Check out this gold from the Australian News Network:

An Israeli politician has blamed a spate of recent earthquakes in the Middle East on gays.

Shlomo Benizri of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party said the only way to prevent the earthquakes was for parliament to stop liberalising laws concerning homosexuals, AP reported.

“Why do earthquakes happen? One of the reasons is the things to which the Knesset (parliament) gives legitimacy, to sodomy,” Mr Benizri said.

Mr Benizri said earthquake damage could be avoided if the parliament stopped “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.

Two earthquakes originating in Lebanon have shaken Israel in the past week. The first occurred two days after the Israeli attorney-general ruled that same-sex couples could adopt children.

In recent years, Israeli courts have ruled that the government must recognise same-sex marriages performed abroad and grant gay couples inheritance rights.

If you want, you can email Shlomo at slomob@knesset.gov.il and tell him what a genius he is.

Shlomo Benizri Himself

If I can’t shamelessly promote my own work here, where can I?

My online portfolio is finally live, at designbenign.com, which I think neatly encapsulates my general philosophy. I wish more of my pieces were emblematic of that ideal, but I do what I can working within the brief…

If you have a chance, give it a look see and let me know what you think.

I know it’s to be expected that some critics will capitalize on the fact that the leading democratic presidential nominee at this point is a muslim named Barack Hussein Obama, but the situation is getting out of hand. One of the cunts currently at the top of my most-despised list, Hillary Clinton, has just released a photo of Obama while he was touring Kenya in 2006:

I don’t have too much useful to add here - Hillary’s becoming desperate, and revealing herself as the sack of shit she really is. The only reason I’m commenting on this is because this is not a stand alone occurrence. On February 18th, this was what MSNBC was displaying as Chris Matthews talked about Barack Obama on Hardball:

CNN, too, has been in on the act. Check out these gems from the “most trusted name in news”:

How many fucking “mistakes” can the media make with this guy? I can’t wait to see how they treat him in a general election. Wait… What I truly want to see is what the Republicans pull. It’s gonna be fun.

On the bus home tonight, I passed the sales office for a new suburban housing development. It said something about “WELCOME HA MONY VILLAGES.”

The R had been stolen. This was at Islington and Finch.

There’s something funny in that, somewhere.

□ Text

□ Email

□ Call

□ Messenger

That’s what the ad for smart phones asked me on the subway, today. There was no option for □ In person, of course. Respect for human dignity tends to get in the way of selling stuff.

It’s crazy how deeply out of touch with reality marketing is. That is, until, through persistence, it becomes reality. The future will be shaped by a stalwart contempt for anything but the bottom line, it seems.

As an aside, on the same subway, a pack of children on a school trip hopped on for a few stops. They couldn’t have been older than 10 years old. Of the few snippets of conversation I made out, I caught, “I like Primus, I like Primus!” “I like Telus!” and “There’s no Rogers, here…” Clearly, the kids had an acute awareness - at least at an aesthetic level - of their environment. But I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, anymore.

My brother sent me this article from the New Yorker about the decline of reading in North America. While it would be easy to fall into the same tired whimsical reminiscing about the good old days when children read books or threw dog poop at girls instead of playing video games, the article goes a little bit deeper. The author makes note of some of the interesting neurobiological effects of literacy and written language, especially as compared to oral traditions (and the secondary orality of media today). There’s evidence that reading literally helps us think, in ways that go well beyond simply the knowledge it imparts. There’s also a little bit of speculation about the way society might evolve as a result of reduced literacy, and the continued downfall of critical thought is ever at the forefront…

Interesting read if you’ve got the time. I definitely need to read more books.

I let this happen all the time. I get lulled into an ordinary routine where I’m too busy to actually think about anything beyond my immediate goals. So I forget about things, and it takes seeing (or even just re-seeing) something really dramatic to shock me back into realizing why I want to live my life the way I do.

I’ve known about his documentary ‘Manufactured Landscapes’ for a while, and even saw Ed Burtynsky speak at the ‘Worldchanging’ book launch tour last year (where was the post for that one? Ha!). The clips he showed from industrial China, especially combined with his personal narration, were pretty mindblowing. But it takes seeing a full 90 minutes of the stuff to really hammer it, uncomfortably, into your head. There’s even some comment on the perverse beauty that arises from it all, and when its framed so artfully, it’s hard to disagree.

It was especially poignant to watch after seeing a Chinese factory in person last summer, though the scale I witnessed doesn’t compare with the factories Burtynsky shoots. Even still, the scale of production was difficult to capture - part of the reason I’m glad I actually took a few panoramic scenes. I’ve even been inspired to sift through some of the other photos I took but didn’t post, and a couple are actually cool, so if someone reminds me I will definitely get on posting them.

