deepfnord's blog

I'm pretty sure this will offend somebody, and I'm happy about that. After all, enraging somebody at least forces them to think about their assumptions, and that's almost always a good thing.

I was mighty pleased to discover that the entire November issue of Reason magazine is available online. I've been perusing the Reason archives quite a bit lately, and much to my surprise I find that the Libertarians make a lot of sense these days.

A bit off-topic, but amusing.

My wife is living on the island of Curacao for a while for a variety of reasons. I was there with her but returned to America because frankly I despise the island and all of its inhabitants. I'd be happy to explain why at length; send me an email and I'll write your ear off about it. Back to the topic at hand.

Today at the grocery store, I bought some oranges. I was expecting them
to be fresh, farm-picked Florida oranges, but on inspection they are
actually fresh, farm-picked South African oranges. This is very strange
to me: I live in one of the orange capitols of the world, and yet my
citrus is coming from thousands and thousands of miles away. I guess

CNN, that bastion of sensational and acontextual news media, has reported that Marijuana use can increase the risk of psychosis by up to 40%. I quote from the article, boldface my own: The new review suggests that even infrequent use could raise the small but real risk of this serious mental illness by 40 percent.

However, the article goes on to say:

The researchers said they couldn't prove that marijuana use itself increases the risk of psychosis, a category of several disorders with schizophrenia being the most commonly known.

Radical Islamist Students have taken over the Red Mosque in Islamabad again. This comes shortly after a bloody showdown at the same mosque in which more than a hundred radical Islamists were killed. Apparently these radical students--the ones who aren't dead yet--are demanding that Pakistani authorities release Maulana Abdul Aziz, their leader who was captured while trying to flee the mosque dressed as a woman. This article seems to be laden with fear. The authors seem to want to readers to feel uneasy (fnord) but I don't know why.