A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
I’ve just launched a new podcast called Wikipedia Daily Podcast. The first daily article is on Psychic Surgery (for yesterday). Today’s podcast, which shall be released later, is on Michel Foucault.
Josh Rosenau is criticising the survey that is floating around among pro-science blogs.
Steve Kubby is dangerously ill! Thank the Good Lord for pot prohibitionism! What’s the difference between alcohol prohibition and marijuana prohibition? The former only killed people as a side-effect. The former kills them as one of it’s primary purposes.
Abiola Lapite has good news that you should get in to your head: mobile phones don’t cause cancer. Which part of that statement is difficult for you morons to understand?
Dave Cross is deconstructing the design of the First Direct website.
The FFRF has a quiz on the First Amendment (via MetaFilter).
John C. Dvorak is relaying that E3 booth babes are banned. They’re tacky, but they have a certain aesthetic. “;->”
OPML is all about instant gratification. It’s also just like eating potato chips crisps. The analogy goes too far at a certain point.
Prometheus 6 on Alito.
An Attack of Postmodernism. Postmodernism makes me go soft.
Alison Lurie has an excellent article on Narnia: “Lewis also often spoke of the Chronicles as a means of awakening religious impulses in children who might be turned off by the conventional teachings of Sunday school”.
ex-atheist.com shows quite simply: if you want faith, stop thinking (via MetaFilter).
Austin Cline has got an interesting looking book: “Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany” by Robert A. Krieg.
Pat Hayes: “ID apologists can spin it, they can deny it, they can try to hide it, but there’s nothing they can do to change it. Their supporters will always demand reassurance that ID and God are one, while the legal and political strategy that ID represents demands that they deny it.”
We need more people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Without principles, right becomes left, left becomes right, and only down makes sense anymore. Now to ensure that my sweater is not inside out.
The A-Z of Programmer Predilections. I shalll pass over without comment.
Jody Wheeler is blogging The Amazing Meeting! 4. I particularly like the news that Penn and Teller’s Bullshit! will get two more seasons.
Cobb is pointing towards a survey done of black bloggers by Dr. Antionette Pole from Brown University. It’s an interesting report, and notes that the black bloggers consider the blogosphere to be colour-blind, even if black bloggers are less numerous than they (statistically) ought to be. Perhaps it’s time for the blogging companies to start placing ads on websites with black audiences.
Meg Hourihan has a face-to-filth encounter with the illiteracy demon. I fear we are going to be seeing more of this sort of thing.
Not everyone likes the OPML Editor. Of course, if you don’t like the OPML Editor, then being able to edit your Wordpress blog using it seems fairly useless. But if you do like the OPML Editor, being able to edit your Wordpress blog is rather useful. I run a WordpressMU site. I hate the Wordpress interface compared to the OPML Editor.
That’s good to know: 1 in 4 maths teachers aren’t specialists (read: haven’t studied it at university). Failure? Dropout? Can’t use your head? Teach, for chrissakes, we need to spread mediocrity to an ever wider audience!
Dan Simmons at the BBC on DRM.
Crooked Timber has a good post on blogging and journalists: “What struck me (and what I was going to say) was that the journalists there didn¹t seem to understand how the blogosphere worked at all”.
P. Z. on academia: “The whole point is the people, and that’s why the number one priority of a university is (or ought to be) to fund a community of scholars who are actively involved in sharing their knowledge”. What this analysis fails to realise is that the knowledge that an increasing number of people are sharing is the cultural hermeneutics of David Beckham’s hair style. I think that, on the basis of how academics have allowed themselves to teach such fluff, they almost deserve the management they are getting.
Basement.org on why AJAX is just a tool for a purpose, not an end in itself. Or, as I prefer to say, it don’t mean a thing (if it ain’t got that swing).
Uncommon Sense on democracy and Hamas. I find it very strange when people vote for something good and they then say “See, democracy works!”. Democracy only works if it meets your external presuppositions, not because it’s good in and of itself.
Protect me, government, from my iPod. Of course, the headphones bugger up if you play it too loudly.
Reason Magazine is discussing the “war on sedition” here in the UK and in Oz.
The other day Steve Kubby was moved back to California, arrested and jailed. Mr Kubby is suffering from adrenal cancer. Without the use of marijuana, his body will continue to produce more and more adrenaline until he dies. Marijuana is a safe and effective method for actually treating adrenal cancer.
This man who has done absolutely nothing wrong is being made a martyr by the State of California for the prohibition on marijuana which you, dear reader, help perpetuate.
