*shucks*

 From my inbox this morning:

Hi:

  I'm writing to you, first of all to compliment you on your blog, and secondly to say that, primarily as a result of reading your great material, I've been inspired to begin one of my own.

      I live in Los Angeles, although I am Scottish by birth, and I have always been staggered by the lack of concern and, indeed, ignorance that you find here in regard to politics and its impact on each individual life. It would seem even more apparent these days - at a time when the threat from the extreme right is growing ever larger.

       Hence the blog. I'm not deluding myself that it will become a talking point for thousands but take the position that, if one young person is moved to vote by reading it, then it's a success. That's why I'm trying to use music posts as the tease and intersperse them with opinion pieces and interesting news excerpts.

       I'd like to ask you to have a look at the blog when you have a chance and, if you think it worthwhile and in accord with your views, whether you would be willing to mutually link each other's blogs so, hopefully, more readers can be directed to both. I would also like to ask whether you have any objection to me using pieces from your blog on mine.

       My blog is still in its infancy and the design is still evolving. However there's enough content up there, I believe, for you to get the idea of where I'm coming from.

       The blog is

www.groundsforappeal.ihookitup.com

       Thanks. Hope to hear from you soon.

Well Neil,

you seem to be doing a fine job so far...

will keep checking back

Regards/

Bikeway in Austria

via verkehrt.net

Hey wingnuts

THIS is how Christians are supposed to practice their religion. 
THIS is what the spirit of the first amendment is all about. 
Please attempt to understand THIS!

HERE

Is there a reason why some women like a guy with chest hair and other women don't?

Inside Story - Rethinking the war in Afghanistan

Remember...

@'Threadless'

Read all about it: The secret dossier of lawbreaking that spells trouble for Rupert Murdoch...and David Cameron

HA!

Is This America?

Revolutionary suicide

@'WFMU'

Iran: women on the frontline of the fight for rights

Shiva Nazar Ahari is a prominent women's rights activist. Photograph: Observer

When Shahrzad Kariman finally saw her imprisoned daughter Shiva Nazar Ahari earlier this month, it was for a brief moment outside the Tehran courtroom where the 26-year-old human rights campaigner had been brought. "We could see her for a few minutes," Kariman told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran last week. "Just enough to hug her. But we couldn't ask her how the court session went… We didn't know what the charges were prior to the court session."

The charges against Nazar Ahari are among the most serious that can be levelled in Iran: muharebeh (enmity against God), a crime, in theory punishable by death, originally intended to be used against armed gangs and pirates, not dissidents.

Nazar Ahari is also charged with assembly and collusion aiming to commit a crime, propagating against the regime and disrupting public order. But perhaps most dangerous among the allegations – strongly denied both by her family and her organisation, the Committee for Human Rights Reporters – is of "relations" with the banned Mojahedin e-Khalq group, which is accused by the Iranian regime of terrorist activities. Her family says that she deplores the organisation.

Arrested twice since the disputed Iranian elections in June 2009 and held in the notorious Evin prison, in north-west Tehran, Nazar Ahari has been kept largely incommunicado since December, when she was arrested with several other women activists on her way to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in the city of Qom. Also detained was Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, another prominent women's rights activist and film-maker, who has since left Iran and was sentenced in absentia to two-and-a-half-years in jail and 30 lashes for her part in a 2007 protest.

For the 15 months since Iran's stolen elections, the faces of these women and others like them have been visible from Paris to New York, in London, Berlin, Sydney and the Hague...

Continue reading

Peter Beaumont @'The Guardian'

Dopamine

@'New Scientist'