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November 16, 2006
Avalanche transceivers have become an essential piece of technology for people who spend time in avalanche terrain. Beacons, as they're also known, operate on an international standard frequency and can be used to find other transceivers (hopefully still attached to people) buried under snow, giving rescuers a chance to find victims before they suffocate. [more inside]
posted by mistermoore at 3:08 PM PST - 19 comments
Milton Friedman has died. One of the most famous economists to come out of the
Chicago school, his 1962 book
Capitalism and Freedom was a straightforward challenge to the predominant
Keynesian model that government intervention was frequently necessary to prevent market failures, arguing instead that the way to true political freedom was through economic freedom. He was a devout
monetarist and although conventional wisdom conflates conservatism with laissez-faire economics, he described his own philosophy as
liberal in the Enlightenment sense of the word. His 1980 book
Free to Choose, written with his wife Rose in conjunction with the
PBS series of the same name, explained in layman's term his philosophy of how a truly free market works for the benefit of society.
posted by Doofus Magoo at 11:02 AM PST - 123 comments
Only 35 days left until the
Global Orgasm. Remember that you're doing it for Peace On Earth or Purity Of Essence or Projection Of Energy or whatever. Don't forget to visit the
GlobalO Blog for more information.
posted by forrest at 11:01 AM PST - 51 comments
When Everybody Called Me Gah-bay-bi-nayss - an ethnographic biography of Paul Peter Buffalo, son of Ojibwa medicine woman and grandson of the great chief Pezeke. Buffalo died in 1977, but spent his last dozen years chronicling his heritage and the things the elders told him. Be sure to check out the entry on John Smith, a wonderful character more popularly known as
Wrinkle Meat.
posted by madamjujujive at 10:48 AM PST - 8 comments
Muslim UCLA student tasered for not having ID "It was beyond grotesque," said UCLA graduate David Remesnitsky of Los Angeles, who witnessed the incident. "By the end they took him over the stairs, lifted him up and Tasered him on his rear end. It seemed like it was inappropriately placed. The Tasering was so unnecessary and they just kept doing it."
Some
additional coverage. Patriot act craziness or simple police overreaction?
posted by cgs at 8:28 AM PST - 372 comments
In a rare interview out of character, Sacha Baron Cohen discusses his reaction to the controversy over Borat:
And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist -- who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old."
Maybe this Kazakhstan doesn't exist--but Borat's antics sometimes aren't far off the mark from
other parts of the world where gang-rape and stoning are meted out as punishment. Is it so silly to appreciate Borat as a comical icon from these dark corners of the world? Who is ignorant of what is really happening in the world--Cohen or his unwitting interviewees?
posted by Brian James at 1:37 AM PST - 150 comments
