Explosions in the Castro
I was sitting in my living room yesterday working and I heard a bunch commotion and a few big booms from outside. There's a lot of construction in the area so I didn't really think much of it. Then this helicopter kept hovering overhead, which also isn't that unusual but sometimes it means there's some kind of protest or march or something going on, so I turned around and this is what I saw.
Turns out there was a car accident in the middle of Castro Street in front of the theater. One of the cars flipped over and landed on the motorcycle parking lot along the side of the street, knocking one of them over and opening it's gas tank before it blew up. The burning gas quickly ran down the street in the gutter igniting each of the cars parked on the street downhill causing each explode one by one. At least six cars blew up before the fire department arrived an got it under control.
You'd think I'd have noticed 6 cars exploding across the street. It wasn't that loud though. It sounded more like The Flaming Lotus Girl's art or some sort of Burning Man fire installation, more of a woosh than a bang. I think at least one person in one of the cars involved in the initial accident didn't make it, there were flowers on the sidewalk today near where they were peeling melted car off the street.
Here's the SF Chronicle's article
Surfing the Web at Work is OK Says Judge
Judge John Spooner ruled that a New York City employee can
not be fired for surfing the Web at work. Judge Spooner stated that agencies
need to apply the same standard to personal Internet usage as they do to other
personal activities, according to CNET News. Spooner compared Web browsing to other
personal activities allowed by different agencies like reading a newspaper or
taking personal calls, as long as these activities do not interfere with the
worker’s overall performance.
Curiouser and curiouser
An article from the man that coined the term 'metrosexual.'
Male bisexuality doesn’t exist. Or it’s very, very rare. Or it’s really just gay men in denial. Yeah, it’s official: bi guys are freaks and liars as well as non-existent.
Female bisexuality, on the other hand, is almost universal. It’s as natural and as true as it is wonderful and real and… hot!
Or so you would be forgiven for thinking if you had read the effusive reports in the papers about California State University’s recently published sex-research which claims that women are 27 times more likely to become attracted to their own sex than men.
Nixon 2.0
Ahh, I do love Mark Marford. Nixon 2.0 is perfect.
Did you guys read this? From Seymour Hersh's article in New York Magazine:
Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler
...
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government."
Yes, as a matter of fact, they really are that clueless. Bin Laden says we should overthow our goverment too.
“This is much more than a nuclear issue,” one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. “That’s just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years.”
...
“Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”
...
The bottom line is that Iran cannot become a nuclear-weapons state. The problem is that the Iranians realize that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the U.S. Something bad is going to happen.
The Most Homophobic Place on Earth
From an Time magazine article on rampant and violent homophobia in the Carribean.
In the past two years, two of the island's most prominent gay activists, Brian Williamson and Steve Harvey, have been murdered — and a crowd even celebrated over Williamson's mutilated body. Perhaps most disturbing, many anti-gay assaults have been acts of mob violence. In 2004, a teen was almost killed when his father learned his son was gay and invited a group to lynch the boy at his school. Months later, witnesses say, police egged on another mob that stabbed and stoned a gay man to death in Montego Bay. And this year a Kingston man, Nokia Cowan, drowned after a crowd shouting "batty boy" (a Jamaican epithet for homosexual) chased him off a pier. "Jamaica is the worst any of us has ever seen," says Rebecca Schleifer of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch and author of a scathing report on the island's anti-gay hostility.
Banton's lyrics are hardly unique among reggae artists today. Another popular artist, Elephant Man (O'Neil Bryant, 29) declares in one song, "When you hear a lesbian getting raped/ It's not our fault ... Two women in bed/ That's two Sodomites who should be dead." Another, Bounty Killer (Rodney Price, 33), urges listeners to burn "Mister Fagoty" and make him "wince in agony."
Last week two CBS News producers, both Americans, were beaten with tire irons by a gay-bashing mob while vacationing on St. Martin. One of the victims, Ryan Smith, was airbused to a Miami hospital, where he remains in intensive care with a fractured skull.
The nosend Attribute
What is the nosend attribute?
It is usually found in an image tag and looks like this: nosend attribute.
The nosend attribute is an undocumented and non-standard HTML attributed used by Outlook (go figure) to decide how to handle the URLs for images included in HTML email.
