1. 051712

    A short film by two Pakistani students on US drone attacks in Pakistan and their impact on society has won an international film award, however they were refused US visa twice to receive the award in Washington.

    mehreenkasana:

    The 20-minute short film revolves around the idea of assessing social, psychological and economical affects on people from the tribal areas of Pakistan. The film identified problems that families face after becoming victims of drone missiles.

    Hypocrisy in American policy. Evident and thriving. More power to these young Pakistanis.

    (via randomactsofchaos)

     

  2. invisiblelad: fyeahblackhistory: kemetically-ankhtified: Remember 68 year old ex-Marine Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. who accidentally called for medical help and was later murdered in his own home by White Plains, NY police? Well, the murderer, Anthony Carelli, will NOT be facing ANY charges. Click here for a interview with his son. This makes me physically ill, every time I see this story, and am again reminded that we live in such a world where every bit of evidence can be sumarily ignored by the system that props up, and entitles such brutality. We tell ourselves that everything a policeman does is either in service of the social good, or an attempt to protect themselves. We write off their behavior when they’re…breaking down doors, tazering old men with conditions, as they’re trying to explain they’re fine. All while calling them slurs and finding their torment and fear perfectly amusing.  We live in a culture where institutionalized cruelty is written off as “following procedure”. This is a nauseating indictment of a system that refuses to examine (or dare I say police itself) itself in the slightest.

    invisiblelad:

    fyeahblackhistory:

    kemetically-ankhtified:

    Remember 68 year old ex-Marine Kenneth Chamberlain Sr. who accidentally called for medical help and was later murdered in his own home by White Plains, NY police?

    Well, the murderer, Anthony Carelli, will NOT be facing ANY charges.

    Click here for a interview with his son.

    This makes me physically ill, every time I see this story, and am again reminded that we live in such a world where every bit of evidence can be sumarily ignored by the system that props up, and entitles such brutality. We tell ourselves that everything a policeman does is either in service of the social good, or an attempt to protect themselves. We write off their behavior when they’re…breaking down doors, tazering old men with conditions, as they’re trying to explain they’re fine. All while calling them slurs and finding their torment and fear perfectly amusing. 

    We live in a culture where institutionalized cruelty is written off as “following procedure”. This is a nauseating indictment of a system that refuses to examine (or dare I say police itself) itself in the slightest.

    (via randomactsofchaos)

     

  3. That means we are going to have to encourage more persons with disabilities to work, more seniors to work, more aboriginal people to work, including young people. We need to get rid of disincentives in the employment insurance system to people joining the workforce.
    — 

    There are no bad jobs, Flaherty says - Canada - CBC News

    “Getting rid of disincentives” has got to be one of the weirder double negatives to come out of this new Conservative ideology. They seriously think the best way to address labor shortages is by cutting services to seniors, native groups and the disabled? I don’t even pretend to understand anymore. 

    (via aaronleaf)

    So basically, let the most vulnerable people straight up starve and they’ll do whatever it takes to survive, right? Coz any job is a good job when you will literally die without it.

    Yes, this is the world I want to live in, a social-darwinist dream.

    (via becoming-wave)

    (via becoming-wave)

     

  4. randomactsofchaos:

    Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence

    Rachel Maddow exposes Timothy Johnson, the former Vice Chair of the the North Carolina Republican party and one of the signatories of a letter to congress that strongly urges Republicans not to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, as a domestic violence abuser:

    “He got a suspended sentence of 18 months in prison after admitting to beating his wife into the hospital, breaking her nose, breaking her toes, breaking a piece of furniture over her back. Police found his wife in the couple’s home on Christmas Day, bleeding from the face and suffering from other injuries. He plead guilty to felony aggravated assault in that case. He is now one of the signatories to the vote against the Violence Against Women Act letter, right? It’s a letter signed by him and by all those groups that have the word ‘values’ in their names.”

     

  5. treehugger: Whoa. Imagine going on a hike and walking up on these incredible sculptures. Trippy! Learn more about the artist here: Guerrilla Tree Sculptor Takes Over UK Town

    treehugger:

    Whoa. Imagine going on a hike and walking up on these incredible sculptures. Trippy! Learn more about the artist here: Guerrilla Tree Sculptor Takes Over UK Town

    (via cancerninja)

     

  6. shortformblog: Here’s the Republican anti-Obama playbook, everybody A Republican political branding group, Strategic Perception Inc., is working on releasing a ton of anti-Obama salvo in September or so in the form of a film titled “Next,” in an effort to make the president look as bad as humanly possible — bringing up such good memories as Jeremiah Wright and the one time that he shook hands with the Russian president. (The voiceover they want to use? Jon Voight.) But Republican ad strategist Fred Davis, working with TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, didn’t count on one thing: The New York Times got a hold of it first. Read the whole document describing the ad. It’s comedic.

    shortformblog:

    Here’s the Republican anti-Obama playbook, everybody

    A Republican political branding group, Strategic Perception Inc., is working on releasing a ton of anti-Obama salvo in September or so in the form of a film titled “Next,” in an effort to make the president look as bad as humanly possible — bringing up such good memories as Jeremiah Wright and the one time that he shook hands with the Russian president. (The voiceover they want to use? Jon Voight.) But Republican ad strategist Fred Davis, working with TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, didn’t count on one thing: The New York Times got a hold of it first. Read the whole document describing the ad. It’s comedic.

     

  7. (via freshphotons)

     

  8. Blood-filled needles create anxiety in Sherbrooke

     

  9. Today - Jasper Sloan Yip

     

  10. 051612

    Grand Chief Derek Nepinak was dismayed by comments made by Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney about a report on access to food in Canada by the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food.

