Fontana Labs writes about being pissed of Dennis Kucinich.#

As my irritation goes into high-earth orbit, look for a bitchtastic post about why Dennis Kucinich pisses me the hell off. The short answer: remember 2000? No, not our side, but the other side? How everyone in the big fractious Republican family went along with Fortunate Son and kept the differences out of sight when company came over? Now it's our turn, and for the most part everyone's on board, since the alternative is unspeakable. But Kucinich doesn't seem to get it. I don't mean that he's being disloyal or anything like that; he's got the right, etc. etc. What he doesn't get is this is the year when no one cares about fringey candidates and they're not going to pay attention. Has he affected the campaign in any way? Has he shifted the debate? Of course not. But he beats on, like a boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into, say, 1984.

Nate P. writes about The Passion.#

For me, I can't say I really believed it. I was never able to suspend disbelief and get lost in this. It just seemed like a set of scenes with lots of gruesome pain as their motif.

I mean this on a very basic level. The movie was a cartoon: all that blood and violence and savagery and for what? It wasn't particularly believable. It looked and impressed at about the same level as a Schwarzenegger or, well, Gibson action flick. There's no sense of empathy there. Christ suffers, and I can't understand why I was supposed to care. We never really got to know him (I guess it's assumed we were supposed to before we walked in), and we just see Him suffer a lot. It's gory, but to what effect? In the end, I think, my reaction has come to be something close to "Who cares?"

Dave Pollard finds a very interesting correlation between violence and population growth and people per arable hectare.#

In this chart, about a third of the countries, those with annual growth rates under 0.5%, are excluded to keep it from being too busy. The overall global population per arable hectare (4.0) and overall global annual growth rate (0.8%) are shown by a large blue dot. The sustainable global population per arable hectare (1.0, per a variety of sources I have cited in earlier posts) and the sustainable overall global annual growth rate (0%) is shown by a large green dot. No country has achieved that sustainable level -- every country in the world has either positive growth rate or a density over 1 person per arable hectare.

Sure enough, the countries furthest from the green ideal point are also, almost without exception, the most violent and war-torn countries. At the far extreme, you find Palestine and Kuwait, with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and most of the MidEast countries close by. In the upper central part of the chart you find most of the war-ravaged sub-Saharan African countries, led by the Congo, with its horrendous and incessant war, Sierre Leone, where militias amputate their enemies' limbs as a symbolic warning, and Rwanda & Burundi, site of the bloodiest massacre of the last half-century. Here, too, you'll find Colombia, where anti-drug spraying and civil war have killed thousands, destroyed the economy and poisoned 80% of the arable land. And you'll find Haiti, site of this week's coup, and several Central American states that have witnessed horrendous warfare in recent years.

Tony Pierce addresses President Bush.#

fuck you for thinking that people need protection from words on the radio or nipples on tv. fuck you for pretending that you think that people need protection from these things because i know how hard you partied in college and i dont even think that you believe that people need protection from nipples.

what we need protection from is government.

what we need is protection from power hungry moralists who dont even read the bible but thump it.

Julie Leung writes about an amazing experience that will make you love your mom even more.#

Tony Pierce writes about America.#

Americans make me sick. Myself included. (Yes that's right, I make myself sick). We're so lazy, but we can somehow manage to post on our blogs how much we hate the government or how disenfranchised we are. Meanwhile, the average immigrant can come here and make twice as much money as we do, own 6 businesses, and manage to raise their kids to replicate the process. Why? Because they recognize that authority is authority and they can bitch and moan but it's not going to change their situation. They actually DO something in spite of the government. So I say, we're full of excuses and I think it's a load of crap. People need to step outside of themselves. How does what we do as individuals impact the same issues we complain about. In spite of our problems, we're freakin' blessed to live in a country like America and that shouldn't be forgotten. Whoever catches that revelation will be the most successful in life. Period.