Let me show you how.
The prohibition of psychoactive recreational drugs is one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. For fear of crack babies and cocaine-snorting twelve-year-olds and other mythological creatures of necessity, we ban people from using, recreationally and medicinally, substances like marijuana which are less dangerous than almost any other.
Drug prohibitionists search for the “holy grail”, a scientific justification for continued prohibition. They know in their heart of hearts that what they are doing in preventing legal access to these substances is one of the greatest immoralities of our age, but refuse to shift their position for fear of appearing inconsistent, for “sending the wrong message” (I so badly want them to try and explain to Steve Kubby’s wife and kids that their beloved husband/father was arrested, imprisoned and, as the story will end without his release, died in order to send a “strong message”!), or giving in on their “law and order” base (as if Mr Kubby were a thief or a vandal or deserving of, to use Mr Blair’s conception, an Anti-Social Behaviour Order).
The Police roam around, sending SWAT teams in to deal with potential cannabis users, shooting them, destroying their property, imprisoning ordinary and loving people. This serves no purpose except satisfying you!
You, obviously, don’t want your kids to use drugs. And so you prevent everybody else from using drugs. Including people like Mr Kubby who is using a drug which, by dint of only it’s cultural status, is illegal but otherwise extremely effective in both pain control and, if his testimony - and that of his doctor - is to be believed, the treatment of cancer.
Similarly, children are getting posioned in South America by the poisons which the US Government spray on coca leaves. But, you know, killing children in South America is so worth it, when we can prevent children in Kensington or the Home Counties (the start and destination of the journey on which I am writing to you) from using pot. Mr Kubby is being sacrified for your capricious and irrational gods.
You people who vote for this continued barbaric prohibitionism make me sick to my stomach. You are the vilest, most hypocritical, morally bankrupt bunch of asslicking motherfuckers I have ever laid eyes upon. If someone torched your houses, I would chalk it up to revenge.
Marijuana is one of the safest and most effective drugs in the world. You talk about a “strong moral message”, but what moral message are we sending to “our children” (and I would never bring a child in to a world when they are to be raised in the company of your type - that would be the worst sort of abuse) by telling them that killing cancer patients like Mr Kubby and poisioning Colombian pre-teens is justified, so long as rich American and European teenagers don’t get access to a relatively harmless mind-altering substance.
I mean, look at all the terrible things that pot brings: a predilection for cartoons and the munchies. Look at the haven of crime that Holland has become. We mustn’t devolve to become a society like that! So, keep that pot criminalised. We can’t have coffeeshops if we are to keep our societies moral.
If you have actually used either your brain or your heart while reading the above (preferably both), then you need to do the following. If you are in the United States, call your Representatives and Senators, and call the State of California. If you are outside the US, call your local American embassy and remind them that the death penalty should not be a punishment for being caught with a drug that’s less addictive and less harmful than beer.
The US Embassy in London’s contact details: there’s, according to Google, an unpublished number - 020 7355 3335. I haven’t tried it, so I can’t guarantee it. The official number is 020 7499 9000.
If you are a Canadian, you should contact your political critters in the normal way to protest the way in which Mr Kubby was handled by the Canadian authorities. If not, contact your local Canadian embassy. In London this is 020 7258 6600. Steve Kubby was extradited from Canada, despite the pleas by his wife that he would be arrested and treated extremely cruelly when he got back to SF (both of which are true).
If Steve Kubby dies in jail (which is fairly likely), it should be on your conscience, drug prohibitionists and you hypocritical shits out there who willingly go along with it.
If you are an American citizen, ignore everything I’ve said today except what I’ve just written about Steve Kubby and what Madge is saying about Samuel Alito. If the Senate confirm Samuel Alito, they will have shot America in the foot. Alito worships executive power, and everyone who wields it. He will be the sort of judge who would rubber-stamp Hitler without a second thought. He will be dangerous for civil liberties, privacy, and so much more. If you are an American citizen, you owe it to yourself, to your children, to whatever damn God you believe in, and just to the very meaning of goodness to help fight the Alito confirmation. That is, unless, you know, you think that fourteen year olds getting strip searched without even a damn warrant (not that a warrant would have helped) is all kosher. Senators who vote for Alito are voting for a police state. That is all. Now get back to watching American Idol.
Headline: “Met chief admits mishandling shooting”. Doesn’t bring Mr de Menezes back to life, alas. Only grabbing a bit of power back from the underachievers-in-uniform will do that.
