***UPDATED to include a few more sources, including IC’s rebuttal to the critiques raised – more information is always a good thing.***

If you were on the internet today, you probably saw the Kony 2012 video put out by the charity Invisible Children, designed to raise awareness and create international pressure to arrest Joseph Kony, an African rebel leader who’s myriad crimes include forcibly recruiting children to fight in his Lord’s Resistance Army.

The video took off like a viral wildfire over the last 24 hours, drawing attention everywhere and whipping up a frenzy of social media sympathy and probably sold a whole lot of bracelets and activist kits. The video is slick and affecting, and seems to have really figured out how to motivate people into action, at least in situations where “action” is defined as “express support on social networking sites”.

No doubt, the raising awareness part has worked – people with internet connections, several million of them, certainly know who Joseph Kony is today when they might not have the day before. The video did it’s work, and in terms of raising public awareness about atrocities in East Africa, it’s been good work.

However, the video itself is heavy on emotional appeal and light on information, as is the rest of Invisible Children’s web site. A little further research indicates that there’s more to the story, such as the fact that Invisible Children doesn’t spend a lot of it’s income on actual charity, and it’s mission to topple people like Kony largely involves equipping the Ugandan military, which doesn’t exactly have the greatest record in terms of humanitarianism.

Also, the situation as presented in the video is somewhat out of date – Kony himself is inactive, and has been in hiding for several years, thanks in part to assistance from US governmental advisors. He’s not particularly a factor any longer (not that there aren’t others in the wings), and the situation in the region, while not great, isn’t nearly as awful today as the video presents (the video more accurately describes conditions in 2003-2004).

The previous two paragraphs are largely sourced from a few articles I found – this piece at The Daily What and this somewhat more involved piece at I’m A Fan of Postcards, which go into more detail about Invisible Children’s mission and efforts. Both talk about how while IC’s heart is in the right place, the facts that they are so light on information, and that their historical revenue-to-action ratio is low, and tends to lean toward destabilizing military intervention are troubling. I encourage you to read both pieces, and do some more digging for yourselves.

In any case, the lesson here is that every appeal for action, is, in the end, a sales pitch, and often does not include all the information necessary to make an informed decision. The Kony 2012 video has obviously touched a lot of people, otherwise we all wouldn’t have seen it three dozen times in our twitter feeds. Personally, the video really pegged my “emotional manipulation” meter, what with all the “cute kid” footage and earnest narration (this is because I’m the kind of person who’s inherently distrustful of these kind of earnest emotional appeals – want to win me over? give me facts and figures, not video of some guy explaining war crimes to his six year old). While I don’t doubt that the guys who run IC feel very strongly about their cause (which, again, at it’s heart, is a good one), their video is calculated to cause an emotional reaction in you, which for a lot of people, short-circuits the ability to think critically about what is being presented.

In the end, it’s worth your time to take a few minutes to do a little research on these sorts of appeals so you know exactly what you’re showing your support for when you slip on a rubber bracelet or click the “like” button.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t donate time or effort or money to the #kony2012 movement, or to any other charity; but rather to be sure you’ve got all the information before you so. Everyone’s got an angle, and it’s in your interest to know what that angle is before jumping in with both feet on something, no matter how easy it is or how good it feels to engage in positive social action.

3/8 update — A few more sources that I thought were useful additions: first, a post from Foreign Policy magazine getting into the complexities of the entire issue, an interesting piece at Christianity Today which addresses the “know your charities” issue, and how religion plays into the situation in East Africa, this piece at Jezebel does a pretty good job of both collecting background information and capturing my initial (and still kind of lingering) cynical reaction to the whole business, Visible Children, a clearinghouse blog of the various concerns regarding the campaign, and finally, Invisible Children’s own rebuttal to the critiques that have been made to it’s effort (which directly addresses many of the criticisms with varying degrees of success).

A new candidate has entered the VA Senate race this year, challenging former Governors Tim Kaine (D) and George Allen (R) for the seat being vacated by the retiring Jim Webb.

Here’s his new ad:

Yes, the candidate is Hank. He’s a cat, running on a platform stressing job creation, reducing negativity in campaigning, and raising awareness for animal adoption (donations to Hank’s campaign go to the Fairfax County Humane Society).

Hank’s campaign is gaining a lot of steam, getting national attention via The Washington Post, Huffington Post, The International Business Times, and a mention on The Tonight Show.

There’s already a backlash against this insurgent campaign; superPAC “Canines for a Feline Free Tomorrow” have launched their own attack ad:

Totally unfair. There are plenty of legal Maine Coon residents in the Commonwealth of Virgina who are productive members of society, including this one.

