mumble mumble

"It’s like watching an episode of The Simpsons, quite frankly. Although I think Mayor Quimby actually..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:27:46 -0400

“It’s like watching an episode of The Simpsons, quite frankly. Although I think Mayor Quimby actually has more integrity.”

- Councillor Adam Vaughan on Rob Ford (via tramampoline)

19 Things Worth Knowing About Toronto's Crack-Smoking Mayor, Rob Ford

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:18:18 -0400

19 Things Worth Knowing About Toronto's Crack-Smoking Mayor, Rob Ford:

iaryl:

Rob Ford has gotten into approximately 1 million controversies.

A piece quite rightly filed under ‘other countries’ embarrassments’. How the fuck has this guy stayed in office since 2000?!!!

thepensivebrony: “you shouldn’t be depressed, people have it worse than you” finally, after years...

Fri, 17 May 2013 15:15:14 -0400

thepensivebrony:

“you shouldn’t be depressed, people have it worse than you”

finally, after years of searching, the person with the worst life ever is found. formally, they are granted permission to be sad. but only them. only they have earned it. no sads for anyone else at all ever

10knotes: trugazi: this is the internal anatomy of cows as far...

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:00:41 -0400

10knotes:

trugazi:

this is the internal anatomy of cows as far as i’m concerned

"The most significant differences between those who smoked marijuana and those who never or no longer..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:59:29 -0400

“The most significant differences between those who smoked marijuana and those who never or no longer did was that current smokers’ insulin levels were reduced by 16 percent and their insulin resistance (a condition in which the body has trouble absorbing glucose from the bloodstream) was reduced by 17 percent.”

- The Atlantic’s Lindsay Abrams, reporting on the results of a recent study on the health effects of marijuana. In addition, regular pot smokers were skinnier than those who abstained, “even after adjusting for factors like age, sex, tobacco and alcohol use, and physical activity levels,” and had higher levels of HDL (“good cholesterol”). source (via shortformblog)

iwouldbutfuckyou: fixthatweave: Get me a plate of these and...

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:08:29 -0400

iwouldbutfuckyou:

fixthatweave:

Get me a plate of these and the panties will just evaporate

LMAO^^

hungryghoast: this is it

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:17:31 -0400

hungryghoast:

this is it

inothernews: Photographer Steve Lindon captured this stunning...

Wed, 15 May 2013 13:15:37 -0400

inothernews:

Photographer Steve Lindon captured this stunning image of a rainbow — or rainstripe? — seemingly piercing through cloud cover in Herefordshire, England. (via the Telegraph)

Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:23:28 -0400

Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life':

the-lone-pamphleteer:

by Jacob Chamberlain for commondreams.org

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday in favor of biotech giant Monsanto, ordering Indiana farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman, 75, to pay Monsanto more than $84,000 for patent infringement for using second generation Monsanto seeds purchased second hand—a ruling which will have broad implications for the ownership of ‘life’ and farmers’ rights in the future.

In the case, Bowman had purchased soybean seeds from a grain elevator—where seeds are cheaper than freshly engineered Monsanto GE (genetically engineered) seeds and typically used for animal feed rather than for crops. The sources of the seeds Bowman purchased were mixed and were not labeled. However, some were “Roundup Ready” patented Monsanto seeds.

The Supreme Court Justices, who gave Monsanto a warm reception from the start, ruled that Bowman had broken the law because he planted seeds which naturally yielded from the original patented seed products—Monsanto’s policies prohibit farmers from saving or reusing seeds from Monsanto born crops.

Farmers who use Monsanto’s seeds are forced to buy the high priced new seeds every year.

Ahead of the expected ruling, Debbie Barker, Program Director for Save Our Seeds (SOS), and George Kimbrell, staff attorney for Center for Food Safety (CFS), asked in an op-ed earlier this year, “Should anyone, or any corporation, control a product of life?”:

Bowman vs. Monsanto Co. will be decided based on the court’s interpretation of a complex web of seed and plant patent law, but the case also reflects something much more basic: Should anyone, or any corporation, control a product of life?

[Monsanto’s] logic is troubling to many who point out that it is the nature of seeds and all living things, whether patented or not, to replicate. Monsanto’s claim that it has rights over a self-replicating natural product should raise concern. Seeds, unlike computer chips, for example, are essential to life. If people are denied a computer chip, they don’t go hungry. If people are denied seeds, the potential consequences are much more threatening.

Bowman had argued that he was respecting his contract with Monsanto, purchasing directly from them each year, but couldn’t afford Monsanto’s high prices for his riskier late season crops. Bowman’s defense argued that Monsanto’s patent was “exhausted” through the process of natural seed reproduction and no longer applied to Bowman’s second generation seeds.

