Nine Inch Nails knows how to make money without seeming like that's all they're after. When the 2005 album With_Teeth was released, the *whole album* was available to listen to on mySpace. Hordes of NIN fans went out and bought the album ( Read more... )

Just watched a very tough documentary about an OB/GYN in Afghanistan, himself originally an economic refugee to the States from Afghanistan in the 70s. The one hospital he worked at, which was supported by the US dept. of Health & Human services had rotting toilets, and was so low on supplies that they use dirty needles as paper clips. The ( Read more... )

Radio is having a call-in show about women in positions of power, alluding to Hillary Clinton. The usual ideas surfaced, including one woman who said that as a feminist, she won't vote for Clinton because she occupies the narcissistic space that's supposed to be reserved for men. Yeah, OK, whatever ( Read more... )

The internet may have made the global village possible, but in practice it functions much like a bunch of segregated barrios within a megaplex megapolis [wrong suffix lol].

On NPR's Weekend Edition (link Audio avail. after 13:00 EST), a story aired about the Palestinian Holocaust museum. According to the director, Palestinian understanding of the ( Read more... )

Police using tazer against a non-compliant subject in UCLA library in November:
The ensuing discussion at youTube is quite interesting ( Read more... )

The bbc reported on an Indian 800m runner being stripped of her Asian games silver medal after failing a gender test. What really surprised me was that in a radio interview, a doctor pointed out that the test is no longer genetic. Now I understand that a certain genotype can be expressed differently in the body, so genetics *alone* is not ( Read more... )

NPR did a story on PTSD and the lack of mental health care that vets receive. A congressional study found that -- surprise! -- vets are not getting proper mental health care ( Read more... )

In a campaign to get Apple computer to "go organic" Greenpeace writes:Hello, I'm a Mac and iToxic ( Read more... )

Pick 1 For their opening movie of the semester, the film society screened Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". It was better than I thought it would be, and I encourage people to see it when it comes on DVD. The film-makers used a heavy hand to edit autobiographical sketches of Gore into his slide show on global warming. The slide show itself was ( Read more... )

Slightly paraphrased from NPR: "Believe me when I say that I've never even had this conversation before. This is the first time I'm discussing it... I believe we should adhere strictly to the Geneva Conventions... when they are whacking people around in these secret prisons... you don't need blanket advanced aproval for blanket torture... the ( Read more... )