OVO

Why do I read the Guardian Unlimited every day? For personal essays like Grim reaper calls for my second father by Peter Preston and great reporting like Peer into the past by William Dalrymple. From the later: “He ekes out a living as a peasant farmer in a remote part of north India. His only link to Britain would seem to be his short-wave radio. But despite his humble lot, Julian Gardner is heir to an English barony.”

I read the Smirking Chimp for collected articles such as Going AWOL by Justin Raimondo. And I read a bunch of other stuff for similar and entirely different reasons. You should read stuff too.

Go to Google, type in “miserable failure” and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button.

If your looking for something fun, FREE, and educational for the whole family this weekend, checkout the [Portland] Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. The museum is having a free admission weekend! As a special holiday treat, OMSI is offering FREE MUSEUM ADMISSION from 9:30am to 5:30pm on December 6th and 7th! Explore more than 200 hands-on exhibits and enjoy special science demos, crafts for the kids, and lots more. While you’re here, get your holiday shopping done at the OMSI Science Store, where you’ll find unique gifts for everyone. OMSI’s a great place to spend time with family and friends this holiday season. So come to OMSI this weekend, December 6th and 7th, for our free museum weekend!

For more OMSI news, visit http://www.omsi.edu.

Theocracy is a form of government in which the governmental rulers are identical with the leaders of the dominant religion, and governmental policies are either identical with or strongly influenced by the principals of the majority religion. Typically the government claims to rule on behalf of God or a higher power, as specified by the religion in question. If a state denies atheists the ability to assume public office, is that state a theocracy?

How many magicians are there who will pay you a million dollars to prove the supernatural is real? One… two… I say two.

That’s so gay!

James Meek of the Guardian reports: “Having failed to find the suspected mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, his Taliban ally, Mullah Omar, or much in the way of terrorist infrastructure, the US set about constructing, behind razor wire on a secure Caribbean island, an incarcerated model of what its “war on terror” rhetoric implies. It has gathered terrorism suspects from all over the world, imposed discipline and order on them, encouraged them to hate the US and kept them together for years. It was as if the Bush administration so wanted the Hollywood fantasy of a central terrorist campus to be true that they built it themselves. [...] The first prisoners were moved from the runway to a truck, from there to a launch across the bay, and from there to the bare mesh cages which would be their home for the first few months of 2002, the original detention centre, Camp X-Ray. Those initial images of blinded, deafened, mute and bound men in glaring orange became a potent weapon in the hands of those who opposed the manner in which the Bush administration was coping with terrorism, particularly in Europe and the Muslim world. A country which would not countenance an international criminal court, the pictures seemed to say, had built a harsh international jail. The bizarre setup of Guantanamo itself, a fortified American toehold in one of the world’s last outposts of communism, added to the sense of prisoners being cast into the centre of concentric circles of isolation. Cubans remember, if few others do, that the world’s first concentration camps were built on their island by the Spanish in the 1890s.”

“The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and engaged in sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them.” Who might that be? Go on, take a guess.

Brand new Laibach video here!