Here’s some excerpted scenes from Manufactured Landscapes - watch the DVD if you can:

The title is yet another lyric cribbed from the artists who gave the site its name, and I think it’s an apt description for a discussion on overpopulation, and the taboo of voluntarily sterilization. Ever since Thomas Malthus began predicting doom and gloom for human society in the early 1900s, the idea that humans are overrunning the Earth’s natural carrying capacity has remained one of those uncomfortable subjects that most everyone acknowledges, but almost no one is willing to make a personal commitment towards. (There are critics who dismiss Malthusian limits out of hand, but they don’t seem to realize that the huge improvements in agricultural efficiency we’ve made are only the result of an exponentially greater reliance on dwindling fossil fuels). We’re generally content to say that overpopulation is bad, but that it’s the fault of those dirty Africans, Indians, and Chinese - they’re the one’s having all the children, after all. We may be the ones using all the resources, but that’s not the point.

Interestingly, though, the idea of voluntarily sterilization still crops up from time to time in the media. Back in the hippie hey-days of ‘65, TIME even wrote an article about it (apparently 100,000 Americans were sterilized annually). More recently, I read an amusingly incredulous article about it in the Daily Mail (a right-wing British tabloid) with a few anecdotes about women who sterilized themselves because of the environmental impact of children. On the far fringes, there’s always the Voluntarily Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT), continuing to do their fine work. And of course we have China, though their one-child policy is hardly voluntary - another one of those instances where admitting that the actions of totalitarian governments can have positive impacts is awfully prickly.

All of this raises an interesting issue, though - it seems that having an environmental conscious remains something of a Western, bourgeois ideal, especially with regards to something as dramatic as voluntary sterilization. It’s an ideal that may ultimately be irrelevant, anyway, as birth rates naturally dwindle off with education and affluence. In most Western countries the birth rate is well below the level of replacement, with the difference being more than offset by immigration. Population growth (and commensurate consumption) the world over thus shows little real sign of abating, despite the extreme actions of a few people. As an analogy, we’re obviously much better off having 100 carnivores eat one less meat meal a week than have 1 person become completely vegetarian. Childbirth is much more of an all-or-nothing deal, which makes convincing people to avoid it that much more difficult.

The other irony is, of course, that most of the people who are willing to go ahead with something like voluntary sterilization are more highly educated and environmentally conscious in the first place, and would (I would argue) be more likely to pass on these virtues to their children. There are undoubtedly people who, through their actions, can produce a net negative in carbon emissions throughout their lives. I suppose adoption might be the ideal way to foster those values, while reducing the environmental impact of overpopulation.

In the longview, though, I wonder what the population will look like five generations from now, as intellectuals and altruists breed less and less, and the uneducated and uncaring pick up the slack. Alternatively, we’re left with the moral repugnance that eugenics entails. Neither option looks especially promising. I think I’ll read up a little bit more on VHEMT’s literature…

I know the topic of waterboarding is a played out theme lately, but after watching a Jon Stewart clip today and then doing some research, I feel like a comment on the practice is needed. Mostly I feel it necessary to emphasize just how fucked waterboarding is. Says Evan Wallach, former soldier (American) and waterboarding victim:

“The media usually characterize the practice as “simulated drowning.” That’s incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death. That is, the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted once the victim is unconscious.”

For those who still are unsure what waterboarding entails, pretty much a cloth gets placed over the face of the victim and water is poured on it. The cloth ensures water enters both the nose and mouth, preventing any form of breathing. The victim usually takes 2-5 minutes to “drown,” inhaling enough water to become unconcious. The victim is then revived and the process repeated (5-6 times consecutively is the current admission).

Says former Navy airman Richard E. Mezo, subjected to “water torture” in Vietnam:

“Pulling out my fingernails or even cutting off a finger would have been preferable. At least if someone had attacked my hands, I would have had to simply tolerate pain. But drowning is another matter.”

Both waterboarding victims report frequent panic attacks to this day, decades since active duty.

Waterboarding has been a favourite of interregators throughout the world for many centuries. Americans were especially fond of the practice during the Vietnam war. Check out the huge grins of these US troops as they “simulate the drowning” of this Viet Cong POW:

Hilariously (not really actually), this practice continues to be used by US military, with no end in sight. John McCain, the famous POW and former torture victim, claims to be opposed but recently voted against a senate bill banning waterboarding. WHAT THE FUCK? Little miss cuntface Hillary Clinton is also opposed to a ban, as torturing detainees might be important to prevent a future terrorist attack, although it should be used sparingly. It all depends on the circumstances. It’s a good thing only three Guantanamo detainees have admittedly been waterboarded so far this year I guess. And there haven’t been any attacks lately. I guess torture is working.

One final note: Pretty much every current presidential candidate (props to Kucinich, the rebel) has said that there are circumstances where torturing a detainee should be allowed to save American lives. One of these people will become the leader of a country that, only 50 years ago, executed 8 Japanese soldiers and imprisoned many more for torturing American WWII soldiers by “…fixing a towel under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned.” The defense of these soldiers? They were trying to save the lives of around 220,000 civilians killed by American atomic bombs. It wasn’t good enough apparently. I guess the circumstances weren’t quite right.