After covering a war, a friend said, buy yourself a house. I did. I came to this French village where church bells chime the rhythm of the days, married here, raised children and parked Bosnia somewhere in a corner of my mind.
...
Nermin Tulic, an actor, his legs blown off by a Serbian shell on June 10, 1992, telling me how he wanted to die until his wife gave birth to their second daughter and his dad told him a child needs his father even if he just sits in the corner.

I took that away from the war: the stubbornness of love.

Amra Dzaferovic, beautiful Amra, telling me in the desperate Sarajevo summer of 1995 that: “Here things are black and white, they are. There is evil and there is good, and the evil is up in the hills. So when you say you are just a journalist, an observer, I understand you, but I still hate you. Yes, I hate you.”

I took that away from the war: the fierceness of moral clarity.

Pale Faruk Sabanovic watching a video of the moment he was shot in Sarajevo and saying: “If I remain a paraplegic, I will be better, anyhow, than the Serb who shot me. I will be clean in my mind, clean with respect to others, and clean with respect to this dirty world.”

I took that away from the war: the quietness of courage.

Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for “repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide” and urging future Foreign Service officers to be “guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed.”

I took that away from the war: the indivisibility of integrity and the importance of a single dissenting voice.

Roger Cohen is da man

Op-Ed Columnist - ROGER COHEN - Karadzic and War’s Lessons - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Polish people in Britain are being told the weather is a good subject with which to strike up a conversation with a stranger. But is it? The Magazine's Tom Geoghegan puts the theory to the test.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | 'Nice day today, isn't it?'

interesting reading

sort of a map of the relative violence (well that went to the extreme of murder) of different countries

with some real surprises why is Finland so violent -- not one I would have guessed

edit interesting stuff on the site like the US coming 2nd in a crime survey of countries where people feel safe to walk in the dark

the UK having the highest rate of reported crime (although reported here makes a difference -- says the brit)

NationMaster - Murders (per capita) (most recent) by country

A small bronze sparrow which was part of a Tracey Emin sculpture which had gone missing from its home in Liverpool has been returned.

An anonymous caller left a message on BBC Radio Merseyside's answerphone, saying they had left the £60,000 artwork in the grounds of The Oratory.

The bird was found in an envelope marked "FAO Tracey Emin: URGENT!"

A note inside read: "We are sorry - No harm meant. We would have returned it sooner but we were scared xxx."

BBC NEWS | England | Merseyside | Missing bird's mysterious return

An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex -- the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking -- connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.

New map IDs the core of the human brain (7/2/2008)

flynn23 wrote:
I think that it's perfectly acceptable to own weapons in your home for sport, protection, or collection. Although I do have serious reservations about the TYPES of weapons owned. You can collect WW2 rifles or even historic machine guns, but there's no reason why someone should have an operational M2 or an AK47, both of which I know of several people who possess.

I've been meaning to get back to this thread. Its been interesting. I want to interject some thoughts.

1. I think the second amendment consists of a purpose and a means to achieve that purpose.

2. I think the means is a near total ban on federal firearms laws. The 14th amendment extends this ban to the states. Certain exceptions such as the case of felons or in certain locations are probably allowable given an over-riding government interest, but I don't think a ban on certain types of weapons is possible and I'm not sure I buy U.S. v. Miller. You can obviously use a sawed off shotgun in a war. Actual wars in the world today involving actual militias are actually fought with all kinds of fucked up weapons. Actual militias have things like RPGs. I think the second amendment cannot achieve its stated purpose if it allows for the federal regulations on the ownership of RPGs.

3. Self defense in the home is not the purpose, nor is hunting, nor is collecting. But the ownership of weapons for those purposes is a given considering the means employed by this amendment. Similarly, the purpose of the first amendment was not to protect porn videos from federal bans, but it does so anyway, due to the means employed (nearly total prohibition on regulation of speech.)

4. The purpose was to protect the right of the people to form armed militia groups capable of challenging the power of any other contemporary armed force. The original federalist structure of the U.S. Government may have put states in the position of regulating such militia, but the 14th amendment set that power aside.

5. Militia of the sort envisioned by the Constitution are not obsolete from a technical standpoint. Generally, we refer to them as terrorist organizations. The closest modern equivalents are Sunni and Shia insurgent groups in Iraq, and Hezbollah. I think thats really what the founders were thinking. In fact, I recall Nanochick making a very insightful analogy between the founding of this Republic and the present bloodshed in Iraq. Looking at the situation there is the closest thing you can get to understanding the context that the Constitution was written in. I doubt very seriously that you'll see any party to any settlement in Iraq agreeing to lay down their arms. The 2nd amendment is an agreement that the federal government of the US would not disarm the militia. Its the same kind of thing.

6. Almost no one in the US today is comfortable with the idea that armed terrorist organizations can rightfully exist here. The actual purpos... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: Guns for Safety? Dream On, Scalia. - washingtonpost.com

"Hold your hands out to the sun. What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there's pressure as well – though you've never noticed it, because it's so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it only comes to about a millionth of an ounce. But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important – for it's acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it's free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it; we can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the sun."

These words were spoken not by a NASA scientist but by a fictional character – John Merton – in Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Wind from the Sun. If all goes well, Merton's prophetic words are about to become fact.

NASA researchers, thinking "out of the box" (or maybe "out of the rocket") have long dreamed of the possibility of sailing among the planets with sails propelled by sunlight instead of by wind. Except in works of fiction, though, no one has yet successfully deployed such a sail anywhere beyond Earth.

"There's a first time for everything," says Edward "Sandy" Montgomery of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

Montgomery's team and a team from Ames Research Center (led by Elwood Agasid) hope to make history this summer by deploying a solar sail called NanoSail-D. It will travel to space onboard a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket, scheduled for launch from Omelek Island in the Pacific Ocean during a window extending from July 29th to August 6th (a back-up extends from August 29th to September 5th)

NASA to Attempt Historic Solar Sail Deployment

About a quarter-century ago, I was in West Beirut at the Commodore Hotel, once described as a functioning telex machine surrounded by 500 broken toilets. You lined up to use the telex. There was a war on in a divided city. There was also plenty of Black Label.

Op-Ed Columnist - In Praise of Being Cut Off - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP.

He is to force a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency which he will fight on the issue of the new 42-day terror detention limit.

Mr Davis told reporters outside the House of Commons he believed his move was a noble endeavour to stop the erosion of British civil liberties.

BBC NEWS | Politics | David Davis resigns from Commons

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

edit having recommended this i note a, that i recommend it not to express an opinion but because it is a good article
but it also occurs to me b, clearly i generally believe in a marketplace of ideas (why else would I be attracted to a site about memes?)
and c, America protects hate speech yet America, first amongst the western nations, is potentially on the verge of electing a black leader. This doesn't prove anything but it is interesting to note.

Hate speech or free speech? What much of West bans is protected in U.S. - International Herald Tribune