minister of Portugal steps down following a rejected budget proposal.

Don’t forget Japan and Libya!

And, a potty trained robot?

James O’Keefe, the undercover conservative journalist, investigator, filmmaker, etc. etc. has problem…and he needs your help to fix it.

O’Keefe, who most recently made headlines for his role in the controversy surrounding NPR, is known for his work involving hidden cameras.

He first came to “prominence” when his videos exposed the wrongdoings of some members of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

The problem for O’Keefe is… this film making costs money. Until now, O’Keefe has been putting the money on his and his friends’ credit cards. Now, he is deep into debt.

It cost us about $50,000 when all is said and done to produce the NPR video”

To help ease the pain, O’Keefe is asking supporters to contribute money so he can pay off the bills. He promises anything extra will be used for future projects.

Maybe next time he’ll spend less on costumes?

BONUS: Vanity Fair thinks they may have found some useful advice.

One of these experts is Zeynep Tufekci. She has particular interest in”the social impacts of technology and social media.”  She has made numerous media appearances discussing these issues as they pertain to the Middle East.

We at USDemocrazy had the good fortune to interview her recently (See above).

This interview is the first of a series we are offering in conjunction with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Talking Heads blog.

Check out the video and give us your thoughts.

Thanks to Wikicommons.

Beginning of the hand off. Seven areas of Afghanistan to be protected by Afghan National forces without foreign support in July.

Maybe Hillary should have tried this? Guatemala’s President and First Lady to divorce so she CAN legally run for president!

Singles need not apply. Job discrimination is illegal unless your a pastor?

Thanks to Wikicommons

Japan is still recovering from the worst natural disaster in its history. While still digging through the rubble of demolished coastal towns the nation has also had to face a nuclear catastrophe. As the bad news continues to roll in it seems that their is no hope for Japan’s future.

Of course that isn’t true. In fact it is because of the bad news that, as Binyamin Appelbaum notes, that

People often overestimate the impact of a disaster because of our tendency to generalize from devastating images and anecdotes. In fact, most disasters are extremely local events that leave the bulk of a nation’s economy untouched.

This isn’t to say that Japan as a nation is not facing a terrible strategy. Rather, despite of the terrible events human ingenuity will overcome, at least economically.

In fact, as James Surowiecki for the New Yorker describes, some economists have found that tragic events can have benefits as

disaster-stricken economies don’t simply replace broken windows, as it were; they upgrade infrastructure and technology, and shift investment away from older, less productive industries.

…homeowners rebuilding after a disaster take the opportunity to upgrade, a phenomenon known as “the Jacuzzi effect.” In ordinary times, inertia keeps old technologies in place; it may be easier to make dramatic changes when you have to start from scratch.

With a hat tip to Democracy in America, the author of one of the papers, Ilan Noy, has added the following comment about his research that

We still do not know what will be the impact of the enfolding crisis in the various nuclear reactors that have been affected. The analysis above ignored this danger, though the still present devastation in Chernobyl attests to its potentially destructive powers.

Despite possible benefits of disasters we should not forget that, as Democracy in America’s W.W. notes,

the return to trend economic growth does not compensate for the direct human and economic loss created by the disaster. In the case of Japan, the final toll will be immense.

Thanks to Wikicommons.

The UN sanctioned no fly zone has met little resistance from Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact mechanical failures have downed more US planes than Libyan loyalist forces.

However, that doesn’t mean our newest air war (and its Commander in Chief) isn’t under fire.

While the rebels in Libya may be celebrating, American reaction is much cooler with a majority not supporting involvement. Congress is also questioning whether whether President Obama could act without their official support.

Voicing this worry, Andrew Sullivan fears that involvement in Libya, like Iraq, is driven by a perfect storm of

the neocons who want to see the US military deployed across the globe in the defense of freedom and the liberal interventionists who believe that the US should intervene whenever atrocities are occurring. What these two groups have in common is an unrelenting focus on the reason for intervention along with indifference to the vast array of unintended consequences their moralism could lead us into.

It is this specter of Iraq and Afghanistan that is driving much of the opposition to Libya: America is already at war with two Middle Eastern nations do we think we’ll suddenly find success in a third?

Over at Democracy in America, M.S. thinks this won’t be like our other two desert escapades as

Things are different in Libya in great measure because Egypt, Tunisia and their Arab League fellows don’t want to see Muammar Qaddafi win; they’ve never much liked the guy, even before the revolt, and they don’t want to have an unstable, post-civil-war pariah state in North Africa.

…the fact that they’re spontaneously committing to the intervention, that the regional attitude is friendly towards a popular revolt to overthrow Mr Qaddafi and towards UN-approved intervention to protect that revolt, makes a huge difference.

Of course even if the climate is more favorable to positive results that doesn’t mean things will turn out the way we want them to. Using the US air war over Kosovo as an example Peter Beinart notes that by only having forces in the air we have little control on end results and

If we’re lucky, the Libyan rebels will soon be a much more powerful force, and if we’re really lucky, they’ll be a powerful force capable of unifying Libya behind a reasonably humane regime. But the latter will be mostly out of our hands.

So what is the take away? Libya could end up like Afghanistan, or it could not. The rebels could form a peaceful democracy, or they could not. President Obama could go down as humanitarian, or he could not. Thusly, in conclusion we’re as in the dark as you are.