This section in particular is incisive and brilliant:

Second, just in case you missed what all of the fuss is about, the Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm For the Cure^tm announced on Wednesday that it will no longer be making grants/contributions to Planned Parenthood for early breast cancer screenings for the poor and/or uninsured. Nothing says “We’re committed to stamping out breast cancer by encouraging regular, early mammograms” like eliminating funding for mammograms.

OK.

The Susan G. Komen Foundation^tm has been on my personal shitlist for many years (this post is from 2008). If this is what it takes to get you on the heretofore lonely Screw Komen bandwagon, so be it. But you should not have a low opinion of Komen^tm because of their announcement on Wednesday. You should have a low opinion of them because they’re a fake charity run like any other company with a product to sell. In this case the product is a combination of guilt, pity, and hope dissolved in a weak acid and dyed a nauseating pink.

“Jonathan Franzen,” the internet said. “What a dick, am I right?”

“Well…” I said. “He’s got a reputation for being a crusty guy, but lots of writers don’t do well in the spotlight. But he admits the public stuff isn’t his strong suit. I chalk him up to being one of those Jonathan Safran Foer writers who I can read and enjoy but don’t necessarily want to meet.”

The internet barfed all over the place. “Him?”

“What, Foer? Well I mean he’s pretty playful, and did you read that story in the 20 under 40 issue of N-”

The internet interrupted me to barf everywhere once more.

This bit of satire is utterly brilliant, explains everything that’s wrong with the internet, and goes back for more anyway. Because we can’t quit it, even if we try.

More black men are in prison in America today than were enslaved in America in 1850. More African-American men are disenfranchised because of felony convictions today than because of all the laws against black people voting in 1870. A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery, primarily because of the chance of incarceration.

These stats are mindblowing. Full write-up. Separate discussion of how black children learn to relate to the police. Hint – it’s not positively.

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Further notes on incarceration in the US: by the age 23, nearly a third of Americans will have been arrested for a crime; We are the 1 in 100 – a Tumblr blog representing the 1 out of every 100 American citizens who are behind bars.

The Lost Type Co-op is a collaboration between Tyler Galpin and Riley Cran. It was founded with the intention of providing unique and quality fonts based on a pay-what-you-want model. All designers get 100% of the donations their font receives.

Like Bandcamp for typography? I’ve always thought that the pay-what-you-can model had potential for online distribution. Some people will be assholes, but as Louis CK’s recent experiment (longer post on this forthcoming) demonstrated, a lot of people will not. Seems like a good cause with a good business model and some well-designed fonts. Even cooler that one of the cofounders is a friend-of-a-friend.

It started simply enough. Adam found out he needed a visa to travel to China. He went online. Filled out a long, complicated form. And Adam showed up at the Chinese Consulate only to find out that he had filled out the wrong form.

…

Everyone, it seemed, was facing the same problem he was. And this is when Adam Humphreys had his big idea. He called his buddy Steven Nelson. And they rented a van.

A large Penske cargo van.

And they parked it in front of the Chinese consulate. Right in front of the exit door, where frustrated visa applicants wandered out into the sunshine wondering what to do. These lost souls, like Adam a few days earlier, would now be greeted by a sign on the van: Lucky Dragon Mobile Visa Consultants.

I think the best part about that is the name.

From Twitter and Google+

MegaUpload shut down! Everybody freak out. Detailed discussion here. Older discussion of MegaUpload’s compliance with DMCA here.

It’s a Girl – Fantastic and heartbreaking article from The Independent about sexism affecting birth ratios of boys and girls around the world.

iBooks Author – Everyone’s super excited about Apple’s new textbooks platform, but note that they have some tricky restrictions about ownership of content. Meaning that anything you publish through iBooks is theirs.