I’m still pretty sure I’ll be voting for Kaine in November, but in my heart, I’ll be punching the card for Hank.

I’ve recently come to learn that my favored general shopping strategy is actually a thing. That thing? “Perimeter Shopping”.

There’s a surprisingly intricate science to the way grocery store shelves are organized. High profit, brand-name items are more likely to be shelved at eye-level or on end caps. The produce and/or bakery sections of the store are often situated right near the entrance, as the colors, smells, and sensations created by fresh fruits and vegetables and fresh-baked breads have been shown to correlate with people purchasing more. Stores are designed to sell you things, and aren’t above engaging in low-level psychological warfare with you in order to do it; it’s an interesting topic to read about.

One pattern I never noticed until it was recently pointed out to me though, was that generally, the healthiest, lowest-calorie, least-processed foods are stored almost exclusively on the outer edges of the store space. People looking to eat healthily are best served by “shopping the perimeter” to the greatest extent possible, and avoid the concentrations of unhealthy, high-calorie food in the central regions of the store.

Think about the floor plan of your favored gocery store. Around the perimeter walls, you generally find fresh produce, fresh meats, the fresh dairy section, and the bakery. What’s in the very middle of the store? Generally soda, chips, and sugary breakfast cereal.

The theory of perimeter shopping? Stick to the edges of the store, and you’ll generally find stuff that’s good for you, contains fewer ingredients over all, and fewer ingredients you can’t pronounce. Eat from the perimeter, and you’re probably eating healthier.

My two favored local stores follow this pattern, and one goes a bit further by sticking the frozen vegetables (better for you than canned, and keep longer than fresh – nice to have around in a pinch) along the edge as well. Even before I heard about the concept of “perimeter shopping”, it seems I was doing it.

Well, except for when I”m at my local Kroger, which sticks it’s great international section in the middle; I take a sweep through there for all the interesting hot sauces, Indian and Asian spices, and English tea. But otherwise, it’s the meat, vegetables, and dairy on the perimeter.

One of the best things I ever did for myself and my family’s health was to cut out much of the processed “boxed” food from our diet. All this stuff lives in the middle of the store. I’m not entirely sure cutting out pre-packaged taco kits and Hamburger Helper is really making me healthier (other than cutting out stuff like sodium and excess fat), though I know that I feel better not eating those things, and eating is more pleasurable because I can create better tasting, healthier versions of the foods that these boxed concoctions simulate with a little research and a well-stocked spice rack.

I’ve also found that it’s actually less expensive and no less convenient to not buy the pre-packaged crap and cook with fresh (or frozen fresh) ingredients. It doesn’t take me any longer to chop up a couple of onions and potatoes and throw some spices on them before pitching them in the oven. than it would to open a few envelopes of mystery powder and combine them with boiling water and butter or oil to reconstitute them.

Plus, I know exactly what I’m eating, and that’s generally a good thing.

In the couple of years I’ve been operating this way, I’ve definitely gotten healthier (though some of that comes from eating a little less and having a regular exercise program). So it works for me (of whom there’s probably thirty or forty pounds less of than there was two years ago), and apparently enough other people that the practice earned a name.

So I was doing this before it was cool…I’m such a hipster.

I wanted to share a couple of thoughts I’ve had in the last twenty-four hours or so, both because I think they’re important thoughts to share and talk about and to show how wildly my brain swings from topic to topic.

First, I find it absolutely baffling that here, in the year 2012, a time when the planet (that isn’t getting any bigger) has seven billion people on it, America is having a national discussion about whether comprehensive access to birth control is a good thing or not. What’s more baffling is that the argument against comprehensive access to birth control is that a small vocal minority of (mostly white male) people are uncomfortable with a woman having complete dominion over her own ladyparts and what happens in them.

And secondly…

I saw Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance Wednesday night. It was great fun, in a totally grindhouse cinema sort of way. Nicolas Cage was awesomely wacky, but still managed to convey the pain and torment of a guy posessed by a flaming skull demon. Also, it was a nice surprise to also find Tony Head and Christopher Lambert popping up in supporting roles. The story and script weren’t high art, but they fit with the 70s pulp comic world that Ghost Rider came out of, and managed to work in a few nods to the 90s revamp in a way that worked. I thought it was great fun.

I hope you have enjoyed this little journey into the serious and not-so-serious mood swings my brain has. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, whatever that is.

I’ve been sick. That’s pretty much it. I spent most of Friday and Saturday crashed on the couch watching old movies in between bouts of unconsciousness.

