“This Is What the Internet Is For!”
Posted on October 28th, 2008 at 5:31 pm by Steve

Mr. Mul-zany shared this incredible Flash video site with me today via email. Too freakin’ awesome!

IOZ: “Fucking Is None of Your Fucking Business”
Posted on October 27th, 2008 at 10:10 pm by Steve

Limp Wrist in British Sign Language

My man (?) IOZ offers his take on the nature vs. nurture debate (and I happen to agree!):

But sexuality isn’t the same as race (well, even race isn’t the same as race), and though it, like all human behaviors, has genetic and hormonal antecedents, it is not mere biological determinism that causes me to suck cock. Predilection is not identity. Human sexuality does exist on a spectrum; its characteristics and emphases change even within the individual over the course of a lifetime. Some people have very stable sexual interests; others “oscillate wildly,” as goes the title of The Smiths’ song. The fight against discrimination based on sexual identity is categorically confused: sexuality doesn’t constitute an identity. It constitutes a portion of the totality of each autonomous individual identity, and the reason not to discriminate against those whose sexual tastes and practices diverge from your own is not that minority sexualities constitute a protected class, that like the color of one’s skin, the angle of one’s wrist is genetic and, goddamnit, queers are people too. It’s simply that fucking is none of your fucking business.

Canadian Court Rejects Government’s Pot Monopoly
Posted on October 27th, 2008 at 5:46 pm by Steve

Marijuana in the Land of Maple Leaves

CBC News tells us that a Canadian court has found that medical marijuana users should be able to purchase from growers other than the government:

Currently, medical users can grow their own marijuana, but third-party growers can’t supply the drug to more than one user at a time, a restriction that lawyers for the plaintiffs argued effectively gave Health Canada a monopoly on the distribution of medical marijuana.

Stayner said in his January ruling that the restrictions on the supply of medical marijuana were arbitrary and caused sick users major difficulty in gaining access to the drug.

“In my view it is not tenable for the government, consistently with the right established in other courts for qualified medical users to have reasonable access to marijuana, to force them either to buy from the government contractor, grow their own or be limited to the unnecessarily restrictive system of designated producers,” he wrote.

The government has contracted one firm, Prairie Plant Systems Inc. in Flin Flon, Man., to provide the drug to patients.

Taking Bin Laden at His Word
Posted on October 27th, 2008 at 4:49 pm by Steve

George W. Bush, September 2006:

Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say? America and our coalition partners have made our choice. We’re taking the words of the enemy seriously.

Washington Post, October 22, 2008:

“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the terrorist group. It said the Arizona Republican would continue the “failing march of his predecessor,” President Bush.

McCain adviser Jim Woolsey, October 22, 2008:

It is ridiculous to believe that in its heart of hearts, al-Qaeda wants John McCain to be the President.

(h/t: The Anonymous Liberal)

Professor Cole on BushCo’s “Magical Thinking”
Posted on October 27th, 2008 at 3:23 pm by Steve

Juan Cole is an American expert on Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs. In addition to writing a regular blog and column for Salon.com, he’s also the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.

He has an excellent post up today looking at Pakistani military activity in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. He notes that, on the one hand, American politicians speak of vital American security interests which are imperiled by Taliban activity in these areas; on the other hand, ongoing fighting in that area is barely making a ripple in the US media.

In his post, he questions whether the US truly has a compelling national security interest in what’s happening in this part of the world:

Although both candidates tie the resurgence of the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan to US domestic security, I personally have difficulty understanding exactly how that works. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the US were planned by Arab expatriates in Hamburg, Germany, and Pushtun tribespeople had almost nothing to do with them (did the Taliban even know what Bin Laden was planning?)

Both McCain and Obama have adopted Bushspeak on this issue, allowing W. and Cheney to frame the national debate into the next four years. Bushspeak works by contiguity, by things being next to one another, rather than by causality. Al-Qaeda was in Khost, which was controlled by the Taliban, so ipso facto the Taliban are related to 9/11, and since the Taliban were largely Pushtuns, the Pushtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan are, whenever they rebel against their local government, a dire threat to the US mainland. There are roughly 28 million Pushtuns in northwest Pakistan, and 12 million in Afghanistan. The ones in Pakistan recently rejected the fundamentalist parties for the most part in favor of a secular-leaning Pushtun nationalist party. Many of the ones in Afghanistan are part of, or back, the Karzai government. In my view, tying US national security to Pushtun local politics is magical thinking. The stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan are important, but framing that stability in the terms of a “war on terror[ism]” ignores the dynamics of secular and religious forms of Pushtun national self-assertion.

Words of Hope
Posted on October 27th, 2008 at 1:45 pm by Steve

Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, TN
Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee, on the night before he was killed by a sniper – April 3, 1968. In his speech he imagines that God has offered him the chance to live in any period in history. After reviewing times from Ancient Egypt through the Renaissance and the Great Depression, Dr. King concludes,

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.”

Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee – the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

Apple’s Working to Stop Prop 8 – Are We?
Posted on October 24th, 2008 at 4:36 pm by Steve

Apple Home Page

That’s Apple’s home page, above – they’re putting their opposition to California’s pernicious Proposition 8 front and center. Pretty ballsy for a big corporation, if you ask me, but totally in keeping with their corporate philosophy. It makes me wonder, though – what are we doing about Proposition 8?

Frankly, I haven’t done squat. I will admit that I personally don’t feel that the marriage fight belongs front-and-center in what used to be charmingly called the Gay Liberation movement. However, when an organized juggernaut of conservative and religious groups attempts to amend a state constitution to prohibit gay marriage, I get my back up.

Andrew Sullivan has been following the Prop 8 question pretty closely, and has a good post here. He quotes Nate Silver of the Five Thirty Eight polling site as putting Prop 8’s chances at 50-50!

I’m curious – any of you Californians involved in the No on 8 stuff?

Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation
Posted on October 23rd, 2008 at 6:09 pm by Agent B

From the New York Times:

[I]n a tense exchange with Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the committee, Mr. Greenspan conceded a more serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Awesome and Personal InfoViz!
Posted on October 23rd, 2008 at 4:39 pm by Steve

Life Map

This came up as one of the sidebar images on the blog’s home page (it searches Flickr for photos tagged with ‘information’). He calls it a “Life Map,” and it shows his interests, academic and non-academic, apportioned through his life.

The Truth About Colin Powell
Posted on October 23rd, 2008 at 11:58 am by Steve

Major Colin Powell in Vietnam

Like most things in this political season, it’s been disappointing to see progressives get excited about Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Most recently known for his “sales job” at the UN that brought death and destruction to millions of Iraqi civilians, Powell was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980’s, and, as far back as 1968, was busy covering up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Robert Parry published an excerpt of his book Neck Deep that delves into the background of General Powell. It’s worth a read.

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