- I've tried, but can't imagine a situation that would make me think a taser was the right solution to a dispute with an unarmed 72 year old grandmother. (via The Sideshow)
- The New Hampshire wedding-industrial complex will spend the weekend toasting all the gay and lesbian weddings they're going to get to charge through the nose for, as out lesbians and gays in the state realize that their parents are now going to start bugging them about when they're getting married already, just like everybody else. Congratulations!
- As Chris would say, "'Most people' aren't anything. Except women. Most people actually are women." Which is why it's so funny when women's perspectives are considered biased and men's are considered the normal baseline.
- A person might be left scratching their head, wondering what's wrong with science reporting, but one needn't worry that similar things are wrong with Philadelphia. The city is planning an entire year to celebrate evolution, commemorate Charles Darwin.
"Sore winner is a bad look for summer." - Jane Hamsher, FireDogLake
Reg: "Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the f**king Judean People's Front." Stan: "Yeah, the Judean People's Front." Reg: "Yeah. Splitters." Stan: "And the Popular Front of Judea." Reg: "Yeah. Splitters." Stan: "And the People's Front of Judea." Reg: "Yea... what?" Stan: "The People's Front of Judea. Splitters." Reg: "We're the People's Front of Judea!" Stan: "Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front." Reg: "People's Front!" Francis: "Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?" Reg: "He's over there." [points to a lone man] Reg, Stan, Francis, Judith: "SPLITTER!" - Monty Python's Life of Brian
- A Lumbee high school student has been told that he can't wear an eagle feather at graduation. Allegedly, this would be disruptive. Maybe it would lead to anarchy, dogs and cats living together, rains of frogs and little fishes. Who knows. Or maybe it would be totally unremarkable except for increasing the country's gross national happiness.
- Did you spank that kid hard enough? Honestly, the next stage after this is a return to stockades, regarding the glorification of which, I part ways with Heinlein.
- More city dwellers are turning to urban agriculture to ease their budget woes and increase the amount of food available to charities. You can find out more in a report on edible cities, as compiled by some UK folk in the US for an anthropological expedition.
- The space station crew have finally fixed their toilet. The worst 'are we there yet' story ever comes to an end at last.
- The carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology that would be necessary to make coal clean not only doesn't exist yet, it would cost over a trillion dollars over 40 years, or about $1.5 billion for each refitted coal-fired plant. I bet that could buy a lot of solar power and wind turbine arrays.
- Does the equal protection clause apply to Native Americans? Obama isn't known to have an opinion on this one. It's apparently a key legal point in the upcoming, on June 9th, Cobell trial on the Indian trust fund case.
... Anthropologists hold that retro began some 40,000 years ago with the early hominids' mental projection of trace infantile-dependency memories into a mythical "golden age." Continuing with the Renaissance's rediscovery of Greco-Roman homoeroticism and the mass "Egyptology" fashions of the Victorian Age, retro had, prior to this century, always been separated from the present age by a large buffer of intermediate history.
Since 1900, however, the retro parabolic curve has soared exponentially, with some generations experiencing several different forms of retro within a single lifetime. ...
... Law enforcement's infatuation with marijuana enforcement is all the more damaging given the systemic racial disparity it frequently entails. According to Tuesday's report, between 1997 and 2007, New York City police arrested and jailed about 205,000 blacks, 122,000 Latinos and 59,000 whites for possessing small amounts of marijuana. Blacks accounted for about 52 percent of the arrests, though they represented only 26 percent of the city's population over that time span. Whites represented only 15 percent of those arrested, despite comprising 35 percent of the population.
Such racial inequality has long been a hallmark of drug enforcement efforts nationwide. While African-Americans make up only 14 percent of the nation's drug users (whites comprise 72 percent), African-Americans comprise 38 percent of those arrested for drug violations, and a staggering 45 percent of those in state prison for a drug offense. ...
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - From Life-Line, by Robert A. Heinlein
- Amanda Marcotte hosts Jeffrey Feldman at FDL, to discuss the outright barbarous language that the hardly-ever-Right uses to poison US politics. In comments, David Neiwert recommends Altemeyer's work on authoritarianism as helpful background; the full book is available to download in pdf format at the link.
... Ekman, Friesen, and another colleague, Robert Levenson ... decided to try to document this effect. They gathered a group of volunteers and hooked them up to monitors measuring their heart rate and body temperature - the physiological signals of such emotions as anger, sadness, and fear. Half or the volunteers were told to try to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half were simply shown how to create, on their faces, the expressions that corresponded to stressful emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. The second group, the people who were acting, showed the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature, as the first group. ...
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, (2005) by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point
Totally guilting you out about how much good reading you've been missing ...
- Both the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business & Media Institutes are spending money and time lying to people about global warming, in an ongoing effort to make sure that there's neither the money nor time to deal with climate change.
Willow: Sarcasm accomplishes nothing, Giles. Giles: It's sort of an end in itself. - Buffy, the Vampire Slayer
- During a debate over a guest agricultural worker program yesterday, Doug Bruce told his colleagues in the Colorado State House that their great state doesn't "need 5,000 more illiterate peasants". And the state needs Mr. Bruce because ... Bueller? Bueller? Frye? Frye? Frye?
