Authorities in Afghanistan have sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for having downloaded and shared copies of a report criticizing the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies.

Afghanistan: death sentence for downloading, distributing report on oppression of women - Boing Boing

Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.

Finnish patient gets new jaw from own stem cells | Science | Reuters

American history suggests that about every 80 years, a civic (or Joshua) generation, emerges to make over the country after a period of upheaval caused by the fervor of an idealist (or Moses) generation. In 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932 and 1968, as members of new generations -- alternately idealist and civic -- began to vote in large numbers, the United States experienced major political shifts. This year, the civic-minded millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, are coming of age and promising to turn the political landscape, currently defined by idealist baby boomers such as Clinton and George W. Bush, upside down.
...
Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras. In the decades after the 1828 election, the country was pulled apart over slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War. After the 1896 campaign, the United States couldn't find a way to help blue-collar workers and farmers to share fully in the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took the Great Depression to usher in the sense of urgency that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, issues such as affordable health care or quality education or climate change are endlessly debated but never resolved by two sides unwilling to set aside their ideological agendas for the common good.

But now, with another civic generation emerging, the times, as boomer troubadour Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin'. Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues. Previous civic realignments occurred in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1932, when the GI generation put Roosevelt in office. It's no coincidence that these "civic" presidents, along with George Washington, top all lists of our greatest presidents. All three led the country in resolving great crises by inspiring and guiding new generations and revitalizing and expanding the federal government.

in light of recent discussions about party politics this piece particularly struck me

The Boomers Had Their Day. Make Way for the Millennials. - washingtonpost.com

At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama’s race or Hillary Clinton’s sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee’s religious faith.

a new wave (redux) article about evangelicals going stuff that i consider Christian.

Today, conservative Christian churches do superb work on poverty, AIDS, sex trafficking, climate change, prison abuses, malaria and genocide in Darfur.

Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love - New York Times

jpeg of the under sea cables/internet backbone

SeaCableHi.jpg (JPEG Image, 1703x1037 pixels)

A third marine cable has been snapped, compounding global net woes caused by two broken lines on Wednesday.

BBC NEWS | Technology | New cable cut compounds net woes

Events in South Carolina and the introduction of the race issue into America's Democratic presidential primary campaign by the Clintons have brought back some memories of my own about race in South Carolina.

One night in January 1951, I was among a busload of young Georgia recruits and draftees to arrive at Fort Jackson, the big infantry training base near the state capital, Columbia. It was a racially mixed group, uneducated, headed for the infantry because they weren't very promising material.

I was the only one with a college degree, and one of the few who had finished high school. I was with them because I had put my name down for officer candidate school, and for that the full, 16-week-long training cycle was essential.

It had been a long drive and the bus had segregated itself - this was still the Jim Crow South - with blacks in the back and whites in the front. One white guy said in a low voice, "I hear they got [racial expletive] officers in this man's Army. I ain't gonna salute no [expletive] officer!" Other whites muttered agreement.

We arrived late at Jackson and gathered outside the bus. A big, black sergeant strode up to look us over. The guy who wasn't going to salute no black officers was pulling at a cigarette. The sergeant said, "You, there! Eat that cigarette." The recruit managed to get the fire out before he ate the cigarette. It was established who was in charge.
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The army had always been a Southern institution, and in 1948 it still was, despite the Civil War. Then Truman made it into the most important instrument of black liberation and social ascension America had seen since Emancipation.

South Carolina, then and now - International Herald Tribune

An Italian member of the European Parliament is not the first person you expect to meet in Charleston, South Carolina, but there was Monica Frassoni last week following the twists and turns of a remarkable U.S. election.
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Why, it’s fair to ask, should a fading imperium — or so the conventional wisdom has it from Davos conclaves to Pew opinion surveys — so rivet the world?

America’s Riveting Democracy - New York Times

Leaked UK gov't doc reveals plan to "coerce" Brits into national ID register -- MIRROR THIS FILE!
Posted by Cory Doctorow, January 29, 2008 3:01 AM | permalink

Phil from the UK anti-ID-register group NO2ID sends in this nugget -- note the call to action there. We've got a sensitive government document revealing the British government's plan to trick us into a database state and we need as many copies as possible, as quickly as possible!

If you mirror this document, please add a link to it in the comments for the post.

UK campaigners NO2ID this morning enlisted the help of bloggers across the world to spread a leaked government document describing how the British government intends to go about "coercing" its citizens onto a National Identity Register. The 'ID card' is revealed as little more than a cover to create a official dossier and trackable ID for every UK resident - creating what NO2ID calls 'the database state'.

NO2ID's national coordinator, Phil Booth, exhorted bloggers, freedom lovers and anyone who gives a damn about personal privacy to mirror the annotated document on their site.

"The charade is over. While ministers try to bamboozle the British public with fairytales about fingerprints, officials are plotting how to dupe and bully the population into surrendering control of their own identities."

"Biometric ID cards are a sham; a magician's flourish to cover the biggest identity fraud there has ever been."

1.2MB PDF Link (mirror this file!)

Leaked UK gov't doc reveals plan to "coerce" Brits into national ID register -- MIRROR THIS FILE! - Boing Boing

Nose, face, spite.

Changes reportedly made last night in the stimulus package would reduce its effectiveness as stimulus. Although the package includes a reasonably designed tax rebate, the two most targeted and economically effective measures under consideration — a temporary extension of unemployment benefits and a temporary boost in food stamp benefits — were zeroed out, apparently at the insistence of House Republican leaders.

The two respected institutions that have rated stimulus options in recent days — the Congressional Budget Office and Moody’s Economy.com — both give their two highest ratings for effectiveness as stimulus to the two measures that were dropped.

Reported Stimulus Package Would Provide Little Immediate Boost Due to Removal of Most Effective Provisions