“If they don’t want me to go to the elevator and buy that grain,” Bowman had stated, “then Congress should pass a law saying you can’t do it.”

The Center for Food Safety released a report in February which shows three corporations control more than half of the global commercial seed market.

As a result, from 1995-2011 the average cost to plant 1 acre of soybeans rose 325%.

As AP reports, more than 90 percent of American soybean farms use Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” seeds, which first came on the market in 1996.

Vandana Shiva, an expert on seed patents and their effects on farmers around the world, wrote recently:

Monsanto’s concentrated control over the seed sector in India as well as across the world is very worrying. This is what connects farmers’ suicides in India to Monsanto vs Percy Schmeiser in Canada, to Monsanto vs Bowman in the US, and to farmers in Brazil suing Monsanto for $2.2 billion for unfair collection of royalty.

Through patents on seed, Monsanto has become the “Life Lord” of our planet, collecting rents for life’s renewal from farmers, the original breeders.

[See other Lone Pamphleteer posts about Monsanto and watch a trailer for the documentary David vs. Monsanto.]

deducecanoe: arcoirisamor: dominantlife: fuckyeahsexyatheists:...

Wed, 15 May 2013 06:18:20 -0400

deducecanoe:

arcoirisamor:

dominantlife:

fuckyeahsexyatheists:

jaqen-hghars:

tyleroakley:

Well this is awkward.

#the best argument against the bible is the bible

“The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible.” — Mark Twain

π

thank you whoever put this up. you dont even need to argue the bible people just need to read it and realize we are living in 2013 things have changed.

Well… this is awkward.

The "Jewish" Sticker, Israel, And Democratic Values

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:47:01 -0400

letterstomycountry:

Palestinian-Israeli celebrity Mira Awad recently wrote a post on her facebook account about the patronizing experience of receiving a “Jewish” sticker on her passport at Ben-Gurion airport. Ami Kaufman helpfully translated Awad’s post into English:

So, I was checked at the airport, they asked the questions, put the stickers on, and I proceeded to the X-Ray machine. Suddenly, the young security man comes to me: “Mira? Mira Awad?”

Me: “Yes?”

Security man: “Can I see your passport? There’s a mistake with the sticker.”

I almost told him: “No, you’re not mistaken, I see you put the right one on — the sticker for Arabs”, but I didn’t say that (security people have their humor extracted during their preparatory course). I gave him my passport, he opens it, takes off the sticker in the passport and on the suitcase and puts on a new one, different, the same color but smaller.

Now the dilemma. On the one hand it’s obvious the young man has just made my life easier by putting on the sticker for Jews. On the other hand, it’s one of the things that it’s hard to say thanks for. I mean, thank you for not considering me a terrorist any more? Thanks that someone whispered to you, “it’s Mira Awad,” so the “Awad” isn’t scary anymore? Thanks for upgrading me to a Class A citizen? I turned into one of “ours,” or actually one of “yours.” A small sticker that carries with it such huge humiliation, and today even enfolds stupidity. Because since they cancelled the stickers with different colors, which we protested, they made new stickers with less recognizable differences to the inexperienced eye, and here they are embarrassing themselves with unaware patronizing like, “Let’s award you with the status of a privileged person!” — so you don’t say that we aren’t humane. By the way, it happen[e]d to me also last week, when a senior security man who wanted to “show off” (maybe you’ll say he wanted to joke around, but we’ve already concluded that he doesn’t know how to joke around, see earlier “extraction of humor”) and asked one of his employees to get me one of the “regular” stickers and then winked at me as he continued to speak him: “Can’t you see it’s Mira Awad?”

So, the conclusion is, if you’re Israeli and your name is Awad – you better be famous! If not, forget about the duty free! Yalla, I’m out of here. For now.

Critics of the Israeli government often refer to it as an “apartheid” state. This is understandably met with harsh reproach by the “pro-Israel” crowd. Anytime one uses the word “apartheid,” images of the cruel, racist apartheid South Africa regime immediately follow. Clearly, nobody wants to be compared to the unjust regime that Nelson Mandela spent much of his life fighting to dismantle.

But when you are dealing with a state that applies different legal standards to groups of people under its jurisdiction based on their ethnicity, it is difficult to know what else to call it. +972 Magazine has an excellent series called Visualizing Occupation, in which they showcase exactly how Israel’s legal system treats Palestinian and Israeli citizens differently for the same behavior. Avner Gvaryahu, an Israeli citizen and former IDF soldier, described his experience in frank terms:

We created a situation [in the Palestinian Territories] that, de facto, there is never a possibility for equality. You’re talking about … together with East Jerusalem … half a million Jewish settlers that are under Israeli civilian law. And two and a half million Palestinians that are under army law, under martial law … they’ll never be equal. If you have two people who meet in the heart of Hebron, both at the same exact moment, pick up a rock and throw it at each other, and one is Palestinian and one is Israeli, the Israeli will be tried under civilian law. The Palestinian will be tried as a Terrorist, for doing the exact same thing.

