I don’t watch American Idol
But if I did, I’d probably be rooting for this chick. Her band’s music is actually pretty good, and they list The Beatles, Nick Drake, Randy Newman, Elton John as influences.
Blendor
it’s like hitting a piñata filled with exciting blog postsArchive for January, 2008
Black Mirror / rorriM kcalB
lets you play with an Arcade Fire song, separating the individual tracks and adding them back as you like. Pretty cool!
Compact Keychain
This is so cool. I must make it.
All you need is washers and rivets, and you have yourself a quiet, compact set of keys.
Overdose Rescue Kits Save Lives
NPR: Overdose Rescue Kits Save Lives
Every year, overdoses of heroin and opiates, such as Oxycontin, kill more drug users than AIDS, hepatitis or homicide.And the number of overdoses has gone up dramatically over the past decade.
But now, public health workers from New York to Los Angeles, North Carolina to New Mexico, are preventing thousands of deaths by giving $9.50 rescue kits to drug users. The kits turn drug users into first responders by giving them the tools to save a life.
[...]
The nasal spray is a drug called naloxone, or Narcan. It blocks the brain receptors that heroin activates, instantly reversing an overdose.
Pretty awesome, right? The Bush administration doesn’t think so:
But Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, opposes the use of Narcan in overdose-rescue programs.
“First of all, I dont agree with giving an opioid antidote to non-medical professionals. Thats No. 1,” she says. “I just dont think thats good public health policy.”
Madras says drug users arent likely to be competent to deal with an overdose emergency. More importantly, she says, Narcan kits may actually encourage drug abusers to keep using heroin because they know overdosing isnt as likely.
Madras says the rescue programs might take away the drug users motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.
Now, this would be an ok position for an idiotic, hack pundit or talk show host to have, but this is the deputy director of the ONDCP. Let’s see what their mission is:
The goals of the program are to reduce illicit drug use, manufacturing, and trafficking, drug-related crime and violence, and drug-related health consequences.
I always hear President Bush saying history will be the judge of his administration. I’ve got a good guess what word history will file his presidency under: failure. It’s like he hires people based on their ability to be willfully and blissfully stupid. The rationale against Narcan reminds me a lot of the opposition to the HPV vaccine; a twisted moral argument at worst, a bureaucratic cop-out at best.
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Rape of a Nation by Marcus Bleasdale
MediaStorm: Rape of a Nation by Marcus Bleasdale (warning: graphic images)
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is home to the deadliest war in the world today. An estimated 5.4 million people have died since 1998, the largest death toll since the Second World War, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC).IRC reports that as many as 45,000 people die each month in the Congo. Most deaths are due to easily preventable and curable conditions, such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, malnutrition, and neonatal problems and are byproducts of a collapsed healthcare system and a devastated economy.
The people living in the mining towns of eastern Congo are among the worst off. Militia groups and government forces battle on a daily basis for control of the mineral-rich areas where they can exploit gold, coltan, cassiterite and diamonds.
After successive waves of fighting and ten years of war, there are no hospitals, few roads and limited NGO and UN presence because it is too dangerous to work in many of these regions. The West’s desire for minerals and gems has contributed to a fundamental breakdown in the social structure.
Kucinich: “Where’s our conscience?”
I find myself consistently agreeing with Kucinich – far more than any other candidate.
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There are more videos where he answers readers’ questions at the BigThink site. Pretty cool site.
Abandoned books
There’s something about abandoned places I find alluring (I think I’ve probably mentioned that before). Detroit seems to be rife with these places. Here’s a story about the abandoned book depository:
Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition.
Although HDR makes me cringe, here’s the still-interesting Flickr set [via]
Adam Curtis Documentaries
Tony has really outdone himself by posting a series of excellent BBC documentaries that will keep me busy for a good while. Tony astutely posits:
Adam Curtis’ interpretation of current events viewed through a historical and political lens is a tour de force in explaining the absurdity and cognitive dissonance of our current reality.