Over the last few years I’ve seen so many stories that gutted me. The loss of New Orleans, the oil spill, my own government openly admitting to torture, the erasure of nearly half of the world economy, taking countless quiet lives. All of these with their ripples, stories of lives destroyed that won’t ever be told. I have what they used to call a melancholy temperament. Sometimes I just think of these things, and I rock and cry. The entire time I’ve been surrounded by lawyers. I’ve badgered them about why there have been so few or no cases related to the truly major crimes that have been tearing down society. I always get the same answer: that these things are simply too hard to prove, too politicly tainted, that law enforcement doesn’t like to take cases they might lose.

I can’t tell you how disappointing this answer is. It’s too hard? You might lose? Then do hard things and risk failure. What else are we on this earth for?

I’ve been living through the collapse of my industry as well over the last few years. After so many barrels of ink have been wasted on media’s navel gazing (and my god can we navel gaze) I have talked to may of my colleagues, and read much of the studies and analyses of the public consumption of media and news. For all of our gnashing teeth, it turns out either we’re doing our job, or someone else is. The public is more well informed than any other time such things have been studied in history. Yet scandals don’t carry the weight to reform they once did at anything but the most local level, and maybe even then only rural, where prosecutors still follow up. I have worried for some time that part of the public apathy we see is this: your profession has stopped taking the baton from mine.

Then there’s the matter at hand; you have accused Aaron of downloading a million journal articles. You’ve said you can prove this. You’ve asked me to contextualize this, and I’ve given you the only context that I can imagine– giving the global poor tools to better their state. I believe it’s the only context you have. I am still wondering how, in all a sea of troubles, that can really be worth your time and energy, how that can be worth the awesome and sacred destructive power you’ve been given. If you can tell me how spending your precious time on that, time you will never get back, time that can never be given to so many unaddressed oppressions on the human spirit, makes the world a better place, I will rest. Even if I disagree with you, I can rest. But I think I will know if you’re lying. If the actual answer is the other things are too hard, that you might fail, then you are already part of a grand failure. A failure so great and so close to us we can barely see it, mistaking it for the sky itself.

Yours,

Quinn

—

I copypasted this section into a note yesterday and now, for some reason, I cannot find the link on the web in a sufficient period of time.  This is Quinn’s twitter, that will have to do for now.

Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means “Above all, do no harm“. The phrase is sometimes recorded as primum nil nocere.

The so-called Hippocratic injunction to do no harm has been an axiom central to clinical pharmacology and to the education of medical and graduate students. With the recent reexamination of the nature and magnitude of adverse reactions to drugs, the purposes of this research and review were to discover the origin of this unique Latin expression. It has been reported that the author was neither Hippocrates nor Galen. Searches of writings back to the Middle Ages have uncovered the appearance of the axiom as expressed in English, coupled with its unique Latin, in 1860, with attribution to the English physician, Thomas Sydenham. Commonly used in the late 1800s into the early decades of the 1900s, it was nearly exclusively transmitted orally; it rarely appeared in print in the early 20th century. Its applicability and limitations as a guide to the ethical practice of medicine and pharmacological research are discussed. Despite insufficiencies, it remains a potent reminder that every medical and pharmacological decision carries the potential for harm.

::: Via Pubmed :::

This is the indygogo campaign video for a movie called Be Brave.  It is quick and worth watching.  I shed tears (actually just a single, very manly tear)

Wow!  Very compelling right?

Of course, if he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia briefly after returning from Mexico that means that the cancer had been growing in his body for years.

HOW DID THE MAYAN SPIRITS KNOW THAT HE WOULD STEAL THE BONE BEFORE HE DID IT!?!?!?

Do we have free will?  Did the spirits know he was a bad person and pre-curse him?  Grave robbing is pretty common (fyi, when Universities rob graves and steal valuable things it’s called “research”).  I wonder about the other people that stole bones? Did they get leukemia too? Or was it just this one fascinating guy with an awesome sister?

On a broader level, I think this concern about the sanctity of the body is a thing we living people project onto our compatriots who have already passed.  We live life in constant, petrifying fear of dying and so the sanctity of our death rituals is not so much for us but for the people we leave behind.  If your soul has gone into the vastness of eternity, the physical form is irrelevant.  It’s like, who rationally cares about what happens to their fingernail clippings?

Attn Geography Geeks

Above is an abstract performance art piece of a woman dancing on butter.  It is super agonizing but I encourage you to watch it anyway.  The reactions mostly focus around confusion, vicious humor, a bit of bigotry, art in quotation marks, art students, pretentiousness but there is also just a bit of empathy.  That’s a rarity though, especially on the internet.  However, the critical factor is that this flies way over most people’s heads.  So seriously try again to watch as much of this as you can.  Stay with me here.

[–]KosherNazi of reddit explains it perfectly:

Almost all the conversation on reddit focuses on whether or not this is art.  Reddit users are only slightly less slackjawed than youtube users so the dialogue is based on the rather subjective analysis that reduces to:

Art = stuff I like
Not art = stuff I don’t like

In fact, Art is very simply, almost any human expression.  There are some more academic definitions about form and content but that’s really all there is to it.

Though the federal government considers marijuana a Schedule I Controlled Substance and bans its use for medical purposes, a growing number of states feel differently. Today, 18 states and Washington, D.C., have legalized medical marijuana for people suffering from debilitating medical conditions like cancer, epilepsy, severe nausea, multiple sclerosis and chronic pain. And on Tuesday, Colorado and Washington State voted to legalize marijuana for adult use, regardless of medical condition. But these states cannot stop the federal government from enforcing its own laws.

 

And federal drug laws are unjustifiably extreme. Consider the case of Chris Williams, the subject of this Op-Doc video, who opened a marijuana grow house in Montana after the state legalized medical cannabis. Mr. Williams was eventually arrested by federal agents despite Montana’s medical marijuana law, and he may spend the rest of his life behind bars. While Jerry Sandusky got a 30-year minimum sentence for raping young boys, Mr. Williams is looking at a mandatory minimum of more than 80 years for marijuana charges and for possessing firearms during a drug-trafficking offense.

 

This outcome is sad, of course — Mr. Williams will not be free to raise his teenage son — but it is also morally repugnant. Even if you think that the benefits of legalized medical marijuana do not outweigh the costs — a crucial debate, but one we can table for the moment — a coherent system of justice must explain why one defendant is punished more harshly than the next. It must explain why a farmer who grows marijuana in compliance with state law should be punished much more harshly than some pedophiles and killers. If we cannot explain this disparity, we should fight to change it.

 

:: The Fight Over Medical Marijuana + a cute little “op-doc” via The New York Times ::

The article goes on to mention that the guy had multiple opportunities to plea bargin and refused to take them.  That’s a principled stance that probably isn’t a smart stance.

This is from a canadian newspaper from like ten years ago.

see also:

Thieves steal 18 tons of chocolate
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/thieves-steal-18-tons-chocolate

pol·i·tesse n.

tl;dr – (talented) primadonnas whining about something they don’t understand.  

http://blog.burningman.com/2010/07/digital-rights/welcome-to-digital-rights-debates-in-the-dust/