YouTube Revolution
Posted on July 1, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
MY PROFILE
About Morgan Clendaniel
Morgan
- Location:
- (11217, USA)
- Joined on:
- 11/30/06
- Occupation:
- Deputy Editor
The story thus far:
The Deputy Editor at GOOD Magazine
My Blog
The latest from Morgan (25)
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Culture
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2 votes
Living
Homosexual Penetrates With Ease
Apparently, if you are bothered by gay people, you like calling them homosexuals, which is clinical and gross sounding, as opposed to "gay" which sounds happy and fun-loving. An impressionable child would surely have much less interest in becoming a "homosexual" (snooze) than a "gay" (woohoo!). So, right-wing news site OneNewsNow.com does a quick replace all on stories from the AP. Guess what, though, sometimes the word "gay" appears in a non-sexual context. Like, say, Tyson Homosexual (née Gay), who just qualified for the Olympics in the 100 meters, or Memphis Grizzlies' forward Rudy Homosexual (née Gay), who often gets great penetration in the paint.
(they seem to have since fixed the problem, but screenshots don't lie!)
Via Boing Boing
Posted on June 30, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Politics
Sneaky Jong Il
So, North Korea has gone and blown up their nuclear cooling tower and told us all about their nuclear program. In exchange we are lifting sanctions and maybe even taking them off the Axis of Evil (like this is some official designation that the countries really want to get off of). Now, we're sure that there are lots of spies and diplomats working on this and that everything is ok, but really, Kim Jong Il is just going to say "after all those years, I've suddenly decided to end my nuclear program. Please send food." And we're just going to say: "Sounds good." We're not going to say: "You have obviously completed your secret nuclear reactor that we don't know about so you can blow up the one we do know about?" This is the oldest trick in the book! Kim Jong Il is laughing all the way to the Segway shipments right now while gleefully running around his underground reactor.
For more, read our Guide to North Korea.
Posted on June 27, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Politics
Supreme Decisions
The Supreme Court ruled today that the death penalty cannot apply to people who rape children. It was a tight, 5-4 decision, but the main gist is that you can't be killed for anything other than murdering someone (that's just in terms of crimes against other people, commit treason and you're still screwed). We've come a long way with death penalty thought—not that long ago, it didn't exist at all, let alone for crimes that didn't involve also ending someone else's life. At no point was it suggested to extend the eye-for-an-eye rationale of giving the death penalty to murders to help determine the punishment of rapists. For that at least, Patrick Kennedy (no relation) must be breathing a sigh of relief.
This was one of the three super important cases the court was hearing this term. The first gave habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees. The third, to be released tomorrow, considers Washington, D.C.'s total ban on handguns. The liberals are 2-0 so far on the court, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of hope for them to go for the clean sweep. Haven't you heard, the entire District of Columbia is one well-organized militia.
Posted on June 25, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Mobility
Water In The Fuel
A car that runs on water. Sounds too good to be true. But you heard it here first (or second, after Reuters). Also, there is just no way this works. We'll be happy to eat our words about that later. Finally, here is a man who had a water car two years ago. Apparently, no one thought it was a good idea to rush this intro production:
Posted on June 24, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Technology
McCain's Battery Prize
Peter Diamandis must be so happy. The incentive-happy man behind the X-Prize has been loudly advocating for a competitive focus to innovation. They're even working on one for super-fuel efficient cars. And now John McCain has proposed throwing the full power of the federal government behind a similar effort. By collecting $1 from every person in America (metaphorically. Rich people would have to pay more), he wants to offer $300 million to someone who can develop a battery that can power a car. It's the kind of audacious project we've been asking for for years. Who knows if this would actually happen if McCain was elected (manned mission to Mars, anyone?), but this is a good start.
Posted on June 24, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Politics
Capitol Words
What do those people in Washington actually do all day? Probably not much, but you'd have to delve into the Congressional Record to really find out and who wants to do that. Another alternative would be to go to Capitol Words, which tells you the word that was most used during congressional debates that day. Yesterday appears to be "health," so if you are having problems with your insurance, or with your health in general, know that Congress is on it and you should be all patched up shortly.
Via Boing Boing
Posted on June 19, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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Culture
not yet rated
GOOD Guide: to Shadowy Organizations, the Freemasons
The quintessential shadowy organization, Freemasons have been connected with almost any conspiracy you can think of. — read more
Contributors: Morgan Clendaniel
011: Get Lost - Jun 16 2008
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not yet rated
Culture
What's Your Number?
