Someone draws a straight line. The next person’s task is to trace that line as precisely as possible. Repeat 500 times. The lines get really messy surprisingly fast. As David said, this is a nice demonstration of evolution.
Chaos is just marvelous, no? The entire effort communicates something essential about what it means to be human. Each misplaced contour seems to whisper the immortal words of Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Tamar Szabó Gendler questions the role of authorship and whether Dumbledore is gay:
As far as textual evidence goes, it’s clear that “Dumbledore is gay” is not a primary truth in Harry Potter: that sentence appears nowhere in the 4,100 or so canonical pages. So the question is whether it is a secondary truth. … [O]ur best evidence here is what Rowling herself said. But why should that matter? As readers have complained: “If the series is truly at an end, then the author no longer possesses the authority to create new thoughts, feelings, and realities for those characters. And, indeed, this sort of view of authorial authority is held by a number of leading critics of authorial intent. They point out that language is a social creation, and that authors do not have the power simply to make words mean what they choose. By this reasoning, it’s not up to Rowling to say whether Dumbledore is gay: her texts need to be allowed to speak for themselves, and each of her readers is a qualified listener.
There is almost no Internet access and no foreign press, but reports are trickling in of a massacre of around 200 protestors in Benghazi. More significantly:
In a rare public admission of the unrest in Benghazi, Libyan state TV said on Sunday that an "armed people's base" in the city had come under attack and had its walls breached. That news emerged as anti-Gaddafi activists on Twitter reported that a barracks in Benghazi had "fallen". There was no way to confirm that report.
There are unconfirmed reports that rebels have actually taken over the city as the military in the "armed people's base" actually sided with the protestors. Developing …
David Zetland considers how damage to the environment will affect our happiness:
The readers of this blog — most of them in the developed world — are going to have to pay more for sushi, lose the reefs for diving tours and spend more on disaster insurance. For us, adopting to damage to the environment and climate change is going to be annoying, but ultimately cost us less than 10 percent of our income.
The people who are going to suffer are the people who live in the developing world. They are going to lose their food supply, their homes and perhaps their loved ones, as floods, mudslides, crop failures and disease take a massive toll on their already fragile lives. … The iPhone will not save them. Money probably will not save them. What they will need is a massive improvement in their institutions for public works and disaster response. From what we've seen in Haiti, it's more likely that we are going to see millions (maybe close to a billion) people in wretched condition.
For Research Digest's Sin Week, Jesse Bering recalls his near death experience and how it prompted him to admit his feelings to an old crush:
In my late twenties, I went into hypoglycaemic shock in a hotel room in Atlanta while attending a conference; luckily, a friend found me unconscious, called the paramedics, and thirty minutes later, a line of glucose was being transfused into my veins. I’d known this intellectually before, of course, and had already written a good deal about the illusion of an afterlife, but this intimate flirtation with my own mortality taught me that existence really was the equivalent of an on/off light switch. And what a shame, I thought, if I squandered the rest of this absurd gift worrying about making people uncomfortable. It’s time to live an honest life—you can call it a life of sin if you’d like. It doesn’t matter; you’ll perish all the same.
And so, eleven years after I’d last seen him, my great smouldering sin, my limerent lust, finally saw daylight. I’d heard through the grapevine that the object of my attraction had become a rather pale haze of his former glory, an average, married man and father living a very traditional life—but still I wrote him a letter. I purged myself of my feelings for him, sympathizing with the strangeness he must feel as the target of someone whose passions are so misplaced, explaining that this was more a letter for me than it was for him, that it was an exorcism only. I tried to articulate how, in spite of all this, it was important for him to know that I’d loved him.
Faye Stacey, a pony welfare officer for the charity South West Equine Protection (SWEP) stands besides the carcass of dead pony that has fallen on Bodmin Moor on February 18, 2011 in Bodmin, England. The charity is calling on the authorities to recognise that there is a serious problem with the welfare of the Bodmin ponies. Due to the sale price of the ponies plummeting, the charity is concerned that their owners are now failing to care for them in an adequate way. Whilst the animals are semi feral, the failure of the authorities to act against the owners has resulted in five ponies being found dead in the last three weeks and others being found emaciated and in a poor condition due to starvation. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.
Your comments on "dynastic democracy" are way over the top and gratuitous and silly. You ask if the two Bushes count? No, not really. Neither do the Kennedys, Cuomos, Daleys or Clintons (or any of the others you say you can name). Yes, politics does run in certain families. Yes, those with political families have a much greater chance and opportunity to get elected or appointed to political positions. And yes, the same can be said of other professions – for instance, families with an overabundance of lawyers, doctors, writers, teachers, musicians, etc. Comparing the U.S. situation to the countries with true dynastic rule is like comparing apples and oranges.
Another writes:
Nobody's forced to vote for one particular family over another. Nobody's forced to run for office just because his or her parent was a politician.
However, as in many other professions, children do enter the family business. If you grow up in a Hollywood family, or a military family, or surrounded by dentists or lawyers or doctors or politicians, not only are you going to be influenced by that environment, but that's where your power base and job-finding network is going to be. I don't see how we can prevent people from choosing their profession or inheriting their family's connections.
So yeah, there will be times when we end up with Kennedys and Bushes and Clintons. But then there will be times when the country decides it's time to choose Obama and Scott Brown instead.
Another:
What do you recommend? Making it illegal for someone to run for president if a relative has done so? Constitutional amendment against first-degree relatives or should we extend it to cousins? Aunts and uncles? Do you also exclude highly placed members of previous administrations?
