What is wrong with people?
Our thoughts and prayers go out to those in Boston.
Here are some resources we’ve gathered so far.
- Looking for a runner? Use this form.
- If you’re trying to call someone in Boston, phone lines are jammed. SMS, Twitter, and Facebook might work better. [Lifehacker]
- Live news updates on The Verge
Episode 01;
The Spoken Blurb—A Rape In India.
Today’s podcast discusses the bus rape incident that occurred in India, and then goes into a more general discussion about rape culture, victim blaming, and knowledge + a multitude of voices = power in fighting back.
Here are two articles I’ve referenced in particular in the podcast.
Update (12/27/12): Another article that ties into the issues spoken about this podcast. Read on.
(The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School had) nothing to do with God or Satan. It has everything to do with an even more powerful force: the NRA.
I ask you to think for moment and imagine the scene at Sandy Hook Elementary. I want you to think of the weapons involved. The man who murdered the 20 children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook didn’t simply point his gun, pull the trigger, and somehow magically they fell down dead like a nameless Stormtrooper.
The gun is a powerful and devastating weapon. It is not a magic wand. It’s wounds are not those of a scalpel, clean and precise. It’s destructive powers are clumsy and careless and cruel. And it’s this ability to take another’s life in the simplest manner possible that NRA believes is our most precious right. It is the one that must be protected over all others, including our right to worship who and what we want to.
The folks at the NRA don’t want to live in a world of peace. They want to live in a world in which madmen walk into schools and malls and movie theaters and begin to randomly kill, maim, and terrify innocent men, women, and children. There is a heartlessness in them that is every bit as strong as the evil men who commit these senseless crimes. After all, when the NRA was asked for a comment on yesterday’s tragedy, they did not express sorrow. They did not offer condolences to the families whose lives had been horribly changed. Instead, the NRA said they had no comment.
The truth of the matter is that many in the NRA long for the day when they’ll finally get the chance to gun down a home invader or a mugger or someone like the savage soul who murdered the children of Sandy Hook Elementary.
But what they want most of all is to use their guns for the reasons they were made: to kill another human being. And not only do they believe that there is value in having the ability to end another person’s life, they believe that doing so will be an affirmation of their beliefs. It will be their redemption.
And that, my friends, is true evil.
"The NRA probably has been plotting out how to best say “If people at the school were armed, this never would have happened” since the first minutes after the shootings.
(via inothernews)
- has killed one member of that family
- and reportedly has led to the death of this nurse
- but yaaaaaaay, Kate’s pregnant
- and tourism
- and bullshit
Tens of thousands of Egyptian protesters surged around the presidential palace on Friday and the opposition rejected President Mohamed Mursi’s call for dialogue to end a crisis that has polarized the nation and sparked deadly clashes.
The Islamist leader’s deputy said he could delay a December 15 referendum on a constitution that liberals opposed, although the concession only partly meets a list of opposition demands that include scrapping a decree that expanded Mursi’s powers.
“The people want the downfall of the regime” and “Leave, leave,” crowds chanted after bursting through barbed wire barricades and climbing on tanks guarding the palace of Egypt’s first freely elected president.
READ ON: Protesters surge around Egypt’s presidential palace