Judith Butler (who is Jewish), noted back in February:

Presently, there are at least twenty laws that privilege Jews over Arabs within the Israeli legal system. The 1950 Law of Return grants automatic citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the world upon request, while denying that same right to Palestinians who were forcibly dispossessed of their homes in 1948 or subsequently as the result of illegal settlements and redrawn borders. Human Rights Watch has compiled an extensive study of Israel’s policy of “separate, not equal” schools for Palestinian children. … Palestinians are barred from military service, and yet access to housing and education still largely depends on military status. Families are divided by the separation wall between the West Bank and Israel, with few forms of legal recourse to rights of visitation and reunification. The Knesset debates the “transfer” of the Palestinian population to the West Bank, and the new loyalty oath requires that anyone who wishes to become a citizen pledge allegiance to Israel as Jewish and democratic, thus eliding once again the non-Jewish population and binding the full population to a specific and controversial, if not contradictory, version of democracy.

This unequal treatment before the law is one of the problems with establishing a state where the welfare of one group of citizens is placed above all others in a nation state. Hagai El-Ad, writing for Haaretz back in January, described this as “the shadow of the occupation:”

The shadow of the occupation looms heavily on the coming “national, direct, equal, and proportional” elections in Israel. How free and open are elections in a count[r]y in which, now for more than two-thirds of its history, millions of the people under its control do not even have a vote? And in the present elections, those who do get to vote will likely elect a parliament that will further expand that very same anti-democratic shadow, in both old and new ways – on both sides of the Green Line.”

Joseph Levine (who is also Jewish) opined in March that it was impossible for Israel to be a truly democratic state so long as it defines itself as a “Jewish” state. In doing so, it relegates all Jewish Israeli citizens to privileged status, and all non-Jewish Israeli citizens are relegated to badges of inferiority:

If the institutions of a state favor one ethnic group among its citizenry … then only the members of that group will feel themselves fully a part of the life of the state. True equality, therefore, is only realizable in a state that is based on civic peoplehood. As formulated by both Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli activists on this issue, a truly democratic state that fully respects the self-determination rights of everyone under its sovereignty must be a “state of all its citizens.”

This fundamental point exposes the fallacy behind the common analogy, drawn by defenders of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, between Israel’s right to be Jewish and France’s right to be French. The appropriate analogy would instead be between France’s right to be French (in the civic sense) and Israel’s right to be Israeli.

This is precisely the phenomenon that Mira Awad experienced at Ben-Gurion airport. Airport officials thought they were doing her a favor by giving her a “Jewish” sticker. Instead, they were implicitly telling Awad that her native ethnicity was inferior—that, in effect, she would be better off if she were Jewish.

Opposition to this sort of inequality of condition has a rich history in the Jewish diaspora. Here is Butler again, responding to some of her critics last August:

I am a scholar who gained an introduction to philosophy through Jewish thought, and I understand myself as defending and continuing a Jewish ethical tradition that includes figures such as Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. I received a Jewish education in Cleveland, Ohio at The Temple under the tutelage of Rabbi Daniel Silver where I developed strong ethical views on the basis of Jewish philosophical thought. I learned, and came to accept, that we are called upon by others, and by ourselves, to respond to suffering and to call for its alleviation. But to do this, we have to hear the call, find the resources by which to respond, and sometimes suffer the consequences for speaking out as we do. I was taught at every step in my Jewish education that it is not acceptable to stay silent in the face of injustice. Such an injunction is a difficult one, since it does not tell us exactly when and how to speak, or how to speak in a way that does not produce a new injustice, or how to speak in a way that will be heard and registered in the right way. My actual position is not heard by these detractors, and … [i]t is untrue, absurd, and painful for anyone to argue that those who formulate a criticism of the State of Israel is anti-Semitic or, if Jewish, self-hating.

This tradition can be found in American politics as well. Al Franken relates the following story on Pages 262–263 of Lies and the Lying Liars who tell them: a Fair and Balanced look at the Right:

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he is said to have turned to an aide and remarked, “We have just lost the South for a generation.” The Republican Party became the home to Southern bigots and still is today.

While the Democratic Party lost the South that year, they did gain my dad. A lifelong Republican who voted for Herbert Hoover and every GOP presidential candidate through Nixon, Dad switched parties in 1964 because the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, had voted against the Civil Rights Act. Dad, a card-carrying member of the NAACP, always told us that Jews couldn’t be against civil rights. He never voted Republican again.