    Olivier Schutter completed his 11-day official visit to Canada by delivering a preliminary report in Ottawa Wednesday morning. Canada is the first developed nation De Schutter has visited.

    He said Canada is basking in the glow of its wealthy while nearly two million Canadians are left to wonder where there next meal is coming from.

    “I have to say my concerns are extremely severe, and I don’t see why I should mince my words,” he said.

    He said Canada is ignoring its obligations under several UN conventions under which the government has a responsibility to protect the right to food. The country needs a national right to food strategy.

    But Aglukkaq said De Schutter was “patronizing” and “ill-informed” and Kenney said he was wasting his time in Canada when there are countries out there with real famines.

    — Ottawa turning blind eye to hunger, poverty: Grand Chief - Winnipeg Free Press

    (Source: )

     

     poverty  Conservatives  Tories  Leona Aglukkaq  Jason Kenney 

  11. jtotheizzoe: Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way? First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of. If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here). With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones. This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!   (via Discover Magazine)

    jtotheizzoe:

    Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn

    Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?

    First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.

    If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).

    With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.

    This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!  

    (via Discover Magazine)

     

  12. IP-Address Can’t Even Identify a State, BitTorrent Judge Rules

    infoneer-pulse:

    The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping the United States are in a heap of trouble. After a Florida judge ruled that an IP-address is not a person, a Californian colleague has gone even further in protecting the First Amendment rights of BitTorrent users. The judge in question points out that geolocation tools are far from accurate and that it’s therefore uncertain that his court has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged BitTorrent pirates. As a result, 15 of these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits were dismissed.

    » via TorrentFreak

     

  13. 051512

    Conservatives end four years of denial, plead guilty to illegal campaign spending

    Under the scheme, Elections Canada maintains the Tory party funnelled money for national ads through 67 local candidates, allowing the party to exceed its spending limit and allowing candidates to claim rebates on expenses they hadn’t actually incurred.

    In an agreed statement of facts, the Crown and the party essentially agreed to disagree on exactly how far over the spending limit the Tories went. The Crown said it was almost $1.4 million; the Tories said it was just over $563,000.

    (Source: wtftory)

     

  14. It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government.
    — 

    Tories admit to closing enviro research group because they disliked results - Winnipeg Free Press

    Oh John Baird, keep on being the worst.

    (via law-schooled)

    OH MY GOD THAT IS NOT HOW SCIENCE WORKS FUCK YOU BAIRD SCIENCE NEEDS THE FREEDOM TO DO ITS THING INDEPENDENT OF GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP OR ITS NOT EVEN SCIENCE FFFFUUAAHAHGGGHGHGHGHGHG. It makes me sick how many organizations are losing their funding simply for daring to approach the issues they deal with in a way that is not in lockstep with conservative ideology. They are gutting EVERY RESEARCH ORGANIZATION dealing with everything from climate and marine science (they also just hacked 1/3 of the funding for Bamfield Marine Science Centre which does an incredible amount of important marine research and is a massive part of hands on university science education in this country) to Indigenous people’s healthcare (NAHO). It’s sick. I wonder who’s next on the chopping block?

    (via becoming-wave)

    (via becoming-wave)

     

  15. thenoobyorker: paxamericana: A Custom-Made, Data-Driven Butt Plug for Each GOP Presidential Candidate Forget everything that’s come before: these data-driven butt plugs are far and away the best use of 3D-printing technology on this side of the 2012 presidential campaign. Grand Ole Party is a data visualization of voter approval rates, amongst registered republicans, for each of the GOP candidates. It’s also a set of butt plugs. To make them, Matthew Epler culled data from Gallup’s website and used it to create line graphs that represent the fluctuating vote-approval rating of each GOP candidate. Longer plug = longer campaign. Next, the line graphs were imported into a 3D program that turns them into renderings of solid shapes, then a prototype of each one was 3D printed. From the prototypes, molds were made and filled with black silicone: and voila! For $350, you can own the full set of GOP butt plugs. A single unit costs $65 ($45 for Perry or Bachmann, as their campaigns—and thus plugs—were shorter than the rest). Somewhere, I hope, someone is telling Romney: You can take yer approval ratings and shove ‘em straight up yer ass! (Which, if you take a gander at his plug, better be a gaping, Goatse-sized hole.) [Matthew Epler via @holmesdm] Tagged: The New Aesthetic

    thenoobyorker:

    paxamericana:

    A Custom-Made, Data-Driven Butt Plug for Each GOP Presidential Candidate

    Forget everything that’s come before: these data-driven butt plugs are far and away the best use of 3D-printing technology on this side of the 2012 presidential campaign.

    Grand Ole Party is a data visualization of voter approval rates, amongst registered republicans, for each of the GOP candidates. It’s also a set of butt plugs.

    To make them, Matthew Epler culled data from Gallup’s website and used it to create line graphs that represent the fluctuating vote-approval rating of each GOP candidate. Longer plug = longer campaign. Next, the line graphs were imported into a 3D program that turns them into renderings of solid shapes, then a prototype of each one was 3D printed. From the prototypes, molds were made and filled with black silicone: and voila! For $350, you can own the full set of GOP butt plugs. A single unit costs $65 ($45 for Perry or Bachmann, as their campaigns—and thus plugs—were shorter than the rest).

    Somewhere, I hope, someone is telling Romney: You can take yer approval ratings and shove ‘em straight up yer ass! (Which, if you take a gander at his plug, better be a gaping, Goatse-sized hole.) [Matthew Epler via @holmesdm]

    Tagged: The New Aesthetic