Awesome acapella cover.
Fat Head » Review: Rich Foods Poor Foods: "A friend of mine once lectured me on why I shouldn’t buy milk unless I was sure it came from a cow that wasn’t treated with hormones. The lecture might’ve gone on longer, but she had to step outside to smoke a cigarette. I kid you not. When it comes to improving health, I believe in tackling the big issues first and foremost — like quitting smoking before worrying if your milk came from a hormone-free cow. If we could just convince people to give up sugar, refined grains and chemically-extracted seed oils (the dietary equivalents of smoking, in my opinion), they’d already be far along the path to improved health, even if they buy their meats and eggs at Wal-Mart."
This is great.
Supreme Court shields warrantless eavesdropping law from constitutional challenge | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "The Obama justice department succeeded in convincing the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which vastly expanded the government's authority to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. In the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion, released today, which adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ, while the Court's four less conservative justices (Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) all dissented. This means that the lawsuit is dismissed without any ruling on whether the US government's new eavesdropping powers violate core constitutional rights."
How Not to Withdraw from Afghanistan - By Jim McDermott and Lawrence Wilkerson | Foreign Policy: "Eleven years of costly war have confirmed that there is no military solution in Afghanistan." -- No. Shit.
Is the US maintaining death squads and torture militias in Afghanistan? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "In 2010, as WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to the conduct of the US government, government defenders dismissively claimed that they revealed nothing new. Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in "Frago 242", which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to "note" them...
In Afghanistan on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai alleged that the US is doing something much worse: not merely standing by and watching their trained forces torture and kill, but actively and systematically participating. As the Guardian's Golnar Motevalli reported: "The Afghan government has ordered US special forces to leave one of Afghanistan's most restive provinces, Maidan Wardak, after receiving reports from local officials claiming that the elite units had been involved in the torture and disappearance of Afghan civilians...
A 2009 Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, found as follows regarding Afghanistan:
Dennis Rodman will fix everything.
Dennis Rodman Arrives in North Korea for Tour - NYTimes.com: "Dennis Rodman may not come across as the most natural choice for a sports star turned American diplomat, but North Korea apparently begs to differ. Rodman has traveled to Pyongyang along with three Harlem Globetrotters and a documentary film crew for some basketball exhibitions and, the film company hopes, an audience with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who is said to be a devoted basketball fan."
I have been, literally, on this street. Odd, the random things that turn up in my RSS feed.
The comments are the best part of this article.
Between Seth MacFarlane and the Onion, Oscars night was a festival of misogyny | Hadley Freeman | Comment is free | The Guardian: "...we aren't going to stop telling jokes just to make you feel comfortable. The world does not revolve around your feelings. And your feelings certainly do not trump my right to free speech."
And a lengthier retort. I am so sick and tired of the perpetually and professionally offended.
The Oscar “Fallout” Is A Sham: "Apparently the author and Merriam-Webster have taken a break, because I fail to see any part of the Oscars that exemplified a hatred or dislike of women. Nor did I see any hostility to women in the workplace. Wait, perhaps the heretic boob song? Yes, that must be it. As she explains: "We Saw Your Boobs” was as a song-and-dance routine in which MacFarlane and some grinning guys named actresses in the audience and the movies in which their breasts were visible. That’s about it."
EXACTLY. “That’s about it.” A recitation of facts wherein MacFarlane simply stated the name of the actress, the movie she showed her breasts in, and a chorus of literally “we saw your boobs.” Yet somehow Davidson ascribes not only an ill-natured undertone to it, but an active “hostility” towards women in the workplace. These actresses willingly took off their clothes for their movie roles. Why not be proud of your genetic prowess and show off your aesthetically blessed parts for the world to see? What’s difficult for women who are not revered for their looks to understand is that women enjoy this attention. Attractive women like to feel attractive. Not surprisingly one of the more attractive winners of the night agreed to be part of the skit, showing a pre-recorded feigned surprise (Jennifer Lawrence) at the song..."
There's no such thing as complete safety, let alone a 'safe-space.'
JOSHUTOWN? | Hardcore Zen: "But there is an unstated undercurrent in this demand for safety that bothers me. I feel like one of the most important lessons of the Sasaki case is not that students need to be provided with a perfectly safe environment. It’s that responsibility goes both ways. It is very dangerous to suggest this. If you do you will be accused, as I have been, of excusing the perpetrators and blaming the victims. I do not blame the victims for what they suffered...
The problem is we can’t have an environment so safe that we adults can ever let go and fall backwards into a fluffy warm state of infant-like trust. Babies have no choice but to place their total trust in their parents. Sometimes this trust is misplaced. But babies are powerless to do anything about that. So society steps in and tries to make sure that all parents treat their babies well. Adults don’t have that option. No matter how many committees “with teeth” we put into place to try and make it that way. Again, I often wish we did. In Japan, where I lived for 11 years, many adults place a ridiculous amount of trust in the government to be like surrogate parents. After the debacle following the 2011 tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster a lot of that trust is gone. Which is a good thing."
Hawaiian libertarian: Soluble Synergy: "Eating as much healthy fats in your diet as you can is the key to your health and well being. Fats lead to satiety, nutrient absorption and most importantly of all, protection. The healthy fats will make you thrive. They will protect you from the worst effects of other junk food, alcohol consumption and other poisons you may ingest. The healthy fats protect your liver and give your body the best material to work with when it has to manufacture the hormones, neuro-transmitters, and other substances vital for healthy living."
Fuck the police. Seriously.
Man Charged With Felony for Letting Go of Balloons - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "A 40-year-old man faces felony charges after releasing a dozen heart-shaped, helium-filled balloons to impress his sweetheart...
Other third degree felonies include: aggravated assault, repeated drinking and driving, battery on a law enforcement officer, cocaine possession, and failure to return a rental car."
It's true.
From the comments...
Sequester Facts to Know Before Committing Suicide - Reason.com: "Let some small thing happen that you actually initiated back in 2011, but campaigned against as it was finally coming to fruition in 2013. Blame the GOP for it happening, and then blame all of the subsequent bad consequences of all your other shitty policies on this extremely small to the point of being nearly non-existent cut in the rate of growth of spending. It is idiocy in action. But politically, it's almost brilliant."
Where Does a Cop With an 80-Pound Dog Search? - Reason.com: "Imagine that a police officer, after taking it upon himself to search someone's car, is asked to explain why he thought he would find contraband there. "A little birdie told me," he replies.
Most judges would react with appropriate skepticism to such a claim. But substitute "a big dog" for "a little birdie," and you've got probable cause. Or so says the U.S. Supreme Court, which last week unanimously ruled that "a court can presume" a search is valid if police say it was based on an alert by a dog trained to detect drugs. The Court thereby encouraged judges to accept self-interested proclamations about a canine's capabilities, reinforcing the alarmingly common use of dogs to justify invasions of privacy. Drug-detecting dogs are much less reliable than widely believed, with false-positive error rates as high as 96 percent in the field. A 2006 Australian study found that the rate of unverified alerts by 17 police dogs used to sniff out drugs on people ranged from 44 percent to 93 percent.
Police and prosecutors commonly argue that when a dog alerts and no drugs are found "the dog may not have made a mistake at all," as Justice Elena Kagan put it, writing for the Court. Instead it "may have detected substances that were too well hidden or present in quantities too small for the officer to locate." This excuse is very convenient—and completely unfalsifiable. Furthermore, probable cause is supposed to hinge on whether there is a "fair probability" that a search will discover evidence of a crime. The possibility that dogs will react to traces of drugs that are no longer present makes them less reliable for that purpose."
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