John Mortell’s blog

This video is absolutely insane but is quite entertaining – love the ‘military-industrial complex’ speech bit at the end too.. It seems to be quite legit given that Gravel has it on his webpage:

Ideologically rather corrupt and shallow, this film doesn’t really make much of a point beyond ‘extremists are bad’ which one would imagine is rather self-apparent. While it has some impact, mainly through using footage from some real-life executions, any person with a brain should be able to see through the blatant racism and short-sightedness of Geert Wilder’s film. There’s an intersting article about it on the BBC here and it certainly shows what the BBC is talking about in terms of his ability to generate interest – as I write this, the film has been seen 410,211 times on the host website alone. And that doesn’t take into account other language variations.

Just to be clear, I’m posting this out of interest in the topic and the controversy it has generated. Not out of any belief in Mr.Wilder’s ideas. I’m also doing this because I think that silencing talk becuase religious extremists don’t like the content of a video is a bad thing and should be opposed on principle if nothing else.

Cian’s already talked about this, but Obama does it funnier (sorry Cian) (Also, I apologise for the fact that ‘funnier’ isn’t correct English)

It’s a pretty good interview and you can see the whole thing here.
Just a few things that I found interesting -Bush has a very utilitarian ‘end’s justify the means’ view of a lot of his policies. It just comes across in a lot of the things he says and the language he uses, especially relating to Iraq but also to Africa. There’s also the oddest echoes of Jimmy Carter in terms of how he talks about the ‘higher realism of helping Africa’ in the sense that securing African well-being safeguards America’s national interest. What’s also interesting to see is how surprisingly affable Bush is. Nearly too much at times such as when he off-handedly refers to the ‘Dali Lama crowd’ & uses the word ‘suicider’ which is just .. awkward. Anyway, I still think he’s a horrible excuse for a President but it’s worth a look.

From ABC.Net

A Japanese father has called for his own son to hang after a gruesome murder spree in which the teenager killed three family members before slashing open his mother’s belly and putting a doll inside. The father says he will seek the death penalty for his 18-year-old son, who is a fan of the grisly Hannibal Lecter novels and has written horror stories himself.

Now the part I have emphasised suggests that it was the ‘horror interest’ that made that kid bad no? But further down the article:

The father, who divorced the boy’s mother a decade ago and has been in and out of prison on blackmail charges, admitted he was partly responsible for his son’s poor upbringing.

I really hate the fact that the way that article is written is done in such a way that it clearly places more emphasis on the ‘interests’ of the child than in his upbringing, I mean this sort of crap always happens in the analysis of these ‘youth violence’ incidents, especially in the American media, I mean you can just see this event being used by some ‘moral majority’ jackass to ‘prove’ how ‘horror movies corrupt children’..

Bah, I’m tired and cranky but still… This crap really pisses me off..

One of the most entertaining things I’ve read in the economist in a while…

Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density. Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.

Rather interesting (if somewhat long and occasionally disjointed) hour’s worth of talking heads…

Interesting interview here – the one thing I really like is how Dawkins comes across as a much more polite and reasonable person in these clips with Alister McGrath:
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Interesting stuff:

‘Referring to Kantian ethics – Is it right or wrong to sell parts of your body/organs for financial (or equivalent) reward?’

Anyone have any Ideas where I can get good articles on this? Proving a bit difficult atm..