My Favorite Music Videos

I just thought I would post links to a few of my favorite music videos.

• Blue - Coffee & TV [mov]


• Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice [wmp, real]


• White Stripes - The Hardest Button to Button [mov]


• White Stripes - Fell In Love With a Girl [mov]


• Sigur Ros- viðrar vel til loftárása [wmp]

By the way, Launch.com officially sucks because it doesn't support Firefox.

Mark my words: HIV numbers will go up

Condom Wars
New guidelines gut HIV prevention — and endanger young people’s lives
by Doug Ireland

Lethal new regulations from President Bush’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last week, complete the right-wing Republicans’ goal of gutting HIV-prevention education in the United States. In place of effective, disease-preventing safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS. And those abstinence-only programs, researchers say, actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Published on June 16 in the Federal Register, the censorious new CDC guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does HIV-prevention work and also receives federal funds — whether or not any federal money is directly spent on their programs designed to fight the spread of the epidemic. (The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention education about HIV and AIDS, and its head a Bush appointee). It’s all couched in arcane bureaucratese, but this is the Bush administration’s Big Stick — do exactly as we say, or lose your federal funding. And nearly all of the some 3,800 AIDS service organizations (ASOs) that do the bulk of HIV-prevention education receive at least part of their budget from federal dollars. Without that money, they’d have to slash programs or even close their doors.

These new regs require the censoring of any “content” — including “pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula,” “audiovisual materials” and “pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials using photographs, slides, drawings or paintings),” as well as “advertising” and Web-based info. They require all such “content” to eliminate anything even vaguely “sexually suggestive” or “obscene” — like teaching how to use a condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they demand that all such materials include information on the “lack of effectiveness of condom use” in preventing the spread of HIV and other STDs — in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell people: Condoms don’t work. This demented exigency flies in the face of every competent medical body’s judgment that, in the absence of an HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.

...

A third of all federal HIV-education money — some $270 million more in Bush’s latest budget — now goes to abstinence-only programs, almost universally to Christian groups as part of Bush’s “faith-based initiatives” (no Jewish or Muslim groups receive any funds).

PS: Bush to give State of the Union on Wednesday.... dKos suggests that Democrats give a real (aka, not full of fluff, lies, and distortions) State of the Union before Bush gives his.

Some Reading

Regarding the recent elections in Iraq, this disturbs me a lot:

Iraqis were electing a 275-member transitional National Assembly, which will draft a new constitution, and pick the country's next president and two vice presidents. The president, in turn, will select a prime minister.

Voters were also electing members of 18 provincial councils. In addition, residents of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region are electing a Kurdish parliament.

Because of security concerns, names of the 7,000 candidates vying for office were not revealed until the final days of January.

Don't you think it would be awesome to have an election where you knew nothing about the 7,000 candidates you were voting for until a few days before the election? Even better, wouldn't it be that much better to be electing a council that will elect the President and 2 VPs? Sounds to me like we have our hands in the outcome.
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Slate: The Complete Bushisms (Updated Frequently)
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Find out what Bush is up to according to a conservative blogger... trust me, you'll think it's ... different.
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All of this in Florida in the last few days...

• Special Education Students - 9 and 10 - Arrested Over 'Violent' Stick Figure Drawings
• 9 Boys - age 12 to 17 - Arrested In Seminole Car Thefts
• 9-Year-Old Accused Of Attempting To Cut Off Boy's Fingers

... Jesusland: home of perfect, Christian, children.
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Sorry I've been updating like crazy. That's what happens when you've been too sick to leave the house since Friday.