So, apparently on MySpace, if you're a really hot (and underage?) girl, you can develop a large fan base of other MySpace users. And then someone might try to make a fake MySpace page using your pictures. Or some people, knowing how hot girls' MySpace pages can be successful, will make up a fake girl using pictures found on the internet. To prevent this, the geniuses over at MySpace require the hotties to read their ID number into a camera, proving they are a real, flesh-and-blood girl. Here is a video of some of the highlights, or, as we like to call it, a fresh new sign of the impending apocalypse.
Via Gawker
Posted on June 16, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Culture
Brown Denied
The Catholic Church, in denying The Da Vinci Code sequel Angels and Demons permission to film in the Vatican or in Catholic churches in Rome, issued this fabulously old-fashinoned condemnation: Dan Brown has "turned the Gospels upside down to poison the faith. It would be unacceptable to transform churches into film sets so that his blasphemous novels can be made into mendacious films in the name of business." Brand control has never sounded so 16th century!
Posted on June 16, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Health
Metabo!
In America, where the average male waist size is 39 (apologies to people with that waist size - it's the people bigger than you dragging the average up and making you look bad), the idea of some national enforcement campaign against obesity seems laughable. In Japan, they are enforcing a rigorous 33.5 inch maximum on male waist size. Companies and municipal governments will face financial penalties if their employees or citizens don't comply. They've made up a friendly term, "metabo," to denote metabolic syndrome "a collection of factors that heighten the risk of developing vascular disease and diabetes. Those include abdominal obesity, high blood pressure and high levels of blood glucose and cholesterol." They even have a song:
“Goodbye, metabolic. Let’s get our checkups together. Go! Go! Go!
Goodbye, metabolic. Don’t wait till you get sick. No! No! No!”
Japan. Gotta love it.
Posted on June 13, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Media
ProPublica Launches
Propublica is a website devoted to investigative journalism that launched yesterday. Besides hiring a slew of reporters just itching to expose public malfeasance, they are also aggregating investigative journalism from around the country. They haven't broken their first big story yet, but they will, so pay attention.
Posted on June 12, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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Business & Money
Debt Charge
David Brooks writes today that the main problem facing Americans is our collective issues with debt. And while Brooks is a crotchety old man, this time it seems he happens to be right. We have almost a trillion dollar of credit card debt in this country—many people have a crippling amount. The problem is that somehow we decided that it was ok to buy things you couldn't afford. Call us superior, but in non-emergency situations, we simply cannot understand why you would do this. If you don't have enough money to buy that new TV, then you can't have the TV. It seems easy to blame human nature, but this is a relatively new phenomenon on the scale that it now exists, so let's blame the credit card companies instead.
Posted on June 10, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Living
Winning Games Doesn't Matter
In celebration of the primary's official end tomorrow, and the start of the NBA Finals last night, we bring you this slightly dated but still hilarious Detroit Pistons/Hilary Clinton mash-up. Count every point!
Posted on June 6, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Mobility
Gas Costs Spur Changes
Gas is expensive. Maybe you've heard? Or paid? And companies are starting to take notice. GM is ramping up construction of small cars and may even drop the Hummer from its roster. The airline industry is also scrambling, making many changes small (washing planes more frequently to cut wind resistance) and large, like exploring making people pay for their tickets by weight, which is something we drastically support since we've never understood why a large-sized item of clothing costs the same as a small, and its the same principle.
Side note: GM lost 38 billion dollars last year. It hasn't turned a profit since 2004. How can a company like that be in business. Nice free market for you.
Posted on June 3, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Living
Why Don't We Do It In The Road?
Apparently, the Telegraph has the sex-with-inanimate objects beat on lock. Let's look at some of the recent news: This man has had sex with 1,000 cars. He doesn't say how he does it, but he has one steady girlfriend and then a few others, and once did it with a helicopter. A helicopter! And then there is this woman who has been married to the Berlin Wall for nearly 30 years. One problem: they tore it down. Now she lives alone in Sweden bemoaning the loss of her husband and cursing the forces of history that reunified Germany. She is now on the rebound with her fence though. No joke. "I find long, slim things with horizontal lines very sexy," she says. The Great Wall of China was always too fat for her.
Posted on May 28, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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1 vote
Science
Spiders From Mars
We'd like to congratulate NASA on landing the Phoenix Mars Lander. Unlike the rovers, which land on the Martian surface fairly slowly, the Phoenix barreled in at nearly twice the speed of sound, and then had to stop short as it plummeted through the atmosphere. And it worked. So nice job guys. Now they start digging in the arctic soil looking for life, until the cold winter comes and freezes the lander solid. It's nice when NASA still inspires and impresses. May you find some frozen (and friendly) Mars life forms soon.
