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Daily Archives: May 13, 2008
Racist Anti-Obama Tee Shirt
Marietta tavern owner Mike Norman says the T-shirts he’s peddling, featuring cartoon chimp Curious George peeling a banana, with “Obama in ’08” scrolled underneath, are “cute.” But to a coalition of critics, the shirts are an insulting exploitation of racial stereotypes from generations past.”It’s time to put an end to this,” said Rich Pellegrino, a Mableton resident and director of the Cobb-Cherokee Immigrant Alliance. He was among about 15 people who protested outside Mulligan’s Bar and Grill Tuesday afternoon against the sale of the “racist and highly offensive” shirts.
Express your opinion at this internet poll!Major Hat Tip: Kevin!… where you can read more about it.
Newly Released Hiroshima Photographs
On August 6th, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan by the United States Army. The bomb successfully exploded instantly killing about 80,000 people and destroying a majority of the physical structure of the city.Someone with a camera took a series of photographs of the post-bomb carnage. The film exposed by this photographer was brought to a cave outside of town, where it was later discovered by US serviceman Robert Capp. Capp had the film developed and hung on to the images until 1998, when he donated the film to the Hoover Archives with the provision that the photos not be reproduced for another 10 years.That was ten years ago, and the photographs are now available for you to see. Continue reading Newly Released Hiroshima Photographs
How to totally muck up any effort to enhance national security . The bush way.
We all know torture is bogus. There is no scenario in which we will torture the guy with the launch codes for the missile aimed at the orphanage. That whole scenario is just a bunch of crap.However, torture has been used, by American officials, and since we do have, despite BushCheney’s best efforts, something left, even if tattered and torn, of our constitution, it is likely that captives who were heavily tortured at Gitmo (or elsewhere) will have to either be set free or to have important charges dropped against them.That is likely to happen with what we presume are many inmates who were incarcerated for no good reason. But will it also happen to captives who are pretty darn likely to be real bad guys?Yes, it turns out: Continue reading How to totally muck up any effort to enhance national security . The bush way.
Fedora 9 seems very fine.
There are many versions of Linux. At the deepest level, there are a few fundamentally different Linuxes, and each of these may appear in one or more, sometimes many, different “distributions.” So, most Linux distributions are based on either Debian, RedHat/Fedora, Gentoo, and a couple/few others. Off hand, I’m not sure how many different core systems one has to add together to reach 50%, or 80%, or whatever you like.Ubuntu is based on Debian. Debian is part of the GNU project, and is in some ways the philosophically purest, or main distribution. Many, many people will hate that I said that and comment below, and I look forward to their different perspectives. Continue reading Fedora 9 seems very fine.
Stigma and Mental Illness
There is an interesting and important follow up related to a TED Talk that a lot of readers of this blog found interesting (Sherwin Nuland: A history of electroshock therapy) at The Corpus Callosum:Grappling With Stigma: Influence of Social Media
A while back, Gred Laden and Dr. Shock independently linked to a remarkable video. In it, a famous author-surgeon-professor reveals that he had had an episode of severe depression. Moreover, he underwent treatment with electroconvulsive therapy. It worked, he got back to work, and went on to have a distinguished career. The video can be seen here — Sherwin Nuland: My history of electroshock therapy.His point, I suspect, was really to help destigmatize mental illness. …
Carnivals
Carnival of the Liberals is at SIr Robin Rides AwayCarnival of the Green #127 is at Evangelical EcologistEncephalon #45 – Life Is Good, Brains Are Better is at PodBlack Blog
How Society Will Accept Rational Science: The Best Way to Frame Global Warming and Evolution
There is a point that I’ve been trying to make for the last few weeks now, off and on, and it is not working. So I’m going to try something new. Please bear with me, and consider the following three scenarios regarding the idea that the Earth is Round (or, possibly, flat): Continue reading How Society Will Accept Rational Science: The Best Way to Frame Global Warming and Evolution
Doodle 4 Google
Apparently, Google has been running a contest among K – 12 students in the US to come up with a replacement logo. And now they have 40 finalists and you can vote for the one you like.These are my favorites:
Go HERE to vote.hat tip: Natalie
Internet Poll on Dropping Evolution from School Curriculum in Maine
Is a semi-organized effort to ‘crash’ obnoxious internet polls ethically acceptable? Is it boring? Is it stupid? I sometimes ask myself that question.But it’s complicated and will take a while to work out. In the mean time, PZ Myers points out this poll regarding the recent suggestion by a Maine school board member to drop evolution from the science classroom in his district.(Left side bar, two-thirds of the way down)
Ubuntu Means …
Open Source