I did get out a little bit despite the circumstances; I supervised an after-hours school field trip with the eldest to see children’s author Graham Salisbury speak at an event sponsored by the Junior League of Richmond on Thursday night. It was a nice, engaging program, and I think the kids got a lot out of it. My kid’s read several of Salisbury’s books, and she really seemed to enjoy them. I found him interesting enough that I’ll be adding a few of his books to my “to be read” pile. Don’t know when I’ll get to them – that pile is quite large.

I got out of the house a bit on Sunday to attend to some responsibilities, but mostly, again, I took it easy, trying to get this mystery crud out of my system, except for spending an hour or two Sunday night working to rebuild the operating system on my laptop, which for some mysterious reason developed a twitchy boot sector. I’m mostly done with that, though for some reason, the touchpad quit working after a seemingly unrelated software update.

I’ll fix that issue this afternoon (shouldn’t be a big deal), though I suspect it is just one more instance of the universe telling me that the machine is seven years old, and that a new one is probably soon in the cards. Sure, it’s only a dual core with 2 gigs of RAM, and battery #2 only holds about fifteen minutes of power when it’s not plugged in, but I really like the form factor, and it still does what I need it to do. I may just spring for battery #3 and openly defy the universe for another year or two.

Otherwise, this week will eventually find me up in DC, but first I have to see the middle child get his Weblos badge tonight. This is a big deal, and I don’t want to miss it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, placing ideological purity over a well educated American population, speaking to a group of Tea Party supporters in Michigan this weekend:

President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob…there are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.

I’m not even sure how to respond to this. There are so many angles to criticize, the least egregious being the mischaracterization of White House educational policy, which is about giving everyone the opportunity to attend college, and removing economic barriers to doing so. It’s actually not so different (and by this I mean exactly the same) from Santorum’s stated position, as expressed on his old Senate web site. I think pretty much everyone agrees that college isn’t for everyone, but nobody should be denied the opportunity to get an education if such a thing is for them.

I could also take the cheaper shot by pointing out that by his own measure, Santorum’s at least 33% snobbier than Obama if you’re counting college degrees (Santorum’s got three, the President has only two).

But mostly, my problem is with his shameless playing on the fears of his audience. Conservative ideology has for years cast education as bad because it leads to liberalism, and liberalism has been portrayed as consistently and paradoxically both elitist and inferior. The movement has succeeded in recent years at convincing the mythical salt-of-the-earth Real Americans™ that make up the conservative base to resent the ideas of education and learning, by turning them into “the other”.

Conservatism has convinced all these older, white, low-education Tea Party voters that education is bad, and Santorum has spent the last couple of days telling them that sending their kids to college will causee those kids to reject their parents and their worldview, become seduced by the dark side of the liberal intelligencia, and be “remade into the image” of that <whisper>black fellow</whisper> in the White House they’re all so uncomfortable with.

Rick Santorum, with the statement above, told a bunch of old white people that a scary black manPresident Obama wants to steal and consume their children.

And on some level, he’s not wrong. A greater level of education does, in fact, correlate with a more liberal worldview. Above all, it comes from the experience of seeing and experiencing the world beyond their front door, and getting to know all the different kinds of people who live out there, and college is a great forum for that sort of thing. The more different perspectives a person is exposed to, the more tolerant they become of those perspectives, and the more they synthesize those other positions into their own personal worldviews.

In the end, everyone’s personal worldview comes down to serving the interests of themselves and the people they know and love. Liberal and progressive political views simply come out of a person’s knowing and loving a more varied and diverse collection of people.

Where Santorum and I differ is that he thinks this is a bad thing.

The part that Santorum leaves out is that education also correlates greatly to social mobility. People with college degrees have a greater opportunities to get better jobs and earn more money. As a parent, I know that I want my kids to do better than I’ve managed to; I’m pretty sure every parent feels that way; it’s a deep-seated evolutionary trait that continues to make our species successful and dominant. All of these statements from Santorum and his ilk; all the fearmongering and whatnot is about playing to even deeper-seated lizard brain motivations, fear and threat, in order to counter that strong desire for success for one’s offspring.

Because, at it’s core, despite all the talk of bootstrapping, conservative politics isn’t in the business in encouraging class mobility. It’s in the interest of making the rich and powerful richer and more powerful on the backs of the lower classes, who have been convinced to vote against their own economic interests through the proper application of bread, circuses, fear and prejudice.

Through the application of tactics like Rick Santorum applies in the statement quoted above.

