For all those overly-frisky pups, Hotdoll is a leg and furniture stand in relieving owners of annoyance and dogs of their urges. A much more humane treatment than medications or castration, as French designer Clement Eloy points out, the toy also saves guests from embarrassment but still is funny to watch.

I just really don't know what to say. Gosh.

Cool Hunting: Hotdoll

This page is intended to collect images created by Todd Goldman (of the David & Goliath clothing line) that some people regard as being plagiarized from other sources. Whether or not they are actually plagiarized is up to you.

Well, the evidence isn't really good for him, I'd say.

I mean, re-use of pop culture, especially stuff that's become extremely commonplace, is a well known and in my mind, fairly respectable practice in art... i like mashups, for example.

What bugs me is that this Goldman character appears to be a) profiting a *lot* from his appropriation and b) not actually admitting to doing what I described in the previous paragraph.

While I readily admit that in a world as big and as connected as ours, people are going to come up with the same idea on occasion, it strains credulity to believe that this particular professional artist just happens to come up with the same idea as so many others, so frequently.

Some examples don't mean much to me -- e.g. the gnomes. I mean, that's what "gnomes" equate to for most people, so of course it's quite similar -- but others -- Dave Kelley's piece and that final tshirt example in the Lenore section in particular -- are pretty tough to explain away legitimately.

If true, it's about as not cool as it gets.

Todd Goldman: Art Thief?

"It is now pretty well established that certain types of videos and images have an effect on behavior," New York Governor Eliot Spitzer told reporters yesterday. Spitzer wants video games that are "degrading" to minors regulated the same way as cigarettes for those under 18. Retailers who would sell or rent these "not appropriate" games to minors would face fines.

The Democratic governor plans to give details about his plans this Friday in a Manhattan speech before Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network. Like wagering how many times President Bush will bring up 9/11 in a speech, start placing your bets now on how long it'll take Spitzer to bring up the VT massacre in his speech.

[ Oh, Eliot. No no no. *SIGH* This kind of censorious nonsense is one of main things that the mainstream Democrats get consistently wrong. UGHH. -k]

Joystiq

Last month, conservative Christian leaders demanded that Richard Cizik be silenced or removed from his post. They charged that his concerns about climate change and torture have shifted attention away from moral issues such as gay marriage and abortion. But for Cizik, poverty, war, and the environment are moral issues too. We revisit Krista's 2006 conversation with Cizik that took many listeners by surprise.

This is very much worth listening to.

Rev. Cizik seems to be a reasonable and thoughtful Christian. He elucidates a number of things I've said many times about what it means to be able to call yourself a Christian. At the time of his interview, he expressed a faith that the public perception of evangelical Christianity was skewed and that most follow the sort of rational, informed, compassionate Christianity he espouses.

Sadly, this latest revelation somewhat confirms my cynicism.

At one point in the interview, Krista Tippet reads a letter from a woman who describes personal harassment by the kind of abusive "hellfire" evangelicals we perhaps have come to expect. This woman describes how this kind of experience leads many otherwise practicing christians to try and distance themselves from the religion.

This has been my situation, for some years. I came to find not only that my own beliefs have diminished my tolerance for Faith, but also that what interest I might have had in maintaining ties to the Christian church and the community thereof was absolutely destroyed by my desire not to be conflated with such animals. I have come to believe that so many people have misused the term "Christian" that it has quite literally lost all meaning. And I'm not devout enough to want to fight to take the name back.

I'm not saying I agree with all of Rev. Cizik's beliefs -- in fact, I stridently disagree with the NAE on the matters of gay rights and abortion (opposition to which they, of course, call "Protection of the Family" and "Sanctity of Life"). Nonetheless there are points in the interview seemed to me to reveal an encouraging side of Christianity. That is, one that supports environmentalism, trusts science, discourages war and works to eliminate poverty.

I still think the majority of people who call themselves Christian are total frauds, but maybe it's not as overwhelmingly so as I'd thought.

The Evolution of American Evangelicalism [Speaking of Faith� from American Public Media]

flynn23 wrote:

k wrote:

Penn & Teller's "Gun Control is Bullshit"

Worth a watch, I reckon.

My take? Guns don't kill people... Americans kill people.