Santorum on Rape Victims – Rick Santorum once again demonstrates his lack of worth as a human being by telling rape victims who subsequently became pregnant to make the best out of a bad situation, and that the pregnancy is really “a gift”. Hey Rick, go to hell. Twitter user @desifeminista sums up the Republican stance on women’s rights:

If a woman in a vegetative state is going to die: organize to save her life! If a mom is dying while giving birth: LET HER DIE! #FLdebate

The Worst Project I Ever Funded on Kickstarter – Internet entrepreneur Matt Haughey talks about what not to do if you’re trying to raise funds for your product via Kickstarter, the crowd-sourced investment vehicle.

WTF is with empowered women in video games now – These gamers are OUTRAGED that female characters in video games are actually–gasp–just as good as male characters. How dare these game companies say that women can be just as good as men in a fictional universe with gravitational improbabilities that I could never survive in real life!

Nerds and Male Privilege – Speaking of, my new favourite blog Dr. Nerdlove talks about why nerds are often unaware of their male privilege, and how that can hamper them in dating.

English Pronunciation – Read this poem out loud. Can you pronounce every word in it?

Congress Wants to Kill Open-Access Journals – You’ll be paying for JSTOR for a long time if these assholes succeed.

No New Sign-Ups – Popular tech forum YCombinator disabled account sign-ups for a day to prevent an influx of Reddit users due to the SOPA Reddit shutdown. It turned into an interesting discussion on how to maintain community culture.

YouTube round-up:

World’s Coolest Flight Attendant
The Gorillaz’s Feel Good Inc. Live-Looped – my new girl crush!
The Lion King Set to The Dark Knight Rises Trailer
A Cat Plays Fruit Ninja on the iPad

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From The Blog

Commentary

Going Dark In Protest of SOPA – I shut down the blog for one day in protest against SOPA and wrote an informational post about it, for those who are not familiar with what it is. Follow-up post coming soon.

Android’s Ideology – I discuss the relative merits of boycotting a company’s products because you disagree with them ideologically, and why this can sometimes be a red herring. There’s a fun discussion about this over on Google Plus.

Links

The Monster In Your Brain – JT Eberhardt’s elegant summation of what it feels like to be depressed.

Debt Matters Not All That Much – Paul Krugman argues why focusing in debt in the US economy is just a smokescreen.

Rolling Stone is Sexist? Who Would’ve Thought – Another round of sexism in advertising stuff, this time based on the covers of Rolling Stone magazine.

40 Nice Things About Newt – New Yorker columnist John Cassidy asks his readers to say some nice things about Newt Gingrich, for once, with amusing results.

Words and their Meaning – Johnson talks about semantic drift in political lingo. Or: the way words’ meanings change when wielded by pundits with an agenda.

Jim Crow 2.0 – Kicking off the new year with some fun stuff about voter ID laws and voter disenfranchisement.

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Elsewhere

2:37 AM – one of my pieces from the writing section has been edited and published over at Write-A-Holic. A big thanks to Valentina for doing the polishing for me! Go give them some pageviews.

Ladies Learning Code – LLC is a fantastic Toronto-based organization trying to make the world of computer development more friendly to women. I attended a workshop a few weeks ago as one of their mentors. Write-up coming soon.

Happy New Year! Here’s me with a jaunty hat.

To be chemically depressed is like having a monster in your brain trying to take it over.  The monster is never dead, but you can keep it chained in the corner by taking certain steps.  Sometimes it tries especially hard to get loose.  And even for the most well-managed loon, sometimes it does break free.  When that happens, it changes your opinions.  Things you believed to be true just the day before – that life was worth living, that there was hope for things to get better, that you’re not extremely obese, evaporate as the monster sinks its tentacles into your mind.  You literally lose track of ‘you’, and with it your ability to realize that the monster is lying to you.

I just discovered his blog last week, and it is most excellent. Don’t miss this heartwrenching discussion of what it’s like to be a guy living with anorexia.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

…

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

I am joining my blog to that voice. This website is going dark in protest. Read on.

What are SOPA/PIPA?

SOPA stands for “Stop Online Piracy Act“. PIPA stands for “Protect-IP Act”. The two are pieces of legislation currently being pushed through the US Senate by content-holder like the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America) and the MPAA (The Motion Picture Association of America). If they passed, they would give content-holders unprecedented power to control and direct the flow of information on the internet.

