Last Straw

Amy Wal­lace writ­ing for Wired: An Epi­demic of Fear: How Pan­icked Par­ents Skip­ping Shots Endangers Us All:
The rejec­tion of hard-won know­ledge is by no means a new phe­nomenon. In 1905, French math­em­atician and sci­ent­ist Henri Poin­caré said that the will­ing­ness to embrace pseudo-science flour­ished because people “know how cruel the truth often is, and we won­der whether […]

Chan­nel 4’s Dis­patches last night: Do You Know What’s in Your Break­fast? A reminder that, in capitalism, it’s not the job of the food industry to provide good healthy food. Their job is to make as much money by whatever means neces­sary, even if that means sneak­ing copi­ous amounts of sat­ur­ated fat, sugar and salt into […]

They invade and lay waste another coun­try, des­troy the lives of mil­lions of Iraqis for gen­er­a­tions to come, all on some trumped up drivel about “weapons of mass destruc­tion.”
Now they’re arguing over the real reason. Oil. It’s not enough that con­trol of Iraq’s crude is being div­vied up amongst the cap­it­al­ists of the world. Thomas […]

This is a clip from Fra­gile Para­dise, the first in a series of doc­u­ment­ar­ies by the BBC called South Pacific.
This is the first video I’ve pos­ted using the new <video> tag of HTML5, which does away with the need for browser plu­gins (e.g. Quick­time, Flash and Real­player). You do, how­ever, need a mod­ern browser such as Fire­fox, Safari or […]

Guard­ian gagged from report­ing UK par­lia­ment:
The Guard­ian has been pre­ven­ted from report­ing par­lia­ment­ary pro­ceed­ings on legal grounds which appear to call into ques­tion priv­ileges guar­an­tee­ing free speech estab­lished under the 1688 Bill of Rights.
Update: Trafigura drops bid to gag Guard­ian over MP’s question.

Sirocco the Kakapo, a nat­ive par­rot of New Zea­l­and, gets frisky. An extract from Stephen Fry’s and Mark Carwardine’s new BBC doc­u­ment­ary, Last Chance to See:

(via Fro­gb­log)

When a gov­ern­ment as deeply cor­rupt as the U.S. retains the label of demo­cracy you really have to won­der if the word still has any mean­ing.
No Right Turn on how bribery  —  oth­er­wise known in the U.S. as “cam­paign contributions”  —  has turned health care reforms into a fas­cist money-making ven­ture for private insur­ance com­pan­ies.
Bring­ing this into a New […]

With cur­rent events this is a must read for any Westerner.

Infographic com­par­ing rel­at­ive spend­ing of vari­ous multi-billion-dollar budgets. Keep it in mind next time you con­sider vot­ing for any of the major polit­ical entit­ies that have helped cre­ate such a world.
(via Dar­ing Fireball)