Don't Mess With The Muppets

...You'll get stung, as Fox News just learned:



(via DB on fb)

Ham-Tastic

New-ish SFA short film on Allan Benton and his hams...


CURED from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo.


(via Eater)

Watch Out For The Go-Rillas

I'm a big fan of street art, especially when it's smart and classy, and also of guerrilla gardening.  So I'm obviously taken with this East London project from Steve Wheen...

DesignBoom has a few more details and pictures for you to check out.

Flula Rocks

I've only watched two or three of these videos, but dude is a genius - he's got a great formula for youtube and a big enough collection of videos to lead you down the rabbit hole for quite some time...

You Are What You Eat - Seafood & Plastics Are A Bad Mix

Great promotional poster on ocean plastics pollution and marine debris issues from Surfrider...

Here is the hyperlink for the campaign from the poster.

(via Cape Ann Fresh Catch on fb)

President Obama & Al Green

With the political news-scape (and the news generally) dominated by the increasingly mean, petty, ugly, and untruthful GOP primary contest it was nice to see this video start making the rounds...



It's nice to see a moment involving a politician that's just nice for a change.

(This video has been everywhere, I first got to it via THR)

Read This Now - Our Dehumanization

We are after all only human, which is at least part of the reason that we can succumb to collective dehumanization as a society so readily.

The recent youtube video appearance of US marines peeing on the bodies of taliban fighters in Afghanistan has brought appropriate statements of disgust and anguish over the reprobation but probably much too little introspection.

Sebastion Junger takes a look at how we got here as a culture and society and while he may not have a solution he at least gets closer to digging up the roots of the problem than most of the voices out there do these days.

There is another context for that behavior, though — a more contemporary one. As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put high-caliber rounds through the fighters’ chests. American troops are not blind to this irony. They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy they have killed.

Read the whole thing, he does a good job with the piece and it's an important point that he makes.

Read This Now - What's Up With Burma?

It suddenly seems that Myanmar has caught a case of detente; long time political prisoners are being freed, Secretary Clinton is making visits, and the President is getting ready to appoint an ambassador.  I sure don't know what it all means but I'm willing to see it as an improvement over the status quo and the potential emergence of one of the most isolated regimes and peoples in the world today.

Joshua Hammer has a good run down on what's been going on and what it all might mean and how big of a grain of salt you should take these developments with...

[T]he new president was dismissed by many Burmese as the latest in a long line of opaque and isolationist rulers. Instead, after a tumultuous few months, some are already comparing him to Mikhail Gorbachev and F.W. De Klerk: the ultimate party insider who is using his institutional power to lead his country in a progressive, and potentially revolutionary, new direction. 

That assessment of Thein Sein may be premature. But the sweep of change has so far been breathtaking.

Whether Sein is Myanmar's Gorbachev remains to be seen, but here's hoping things keep progressing.  Make sure to read the whole thing to get a handle on exactly what's been happening so far.

And now I have a craving for some Burmese food...

Ahh Books

And people with too much time on their hands, that or a pretty bad case of insomnia...



This is popping up in a bunch of places today but I got there via @Politics_Prose.

World's Greatest Beauty Product Revealed!

Love those closing lines!

(via kottke)

Experts Discuss Latest Sea Level Rise Data And Trends

These guys do this for a living and they also manage to do a good job of making it understandable at a less technical and nerdy level...



This is definitely not an issue that we should be ignoring.

(via CP)

Read This Now - New Year, Same Crappy Political Reporting

It's far from new news that political reporting in the US is far from anything that aspires to be truly newsworthy or truthful, or to actually inform the readers or viewers etc etc.  With the GOP primary heating up with the advent of the Iowa caucuses George Packer does one of the best jobs that I can recall in summing up the problems with the state of our political coverage...

But political journalism—unlike war reporting—long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers? On the other hand, there’s an endless appetite for stories about Santorum’s effort to reach out beyond his evangelical base, or Gingrich playing the expectations game in Iowa. This stuff is political candy.

Read the whole thing for more details on the current scene in Iowa as well.

See also Greg Sargent's wrap up of Mitt Romney's Big Lie Strategy.