Somehow other countries manage to get by without them, whereas we can't feel safe unless we've got one. That says something about us and it's not merely the presumptive "We don't and shouldn't trust our government."

A decent wrap up (I'm not a big fan of Penn's idiotic rantings about religion) and does a good job of crystalizing the issue. I'd like to see less gun control and more laws for gun and ammunition tagging, even for hunting munitions. The technology is there and it would allow for massive improvements in crime solving.

Interesting. I seem to recall in The Diamond Age, how everything but everything had some nano-scale identifier.

It seems like a useful crime solving mechanism, so, sure, but it's still after the fact. That's secondary to the gun control debate, I think. I see no logical argument against it. The "the gubmint may need to be overthrown" POV is fine, and if you're already in open rebellion against the Government, who cares if bullets are tracable? So yeah, I think your proposal has merit.

As for gun control, more specifically, I have trouble reconciling the fact that these kinds of rampages are perhaps effectively inevitable and that, truly, if more people were armed, less people would probably die with the fact that I fundamentally don't trust the people around me enough to want them armed.

Penn makes an argument that "most people are good" and thus if you armed everyone the balance of power shifts to the good people. I find that to be a vast oversimplification because I don't think classifying people in general as "good" or "evil" makes sense. You can say that a particular individual (such as this fucker at VT) is evil, after the fact. That's ok with me. Beyond that, all you can say about any other randomly selected individual is that they haven't yet done anything that makes them evil.

The spectrum of emotional stability is broad and arming everyone makes me nervous because I just don't -- and can't -- know what's going to make someone snap. The repercussions of otherwise casual breakdowns of emotional interactions are increased dramatically.

I study aikido in part because the philosophy that many lethal situations can be defused with no injury to anyone - assailant included - appeals to me. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe my practice applies well to a situation where someone has a gun; a gun is not a sword, certainly. Rather, it leads me to consider more carefully how such situations can be avoided in the first place. In the same way that I've been taught that walking away from a fight is just as much an Aiki technique as kaitenage, it seems that we ought to put some focus on easing the social precursors to the kind of alienation that causes these breakdowns.

To me, use of a gun represents the final breakdown of civil society. I think it's crucial to identify why ours thinks they're so necessary, and try to create a society in which they aren't. I know the pro-arms folks think it's unconscionably naive to even consider such a thing, but I simply can't escape that fact that there are plenty of places that have strict gun control and don't face the same problems as us.

It leads me to the conclusion that American society just isn't that civil.

RE: Penn & Teller's

Although there are abundant rhetorical similarities, I don't think that the issues arising from the Virginia Tech shootings and 9/11 are at all the same. What I do think they have in common is a tendency for overreaction: a tendency for salience-- and a sense of emergency-- to displace good public policy. If there is anything we should have learned from 9/11, it is that a sense of emergency can justify all sorts of bad decisions that we will come to regret later on.

Hear fucking hear.

Balkinization

A vaccine designed to protect humans against the H5N1 influenza virus, known as bird flu, has been approved for the first time in the United States.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the approval Tuesday. Officials said the vaccine could be used in the event of an influenza pandemic to provide early limited protection in the months before a vaccine tailored to a specific pandemic strain of the virus could be produced.

Jesus, they fast-tracked the fuck out of that one.

FDA approves first U.S. bird flu vaccine - Nature

Penn & Teller's "Gun Control is Bullshit"

Worth a watch, I reckon.

My take? Guns don't kill people... Americans kill people.

Somehow other countries manage to get by without them, whereas we can't feel safe unless we've got one. That says something about us and it's not merely the presumptive "We don't and shouldn't trust our government."

Penn & Teller's

You’ve never seen data presented like this. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called “developing world” using extraordinary animation software developed by his Gapminder Foundation. The Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid -- toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling’s hands, global trends — life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates — become clear, intuitive and even playful.

Fascinating talk...

TED | Talks | Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you’ve ever seen (video)

It’s a story that’s too familiar. Someone disturbed through emotional or physical trauma loses control and acts out a violent fantasy. It’s not because they play video games or listen to aggressive music or watch violent movies or don’t go to church. Oppressive security measures and an obsessive push to rid our culture of unpleasant imagery won’t make us safer. Despite what those desperate to finding an easy fix to a complicated (and probably unsolvable) problem would have you believe, sometimes people just snap.

Hear hear. -k

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