Posted on May 27, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Politics
Ellen Vs. Out Of Touch Old Man
We're not sure how many people watching the Ellen Degeneres show aren't already pro gay-marriage and gay rights, but there has to be some positive effect of having a gay personality beaming out to the viewers of daytime TV. While we never really think of Ellen as a sort of ground breaker, she was, and apparently continues to be. Somehow, her show is important enough that John McCain feels obliged to appear, and when he did, Ellen simply schooled him on his lack of support for gay marriage. Most awkward interview ever. Watch here.
Via Crooks and Liars
Posted on May 23, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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2 votes
Environment
Six Reasons Wired Is Wrong
Hi Wired. We think you guys are great. We said you were one of the best magazines of all time. But we'd like to take some issue with your "provocative" (read: irresponsible) cover (pictured above). We're all about questioning the conventional wisdom of the environmental movement because, frankly, a lot of it is wrong and not thought out very well. But what you've done here is employ fuzzy math and quirky facts to just make a contrary point that doesn't serve anyone in the fight to stop global warming. The main point, that we have to reduce carbon at all costs, isn't lost on anyone, but that fight is tied up in a larger societal shift that is going to need to happen to deal with the climate change crisis and whatever crises will come after that. We are living in an age of unbridled entitlement: people think that they have every right to own the biggest car they want, to eat strawberries year round, to have their house and workplace set to the exact temperature they want, and to be able to travel anywhere in the world at their convenience. Wired quotes Stewart Brand saying "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." But these God-like powers and the appetites they feed have led to our carbon crisis, and it's leading to our food crisis, and will probably lead to innumerable other crises. We can be easily provocative by finding different ways to cut carbon, but we're not going to cut carbon without the government's help, and the politicians aren't going to listen until people start living their lives as if they care about this. So, while it's cute to say that your SUV, by some complicated equation, takes less carbon emissions to build than a Prius, a nation of Priuses would get a lot of attention from Washington. Finally, because we have to say it, it would be a lot easier to take environmental advice from a magazine whose parent company didn't refuse to use recycled paper, even for their much lauded green issues, and insisted on sending all their magazines wrapped in plastic with useless advertising inserts inside. Just saying.
Let's look at what is wrong with some of Wired's "10 Green Heresies":
1: It takes more energy to heat an apartment than to cool it.
This is true. However, like many items on this list, that isn't the problem with, say, living in Phoenix. The problem with living in Phoenix is that you are living in the middle of the desert, pumping in huge amounts of water, and importing all your food because nothing grows in a desert. So, while it may be a good idea for us all to migrate to warmer climates, the real takeaway here should be: you can't just build a city wherever you want. The other takeaway: regardless of what takes more energy, we need to use less heating and cooling. People lived for hundreds of years with their houses too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. You can deal with a few degrees difference.
2: Organics don't solve anything and might be bad.
We'll buy that an organic cow causes more emissions than a factory farmed cow. We refuse to buy that this is at all making a difference because there are a minuscule amount of organic cows compared to the millions of cows living in feedlots in middle America and around the world. This was surely a fun point to make, but is utterly meaningless when you consider the scale. And yes, many organic companies are just run by large companies. But organic is less about cutting carbon and more about eating healthier, better tasting food, and those big companies still need to keep to the standards. Local is what is important (oh, thanks Wired, you did mention that in the last paragraph. Pardon us if we missed the helpful suggestion buried under the negative, manipulative headline). If there was a factory farm down the block that delivered lettuce to the supermarket, we'd be all for that. That seems not to be the case, and most of the small farms that do are organic. Sounds fine to us.
We're all for not vilifying China, and they probably will get on the environmental bandwagon. But, perhaps you've noticed, China isn't the most clear-headed, rational government sometimes. We're not sure we want to just sit back and watch them hold the bag on our collective future right now.
4: Go Nuclear.
We're on board with this one, too. But only to a point. To get off coal right now, we're going to need to go nuclear. But nuclear isn't a long term solution, and we should be devoting just as much energy to finding a post-nuclear energy solution, or we'll end up with thousands of tons of still-radioactive spent fuel rods. Then we'll have the nuclear waste crisis to deal with just as soon as we're coming out of this carbon mess. You thought Yucca Mountain was bad? Then again, if Wired, the magazine of forward technological thinking, can't find it in their hearts to advocate for some sort of cutting edge new energy ideas, maybe we're just all screwed anyways.