Why are they so bad?

Remember this little thing called the DMCA? It stands for “Digital Millennium Copyright Act”, and it was passed in 1996 in an effort to combat piracy. If you’ve ever seen a YouTube video that has been blocked because it used a particular piece of music, or if you’ve clicked on a link only to come up against notice that the content has been removed due to copyright violations, well, chances are those videos were served with a DMCA takedown notice.

But the DMCA doesn’t just affect kids singing covers of their favourite songs on YouTube. The Church of Scientology, for example, has tried to abuse this piece of legislation in the past to suppress information about their practices. That’s not very beneficial to freedom of speech.

Now, the DMCA was bad, but SOPA/PIPA will be much worse, because they have much more far-reaching consequences. For example, under the “user-content” provision, a website can be shut down if any of its users upload something that might be in infringement of copyright. That means blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr, but it also means major content-hosts like YouTube, Vimeo, Wikipedia. Even Google could be at risk, unless it actively filtered and censored its search results.

Even more problematically, there is no recourse. There is no due process. Anyone can file a complaint, and your site might just disappear from the internet. You won’t even be able to have a placeholder saying that you’ve been served a legal notice. Your website will just be gone.

The internet has been a source and a driver of huge amounts of innovation in the past, but one of the main reasons why the internet is such a breeding ground for creativity is because it has an open architecture. Anyone can see what anyone else has done. Anyone can take the work of someone else and build on top of it.

That’s not going to happen if everyone’s terrified of being bisappeared if they stepped out of line.

Why are they doing this?

Well, the content-holders are terrified of the internet. They see their traditional means of distribution (like CDs and DVDs) losing ground in favour of digital media that’s much less easy to safeguard. Rather than learn lessons from more innovative content creators who have managed to make the internet work for them, they’ve decided to clamp down even further, and use large amounts of campaign donations to buy out politicians who are willing to do their dirty work for them.

Copyright reform is a whole separate issue I won’t get into right now, but needless to say, the content-holders aren’t so much interested in seeing innovation and encouraging creativity as they are interested in profiting off of their existing assets.

I’m not in the US, why should I care?

SOPA has widereaching implications for the role of free speech in society. Even if you don’t necessarily care about the innovative potential of a free and open internet, you should care about free speech, because it’s the basic principle that allows you to speak dissent against those in power without fear of retribution. A proper functioning democracy needs to be able to criticize its rulers. How long do you think it would take for people to begin being shut down for criticizing, say, Michelle Bachmann?

Furthermore, the US often sets legislative precedent for other jurisdictions. The EU is currently in the process of passing ACTA, their version of the DMCA.

Those in Canada should take note that for the purposes of this piece of legislation, Canadian domains are considered to be “domestic”. Yep, no more national sovereignty. As far as the internet is concerned, we’re American now.

And finally, many of the largest enterprises on the internet are hosted in the US. Websites like Google have their servers in the US, and they must obey US laws. This means that even if you’re surfing from a socialist utopia somewhere else, your access to information will be severely hampered by SOPA.

Okay, you’ve convinced me. What can I do?

If you’re in the US, write to your congressman. Call them, if you can, because that’ll be more effective. If you’re in Canada, talk to Open Media. Otherwise, sign the petition contacting the US State Department.

Here’s some more information about this:

How SOPA/PIPA Violate White House Principiles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation
Electronic Freedom Frontier

Stop Piracy, Not Liberty
Google

Stopped They Must Be, On This All Depends
Reddit

Learn to be a Better Activist During SOPA Blackouts
Information Diet

Stop SOPA
O’Reilly Media

Today The US Legislation Is Considering Legislation That Would Destroy The Free and Open Internet
Wil Wheaton

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Feel free to email me if you have any more questions.

Protect your freedom of speech. If you don’t, no one will.

Well, yes. But not to nearly the same degree:

(Click for full size.)

So please try to keep things in perspective, gentlemen.

Full write-up.