- Veterans' advocates are participating in a class action lawsuit against Veterans Affairs, claiming that delayed care for traumatized soldiers is contributing to a suicide rate of 4-5 per day.
- From atheists who support religion in the Machiavellian sense to columnists who protest too much that they're not bitter, there are many here among us who think that life is but a joke. (I just re-watched that BSG episode yesterday, btw. Frakking awesome.)
- The New Jersey Supreme Court rules in favor of Internet users' privacy rights in the state, requiring even law enforcement to use subpoenas to access ISP records, as would have been necessary to review banking transactions before the advent of the Bush Administration.
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, But neither are you free to abandon it." - The Talmud
- Or food, they could eat food, instead of the Kwikie Mart's pasteurized processed food products they're getting their empty calories from now.
"Some of us have great stories... pretty stories that take place at lakes with boats and friends and noodle salad. Just not anybody in this car." - Jack Nicholson as Melvin in "As Good As It Gets"
It's just been a bad wireless weekend all around, boatloads of good reading to feel guilty about not keeping up with ...
- The story of the deaths of 54 Burmese migrant workers in Thailand, all likely seeking work in the resort industry, sounds like it could have been written about immigrants seeking work in the United States. It's the economic structures, not the people, silly.
- Immigrant crackdowns keep taking us down the road to our police state future. Just close your eyes and think of the glory of the Fatherland.
- Around the country, sex abuse and torture at youth prisons is tolerated as normal. While the Abu Ghraib scandal was truly terrible as a violation of human rights and a deep stain on the US' honor, it's necessary to recognize that the prison culture that's an open joke in our own country is very nearly as heinous, and that it's been that way for quite a long time.
- As climate denial gives way to whining that saving our habitat will destroy our economy (how can you have an economy without a habitat, anyway?), some Yale economists have put out a greened economy simulation tool that challenges mainstreamed pessimism.
- A filmmaker talks about a short he made to offer a window on the lives of day laborers and get people wondering, "What if that was me?"
- Colombia claims Venezuelan involvement with FARC guerrillas. The Bush administration and their Colombian allies would love for this to be true, so it's hard to say whether the allegations will have any credibility outside of DC and Bogotá.
- The House Select Committee on Global Warming is likely to subpoena the Bush EPA for documents related to their compliance with a Supreme Court decision mandating that they make a determination on regulating tailpipe emissions.
- Striking farmers in Argentina, and the results of their negotiations with the government, may affect the availability of food in a global economy where demand for ethanol has been stretching corn supplies, and rice and wheat are in shortage worldwide.
- Colorado GOP candidate is accused of stalking a former girlfriend, Republican party leaders responded by stalking the complainant and pressuring her to back off their candidate.
- When we throw plastic away, 'away' often ends up being the ocean, where it acts as another of many hazards to marine life.
- Residents of the Ganges delta are being flooded out of their homes by global warming-induced sea level rises. Also, did you know that India is building a 2,000 mile barrier fence between them and Bangladesh in anticipation of future floods of environmental refugees from the impoverished, densely populated, low-lying country.
- The slow and brilliant deconstruction of the Left Behind series' theology and literary merit continues with martyr envy and the pope of Mount Prospect.
Especially if y'all dirty hippies, we won't be having with them around here. Go read these other sites, instead, because I have a feeling you're not feeling guilty enough about all the reading you haven't kept up with lately.
- TSA agents afraid of nipple rings. Either that, or a bunch of power-mad creeps decided it'd be fun to subject a woman to humiliation just because they could.
When you're sick, and when you're me, what a good friend does is bring you a copy of a movie like Michael Clayton on DVD. (Which isn't to say I didn't appreciate the cough drops and salsa that A came around with yesterday morning, because that was a life saver.) Have you seen Clayton? Eh, probably, I'm usually the last person to see a movie. Anyway, it was a good myth, and I approve of myths on principle.
But look, when you're enjoying mythic cinema, or perhaps some haughtier resemiotization of story, it's important to know which bit is the aspiration and which is the anchor in reality that calms your mind. What you cling to so you can suspend your disbelief and be carried away with the rest of it.
The truth is that Michael Clayton is, as most readers here probably knew, the fiction. The flight of fancy. The person who barely existed, so they had to invent him. Meanwhile, there are thousands of Karen Crowders and Don Jeffries. There must be. There are thousands of poisons in our food, our medicine, our clothes, our buildings, our water and our air. We and everything we eat, swimming in it, drowning in it.
Karen Crowder is poisoning you right now. It isn't the exception, but the rule.
Anyway, because there isn't nearly enough reading that you feel guilty about not keeping up with:
- Three years ago this week, we were all fighting over Terri Schiavo, which was over whether the Republicans' absolutism would beat out the common sense view of when the state should stay out of a family's private business.
- Who did the passport data contractors work for? On top of that, my question, why the **** are contractors getting access to sensitive public data? Have we privatized the government so much that there aren't any federal employees left to handle this stuff?
- We, and by we, I mean the whole world, are running low on wheat. New wrinkle, there's a wheat disease that seems poised to cut into developing world wheat crops, much worsening the problem.
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