"Before, I just intellectually thought it was a bad idea to go to war in Iraq. When I saw the faces of the people, the people I was hurting, that I was assisting in hurting I really began to change on a spiritual level...

I looked at these guys and I thought, 'Man, these are young, poor, uneducated guys who didn't have a lot of choices in their life and are forced to fight us'...

And I looked at the guys in my own unit and I thought, 'Man, we're exactly the same... all the guys in my unit were young, poor, didn't have the best education, didn't have the best choices in life'

And when I came to that realisation I felt all my fighting spirit just sort of bleed out of me..."

A consciencious objector talks about his experience in Iraq: Part One and Part Two

Informative animation on what's wrong with Bush's Social Security plan.

"Washington has for the first time acknowledged to the UN that prisoners have been tortured at US detention centres in Guantanamo Bay, as well as Afghanistand and Iraq, a UN source said... UN sources said it was the first time the world body has received such a frank statement on torture from US authorities."

Torture Works

1984comic

A newly leaked memo said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult. "It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject," the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be "most unlikely" to obtain the legal justification they needed. The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

Epidemic Computing at Cornell

Teacher in Spain censored for defending filesharing.

A great NPR program about religion in politics in America

In Pursuit of the Gold Star: Diary of a Law Student
from Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left

"Rhetoric is a quarrel with others; poetry is a quarrel with oneself." William Butler Yeats

Now why would anyone throw photos like these away? (the archives are even better)

Eighth Annual ICFP Programming Contest

And remember kids, when you live in a police state you should always obey the police