dutch baklavah: let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

[post title]

"good can imagine evil, but evil cannot imagine good."

"To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love,
The photographing of ravens; all the fun under
Liberty's masterful shadow;
To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician,
The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome;
To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers,
The eager election of chairmen
By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle.
To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs,
The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion;
To-morrow the bicycle races
Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle."

/w.h. auden
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via ny times:

deprogramming jihadists

The Saudi government thus finds itself in the awkward position of needing to defend the principle of jihad to its citizens while discouraging them from actually taking up arms. One step it has taken is simply to talk to those who have proved to be most vulnerable to the temptations of jihad, the captured militants themselves. As Jilani put it to me, “The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has the confidence to fight thoughts with thoughts.”

$585 million fine in lcd price fixing

Three leading flat-screen producers — LG Display of South Korea, Sharp of Japan and Chunghwa Picture Tubes of Taiwan — pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a total of $585 million in criminal fines for their role in fixing the price of liquid-crystal display panels.

the oven is booked. dessert's in the freezer.

Over the years I have learned, by trial and sometimes disastrous error, what can best be made ahead while still guaranteeing success at dessert time. Pastry and cakes, especially those rich in butter, are usually fine candidates for freezing, so if you bake your cakes and pies a week or two before Thanksgiving, you can freeze most of them without fear. Even desserts made the weekend before the holiday are better frozen and then defrosted, rather than refrigerated for four days.

how to fix a flat

Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.

In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition

In short: autism and schizophrenia represent opposite ends of a spectrum that includes most, if not all, psychiatric and developmental brain disorders. The theory has no use for psychiatry’s many separate categories for disorders, and it would give genetic findings an entirely new dimension.

“Think of the grandiosity in schizophrenia, how some people think that they are Jesus, or Napoleon, or omnipotent,” Dr. Crespi said, “and then contrast this with the underdeveloped sense of self in autism. Autistic kids often talk about themselves in the third person.”

the get-out-the-song effort

It’s not that the jingles were great (they weren’t) or that anyone besides my family and friends knew that they were on the radio (they didn’t). Yet I felt I had broken through some invisible wall that the gatekeepers of the music world had put up. There I was, just a young mutt barely paddling upstream. I kept paddling. There was no shore in sight, but at least I was figuring out how to paddle. And I was happy.

anti-gay, anti-family

Social conservatives are threatening to roll out Arkansas-style adoption bans in other states. And the timing couldn’t be worse: in tough economic times, the numbers of abused and neglected children in need of foster care rises. But good times or bad, no movement that would turn away qualified parents and condemn children to a broken foster care system should be considered “pro-family.”

Most ominous, once “pro-family” groups start arguing that gay couples are unfit to raise children we might adopt, how long before they argue that we’re unfit to raise those we’ve already adopted? If lesbian couples are unfit to care for foster children, are they fit to care for their own biological children?

a case of religious discrimination

The federal appeals court reached the right result, but regrettably, it ducked the issue at the heart of the case, which turns on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The real problem is that Pleasant Grove City elevated one religion, traditional Christianity, over another, Summum. The founders regarded this sort of religious preference as so odious that they included a specific provision in the First Amendment prohibiting it. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has a bad record on Establishment Clause cases, which made it easier for all of the parties to treat the case as a simple speech case.
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laist told me so:

County of LA Join Lawsuit Against Prop 8, ACLU Laywer Makes a Great Case

The very title of Proposition 8 states its constitutional defect. Its title is, “Eliminates the Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.” Proposition 8 takes away what our constitution guarantees as a fundamental right. It works a breathtaking diminution of the value of our constitution itself: by allowing voters to completely revise core constitutional principles, Proposition 8 sets a dangerous precedent that all our constitutional protections – the right to free speech, the right to equal protection of the law, and others – exist only for so long as majorities vote yes on them. If it stands, it will suggest that any fundamental rights can be revoked on a bare majority vote, regardless of what our constitution otherwise guarantees.

californians like chickens more than gay people

Many of these older voters grew up in a time where gays had little voice or little representation in the world, and so for them the issue might be a little more difficult than the open environment you grew up in regarding homosexuality or other moral issues. When you don't have exposure to these sort of ideas when you are younger, you are less likely to embrace them in the future. The times they lived in had different moral standards than the times we live in now.

jimi's drummer is gone

Mitchell had been reliving the past while drumming for the Experience Hendrix Tour. Jimi Hendrix, probably the most influential rock guitarist of all time, died tragically in 1970 at the age of 27 of asphyxiation. Noel Redding passed away in 2003 at 57 due to liver failure. It appears Mitchell died of natural causes, although an autopsy will take place. He was 61.

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when was the last time you had a good, hearty vomit all over yourself?
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(this one ultimately seems to be the most misguided of the ones posted here. is she attempting to inform people of god's feelings about america, thereby willing them to change their actions and appease him so he loves us again? perhaps her shirt implies she's a french aristocrat or an active participant in the daily goings-on of buckingham palace? is she an ironic atheist?)

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solar flare 1

solar flare 2

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ANGST
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i took a class about the biology of aging and it was fascinating. one of the more interesting things i learned about was apoptosis, or programmed cell death. unlike the function of telomeres, which essentially determine the length of a cell's life by keeping a sort of biological tally on how many times a cell has reproduced, apoptosis is a process by which cells start out with an intended point of self-destruction, sort of like a muslim infidel with a suicide mission, but that infidel is a member of a universally unwanted community and it's attacking itself. good news for everyone involved. apoptosis is necessary for the separation of fingers, toes, eyelids, lips, and all other parts of the human body that intially started out as one big clump of stem cells.

i mention this because i had two friends growing up with syndactyly, and it always fascinated me. one of them had tiny, malformed fingers on her tiny, right hand, and the other had her second and third toes fused together, which is nowhere near as gross as it sounds, and actually kind of endearing in that weird-nonhazardous-mutation kind of way.

related: polydactyly is cool in some cases.