Without the nosend attribute (or with nosend="0"), Outlook has a few different behaviors. If you're all set up to send the HTML email using Outlook, if you copy the images to your stationery folder and reference them in the HTML with relative urls (without the http://), when you send the email Outlook will attach the images to the email and rewrite the links to reference the attached images. Recipients get an email with lots of image attachments, and the references usually break when people forward or reply to the email.
If you use absolute urls (with the http://), Outlook usually doesn't rewrite the references when you send the email, but if they foward/reply, Outlook will attach the images as above, then the next forward/reply usually breaks them.
With the nosend="1" attribute on your image elements, and using absolute URLs, Outlook will not rewrite your image URLs. There's an almost infinite number of ways users can send, attach, include, reply, and forward these emails so it's still possible for users to break the URLs. But as far as I can tell, the nosend attribute tells Outlook not to mess with the URLs.
BTW, if you're using CSS in HTML email, Outlook generally leaves image URLs in stylesheets or inline style attributes alone.
Bush Considered False Flag Operation to Provoke War
From a NY Times article on a pre-war memo of a meeting between Bush and Blair.
The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.
The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.
Can you say "manipulation?" Can't we make a law saying it's illegal to provoke a war by lying, even if you really think it's necessary? I'm sure Bush would just keep his fingers crossed while signing it.
Religion and Violence
From Sam Harris' article advocating taking the religion out of Buddhism.
The Problem of Religion
Incompatible religious doctrines have balkanized our world into separate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed. Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it has been at any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews vs. Muslims), the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians vs. Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians vs. Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants vs. Catholics), Kashmir (Muslims vs. Hindus), Sudan (Muslims vs. Christians and animists), Nigeria (Muslims vs. Christians), Ethiopia and Eritrea (Muslims vs. Christians), Sri Lanka (Sinhalese Buddhists vs. Tamil Hindus), Indonesia (Muslims vs. Timorese Christians), Iran and Iraq (Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims), and the Caucasus (Orthodox Russians vs. Chechen Muslims; Muslim Azerbaijanis vs. Catholic and Orthodox Armenians) are merely a few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in recent decades.
Why is religion such a potent source of violence? There is no other sphere of discourse in which human beings so fully articulate their differences from one another, or cast these differences in terms of everlasting rewards and punishments. Religion is the one endeavor in which us-them thinking achieves a transcendent significance. If you really believe that calling God by the right name can spell the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, then it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics and unbelievers rather badly. The stakes of our religious differences are immeasurably higher than those born of mere tribalism, racism, or politics.
Religion is also the only area of our discourse in which people are systematically protected from the demand to give evidence in defense of their strongly held beliefs. And yet, these beliefs often determine what they live for, what they will die for, and--all too often--what they will kill for. This is a problem, because when the stakes are high, human beings have a simple choice between conversation and violence. At the level of societies, the choice is between conversation and war. There is nothing apart from a fundamental willingness to be reasonable—to have one’s beliefs about the world revised by new evidence and new arguments—that can guarantee we will keep talking to one another. Certainty without evidence is necessarily divisive and dehumanizing.
Scientist Says 5 Billion People Must Be Sacraficed To ‘Save’ Planet
Interesting rant on a professor who was applauded by his peers at the Texas Academy of Science after asserting that "the Earth can only be 'saved' if ninety percent of the human beings alive today are purged."
So what if some Piankian disciple--a former student, perhaps, who works in a biological research or weapons laboratory--gains access to a deadly pathogen? What if that person becomes clinically depressed? His wife divorces him, his child dies, he discovers he's dying of cancer... Do you think a depressed and angry Piankian just might convince himself that releasing that agent would be a great service to the higher cause of saving the Earth? Do you think he might be able to infect himself, and then use his own body as the vector to infect others?
I do, too.
And that is why we cannot afford to ignore when academics stand and applaud a man who they just heard openly advocate that the world would be better off if over 5,000,000,000 human beings were to die as a result of a horrible disease.
via Metafilter.
Guantanamo Detainees Interviewed
This American Life has a great show about Guantanamo including the only interviews of former Guantanamo detainees that I've come across.
- The only 5% of Guananamo detainees were pick up by US troops.
- 86% of detainees where handed over by the Pakistan Northern Aliance.
- Many prisoners where simply bought and have no background or evidence of terrorist activities.
It turns out this has all happened before, in England during the British Civil War in the 1600's, to religious fundamentalist terrorists.