Believe me, I understand the feeling; I live with someone who raged about this for the last several elections! But I've never gotten a good answer about a "solution" for that matter.
Thousands of demonstrators chanting against the government poured into the streets in nationwide protests on Sunday, clashing with security forces trying to disperse them, according to witness accounts. In Tehran, protestors targeted government landmarks such as the national broadcast company Seda va Sima–seen as a mouthpiece for the regime–chanting “God is great,” and “Death to the dictator,” witnesses reported on opposition websites. Since early Sunday morning thousands of anti-riot police and Basij militia on motorbikes stood guard along the protest route all along Vali Assr Avenue, the capital’s longest road that connects the affluent northern part of town to the poor southern neighborhoods.
0945 GMT: A Military Message? Some Internet eyebrows raised this morning by a report, on a Revolutionary Guard site, of a speech by the head of Iran’s armed forces, Hassan Firouzabadi. Firouzabadi, ostensibly addressing generals in the Arab world, declared that a nation guided by divine principles “cannot be stopped by bullets”: “Other governments must learn the lessons of Tunisia and Egypt and align themselves with their peoples.” He pointed to the example of military commanders executed after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to indicate what happens to those who don’t defend the new nation. On the surface, that is a call to militaries in Arab countries to uphold the “proper” revolution. But, with rumours of splits in Iran’s military forces swirling, some are wondering if Firouzabadi might be sending a message closer to home. And there’s another theory: Firouzabadi’s references to the past 30 years and puts out the message that a regime cannot win by oppression. So if that is true in Egypt and Tunisia, could the head of the military be indicating that it is also true in Iran?
Pro-Ahmadinejad Fars News Agency claims this today: total calm in Tehran. Internet connection has been slowed down by the government, Rahe Sabz reports. It also adds that cell phone lines have been disconnected in Central Tehran. Khamenei’s website has been rendered useless by cyber attacks. BBC Persian reports of clashes in the intersection between Mirdamad Avenue and Valiasr Avenue of the use of tear gas on protesters. Witnesses are telling BBC that today, there are more security forces on the streets of Tehran than February 14.
The Islamic Republic finds itself in a precarious position. As protests in Egypt grew, the regime could no longer stay silent on such a seismic shift in its backyard. The official spin — calling it an Egyptian “Islamic awakening” — was of course necessitated by its own crackdown on post-election protests in 2009 and into last year. While such propaganda may serve well with older and more susceptible classes, Iran’s youth knows the power of information and watched Egypt’s youth achieve what they could not: the overthrow of their ruling dictatorship. The hypocrisy of Khamenei’s praise towards Egypt has surely not been lost on them.
Opposition websites say that the riot police and plain-clothes basiji militia are using tear-gas and wielding batons to disperse protesters in different locations in Tehran. The demonstrations are larger than the one last week that left two people dead.
Update from a correspondent at Frontline’s Tehran bureau:
9:25 p.m. I walked from Vali Asr Square to Vali Asr Crossing to Enghelab Square towards Azadi Square. People (hundreds of thousands I think) were walking densely in the sidewalks, with smiles on their faces. It seems that the security forces were given specific orders not to engage with the demonstrators unless they start shouting slogans. I saw many many Basijis and anti-riot police and plainclothes and bikes and so on. With the events of Feb 14 protests, people seemed to prefer demonstrating in silence in order to reduce the level of tension and violence.
Despite a steady rain, large crowds of protesters gathered throughout Tehran, the capital, from the main thoroughfare to city squares, according to opposition Web sites and witnesses. Those sites and witnesses reported that ambulances were being driven into crowds and officers were making arrests. Security forces, some on motorcycles, deployed tear gas to disperse crowds near Valiasr Square. A hazy cloud of tear gas hung over Vanak Square.
Plainclothes officers randomly stopped and frisked people on the streets and removed people from vehicles, witnesses said. There were reports of police officers firing on the crowds, although that could not be immediately verified because foreign journalists were largely not allowed to report in Iran.
1635 GMT: It Ain’t So. The Deputy Governor of Tehran is denying anyone has been killed in clashes today. The denial is carried in Fars News, which earlier today reported “total calm” in Tehran. However, Fars breaks that line to report on the arrest and release of Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani (see 1547 GMT). Fars says she ws freed when she denied she was making “provocative statements” but was merely out shopping.
1655 GMT: After Dark. Daneshjoo News is claiming that protests are expanding in Tehran tonight, including in Mirdamad, 7 Tir Square, and Vanak Square.
Details have emerged of huge casualty figures in the Libyan city of Benghazi, where troops have launched a brutal crackdown on protesters. More than 200 people are known to have died, doctors say, with 900 injured. The most bloody attacks were reported over the weekend, as funeral marches were said to have come under machine-gun and heavy weapons fire.
Paul Waldman reacts to Bill Maher's assertion, above:
This is a very different question from whether Obama is actually a Muslim. The question here is whether long ago, he decided that he'd get nowhere in politics if he didn't present himself as a believer, and so he started going to church, and every once in a while he talks about his relationship with God. Is it possible? Sure. Will we ever know? No. But what's interesting is that both his most fervent opponents and some of his most fervent supporters think the same thing — that for political purposes, Obama has hid his true beliefs. Many secular progressives want to believe that in his heart he's just like them, and many religious conservatives want to believe that in his heart he's as alien from them as he could be.
It also makes you wonder how long it will be before an avowed atheist could mount a serious run for the White House. In case you're wondering, the number of publicly atheist members of Congress is one, California's Pete Stark.
The Dish 