Slacktivist made mention last week of the interesting dynamic at Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Holy Sepulchre, the supposed location of the crucifiction, entombment, and resurrection of Jesus. The church is managed by an uneasy, tenuous collective of half a dozen competing branches of Christianity, with one other influence continually present to keep the peace between these competing factions over the past 1300 years:The Nuseibeh family. Members of this Muslim family have served as custodians and doorkeepers of the Church for centuries, and they take their role seriously.

As current caretaker Wajeeh Nuseibeh said in an interview a few years back regarding his role as the mediator between the competing factions:

Like all brothers, they sometimes have problems. We help them settle their disputes. We are the neutral people in the church. We are the United Nations. We help preserve peace in this holy place.

I love the image this situation projects, a simple image of respect, tradition, and ecumenism in a place held holy by a significant portion of the world’s religious culture. It’s the kind of thing more people should know about, as it flys in the face of the common American misconception of Muslims and dissident troublemakers – more Christians should know that the force that maintains the peace,tranquility, and sanctity of the religion’s holiest site isn’t necesarily the spirit of Christian brotherhood, but a humble family of Muslims dedicated to doing the job for over a thousand years.

Through the magic of Netflix Watch Instantly, I watched Hackers last night. Despite it being a favorite of a long-time friend, I’d never managed to see it before (though I imagine it had probably been on in the background somewhere at some point or other, because my wife was sure she’d seen it with me). I was an interesting experience.

It got a LOT of things wrong, and mostly made “hacking” look way too much like video gaming (and indirectly suggested that being a master h@xx0r equated to mad skills at playing Wipeout for the PS1), represented computer viruses as digitally processed footage of a vitruvian Seattle grunge reject, and I’ve never seen a laptop display that could project a perfect mirror image of the screen on the face of the user.

Still, I hit a lot of good notes – you could tell that the people making the movie actually did a little research (and read a lot of William Gibson). The fact that the first big hack shown in the film was more a matter of social engineering (the “hero” talked a security guard into giving up information over the phone) rather than 1337 computer skills was nice to see, and largely true to life, as were the organic inclusion of phone phreaking and other classic hacker lore. Also, it worked in the now all-too-common warning to not choose totally obvious passwords as a plot point, which was a nice touch.

Mostly, though, the movie, as fun as it was, felt dated. “Dated” is actually a poor description; a better one would be “So 90s it hurts”. The bizarre fashion, the music, and the technology were certainly top-of-the-line at the time, but it all seems to quaint now. “A 28.8kpbs modem!” “It’s a P6, five times the power of the Pentium…too much machine for you!” and the like are all now merely amusing artifacts. Even the streaming transfer, in glorious non-HD 4:3 pan and scan, fed into the embarassingly nostalgic feel.

Still, I enjoyed it, for all it’s weirdness and requisite representations of virtual reality goggles (though I’ll give them points for wedging a Nintendo Power Glove into the background) and faux cyberpunk trappings. Plus, there’s a young Angelina Jolie doing a reasonably good sexy vulcan impression (as well as a quarter second of nudity!), which probably had more than a little bit to do with the film’s relative success. If nothing else, the film an interesting artifact of a time long gone, when the internet was still new, exciting and dangerous, and all your embarassing relatives weren’t sending you Farmville requests on Facebook.

I actually kind of miss those days.

Nicholas Cage, speaking about his craft:

Right now, what I’m excited about is trying to create a [pauses] kind of a cultural understanding through my muse that is part of the zeitgeist that isn’t motivated by vanity or magazine covers or awards. It’s more, not countercultural, but counter-critical.

…and in regard to his process for playing a guy with a flaming skull for a head (as pointed out to me via io9):

It occurred to me, because I was doing a character as far out of our reference point as the spirit of vengeance, I could use these techniques. I would paint my face with black and white make up to look like a Afro-Caribbean icon called Baron Samedi, or an Afro-New Orleans icon who is also called Baron Saturday. He is a spirit of death but he loves children; he’s very lustful, so he’s a conflict in forces. And I would put black contact lenses in my eyes so that you could see no white and no pupil, so I would look more like a skull or a white shark on attack.

On my costume, my leather jacket, I would sew in ancient, thousands-of-years-old Egyptian relics, and gather bits of tourmaline and onyx and would stuff them in my pockets to gather these energies together and shock my imagination into believing that I was augmented in some way by them, or in contact with ancient ghosts. I would walk on the set looking like this, loaded with all these magical trinkets, and I wouldn’t say a word to my co-stars or crew or directors. I saw the fear in their eyes, and it was like oxygen to a forest fire. I believed I was the Ghost Rider.

Truly, this man is indeed a national treasure. Don’t ever change, Mr. Cage.

this chart really needs an entry for those Pachinko commercials.

Happy Birthday, Andrew.