5: Drive a Used Car Instead of a Hybrid.
The numbers on this one are fun. It "takes more carbon" to produce a Prius than a Hummer. We're always suspicious of these kinds of calculations. Where does it stop? Did you count the carbon of the people who work in the factories? What about their families? Regardless, a Prius makes up the difference on the road pretty quickly. Wired's real "solution": We should be buying used cars that get good gas mileage. Thanks. That sounds like a scalable and helpful model. We'll just keep recycling the used cars until they all fall apart. Again, if this is the best thing Wired can think of about using cars to find a way to cut carbon, we might as well just go off ourselves now.
This one is the most egregious. This is a solution? Here is a simple equation: Pre-carbon problem, there were lots of trees and very few people. Now, there are not so many trees and lots of people. But we're going to cut down trees instead of finding some other solution to solve the parts of the carbon excess that are actually, you know, causing the problem? You have got to be kidding.
Worldchanging's Alex Steffan (from GOOD 002) offers a rebuttal at the end of the piece. It's worth a read.
Posted on May 21, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Art & Design
Design 21 Meets Millennium Promise
Many months back, we wrote about Design 21, an organization that sponsors design competitions for social good. We'd like to let you know about their latest project, which is designing a campaign for Millennium Promise, one of our inaugural Choose GOOD partners. They want you to design a new media campaign making people aware of the Millennium Development Goals, which, when fulfilled will help end poverty in Africa. We even made a video about them once. Here are all the details on the competition. Design your little hearts out.
Posted on May 19, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Politics
R. Kelly Teaches You About The Legal System
This may sound strange, but we'd like to strongly encourage you to read the Chicago Tribune's "gavel to gavel" report from R. Kelly's child pornography trial. Not only because it is awesomely hilarious, with lines like: "During some jurors' interviews, Kelly has been observed bopping his head in a manner that suggests he's grooving to a beat that only he can hear." Mostly because it's providing a detailed glimpse into the court system that is a lot different from the one seen on, say, Law and Order. There have already been something like 10 posts on the jury selection process (one prospective juror blamed R. Kelly for 9/11), explaining everything in detail. Plus there is R. Kelly and the child pornography, which makes the added bonus of learning about jury selection just salacious enough to keep reading about.
Posted on May 16, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Living
Marriage Reports
Since, as of yesterday, gay couples can marry in California (or, more exactly,can't not get married in California, which is slightly less revolutionary sounding, but whatever works), we'd love to know from any of you how this actually affecting the gay people on the ground, as it were? Are spontaneous weddings happening all over the place? Are cities equipped to deal with this? For instance, in Cambridge, MA, at midnight the night before the new law went to effect, Cambridge City hall issues marriage licenses to any number of gay couples. Is this happening in California. Let us know, the only report from the ground we can find is this disheartening one.
Posted on May 16, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Buying
Save Some Fuel
Perhaps you've noticed, gas is expensive! Really, really expensive. Here are some tips on things that not-smart people might have told you to do in order to save gas, that are actually totally made up. Some key examples that you may be doing: using premium gas. Even if your car tells you it needs it, your car is lying to you. Think about that.
Posted on May 15, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Buying
Sideways
For your weekend shopping spree, we want to let you know about this book Sideways, which is in some way connected with the arrival, a few months ago, of the Smart Car on our shores. The book features art works from various awesome international magazines on the broad subject of sustainability, etc. Even if you're not into the subject, the art is beautiful. Check it out.
Posted on April 25, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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not yet rated
Living
Beware The Penis Sorcerers
And you think things are bad here. In Congo, people are getting lynched in the capital. And for what? For magically shrinking men's penises. Yup. Men with gold rings in communal taxis will shrink your penis and not think twice, and the best solution appears to lynch those men before they can get to your penis. We'd avoid Kinshasa for the time being if you either like your penis the size it is, or are a sorcerer who gleefully minimizes penises but who can't cast any sort of anti-lynching spell.
Posted on April 24, 2008 by - Morgan Clendaniel
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Here at GOOD HQ, we have oft marveled that Evolution of Dance, a truly insipid video of a man doing various popular dances of the 20th century, is the most watched video on YouTube. For a long time, it seemed that nothing could unseat it. However, now the video of Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" is within less than a million views. If we all put our hearts together, we can change history and make a new video reign supreme on YouTube. You can be a part of that. Please. Watch. Added bonus: The song and video are awesome. Don't hate.