This Jewish ethical tradition of multi-sectional tolerance and of protecting and preserving civil rights of one’s neighbor is a tradition that one hopes will once again rise to the fore and inform the policy of the Israeli government in the occupied territories and elsewhere. The January 2013 elections have pulled the Knesset back towards the center, but Netanyahu still managed to put together a coalition government. Meanwhile, settlements continue be built, Palestinian villages continue to be demolished, and much legal discrimination continues unabated.

These actions aren’t compatible with a state guided by democratic values. One of the grand promises made by virtually every democratic society is equality before the law for all citizens. And until Mira Awad can walk into Ben-Gurion Airport without worrying about whether she has a Jewish sticker on her passport, the Israeli government will have difficulty living up to that promise.

Update: an earlier version of this post misstated the results of Israel’s January 2013 elections for Israel’s Kadima party. Post has been updated to reflect this (Thanks to Ari Kohen for keeping me honest).

iannorris: In response to Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:38:50 -0400

iannorris:

In response to Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries not wanting “not so cool” kids or women who wear size large to wear his company’s clothes, Greg Karber has come up with a funny and creative way to readjust the Abercrombie & Fitch brand.

He’s giving their clothes to the homeless.

After scouring his local thrift shop’s “douchebag section,” Karber heads to LA’s Skid Row to dole out the clothes among the homeless population. Watch the stunt and find out how you can be involved in one man’s troll-job on a company with some pretty unflattering business practices in the video above.

Via Tastefully Offensive

Photo

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:33:26 -0400

climateadaptation: Road crews tear down Mayan pyramid to make...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:23:07 -0400

climateadaptation:

Road crews tear down Mayan pyramid to make gravel.

Belizean police are investigating a construction company that has destroyed most of one of the largest Mayan pyramids in the Caribbean nation to make gravel to dump on village roads, according to reports from the Caribbean.

Archaeologists and a local TV station witnessed the destruction Friday as bulldozers and excavators continued to demolish the 60-foot-tall main temple at Nohmul — “great mound” — one of the tallest structures in northern Belize, along the Mexican border in the Yucatan Peninsula.

“We can’t salvage what has happened out here,” John Morris, of the Institute of Archaeology, told 7 News Belize. “It is an incredible display of ignorance. I am appalled.” A news crew was threatened by a man with a machete as dump trucks hauled away rock and limestone from the temple, which has been “whittled down to a narrow core,” the TV station said.

A Caterpillar excavator was photographed tearing down what was left of the limestone-rich ruins. “It’s like being punched in the stomach, it’s just so horrendous,” Jamie Awe, head of the institute, told the Associated Press. “These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It’s just bloody laziness.”

The pre-Colombian site is about 2,500 years old and consists of twin ceremonial clusters surrounded by 10 plazas and connected by a raised causeway. Mayans used stone tools to quarry the rock and build the complex by hand. An estimated 40,000 people are believed to have lived there between 500 and 250 BC.

More of these incidents to come in the years ahead as population growth outweighs the need to protect resources.

rosalarian: Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy, in case you...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:02:22 -0400

rosalarian:

Angelina Jolie had a double mastectomy, in case you hadn’t heard. How dare she remove those ticking time bombs from her chest, amiright? Like, hasn’t she learned by now that her body is public domain and we all get to vote on what she does with it? Sheesh, how selfish can ya get.

Angry Maserati owner destroys $430,000 car with sledgehammer |...

Tue, 14 May 2013 16:18:21 -0400

Angry Maserati owner destroys $430,000 car with sledgehammer | wheels.ca

The owner was apparently unhappy with Furi Group, the company responsible for Maserati distribution in the Qingdao area, because they allegedly repaired his $430,000 Quattroporte with second-hand parts rather than the new parts he paid for and did not make all the repairs he requested.

This supercar-smashing is becoming something of a bizarre tradition at the Qingdao Auto Show. The China Car Times says a Lamborghini owner smashed his exotic ride at the show in 2011 to protest apparent dissatisfaction with Lamborghini China, even though he had bought the car second-hand from Germany.

And here’s a video of that Gallardo-smashing:

devilduck: Bathtub soup.

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:47:15 -0400

devilduck:

Bathtub soup.

"There is more at stake here than just a farmer and his few customers — this is about the fundamental..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:46:50 -0400

“There is more at stake here than just a farmer and his few customers — this is about the fundamental right of farmers and consumers to engage in peaceful, private, mutually consenting agreements for food, without additional oversight.”

- Farmer Faces Over 2 Years Jail, $10K Fines for Feeding Community (via thakate)

We’re so screwed.

(via apoplecticskeptic)

kateoplis: Back on earth

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:23:31 -0400

kateoplis:

Back on earth

Photo

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:20:34 -0400