The Glass Delusion was a psychiatric disorder of the late Middle Ages in which people believed they were made of glass.

Sufferer could believe or claim that he was any sort of glass object. A 1561 account reported a sufferer "who had to relieve himself standing up, fearing that if he sat down his buttocks would shatter... The man concerned was a glass-maker from the Parisian suburb of Saint Germain, who constantly applied a small cushion to his buttocks, even when standing. He was cured of this obsession by a severe thrashing from the doctor, who told him that his pain emanated from buttocks of flesh."

Thanks to Kate for this one.

15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will.

Time presents several photos from a 1980 photoshoot with college freshman Barack Obama.

Kevin Kelly wrote a quick article about the possible breakup of the United States. As he points out, most Americans would think this impossible but so did the Soviets.

Igor Panarin, a Russian professor, says it will be soon. From the Wall Street Journal:

He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

Fun to think about.

http://www.helpchildsoldiers.com/

The year 2008 in photographs from The Big Picture. Amazing images.

I was born with a crush on Debbie Harry.

I was in Virginia for almost three weeks during the Christmas break, and I didn't get to see the news much. I missed this. The mother of the dude who knocked up Sarah Palin's daughter was arrested for selling Oxycontin. I don't really care; millions buy/sell drugs. But I carefully enjoyed what Alex Pareene said in that article:

This is a sad and not-at-all entertaining story of broke-ass bored trashy people in a miserable unhealthy little sprawling town using and selling drugs to briefly escape the dull pain of their shitty lives, and it would not be news that the mother of a high school dropout who's marrying some idiot girl he impregnated was arrested for using drugs except that at some point we were all instructed to admire these exalted Real Americans. The Republicans were sort of right, these people are representative of America's small towns, and that is why as a whole we decided to elect the smart, educated, well-off urbanite aspirational black couple from Chicago instead of the angry Vietnam veteran and the scary PTA moron-bitch with the fucked-up family.

Ha-ha-holy crap.

This is one of the most amazing things I've seen. Charlie Chaplin standing on an eyelash! Wow. Mr. Wigan is a very, very cool guy. "'Nothing' doesn't exist." Brilliant man.

The 50 most loathsome people in America for 2008. #1 is a no-brainer.

If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a “great speaker” when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party between her admirers and people who can read.

After eight long, tiresome years, President Al Gore won't be missed. Even if he did save the planet

By TA Frank of The Guardian.

No one thought Al Gore would be a loveable president, but, after eight years in the White House, he has gotten truly tiresome. The droning voice, the purchase of an eco-friendly robot dog, the campaign for carbon-free diamonds - all these things were hard to take, and he has been way too smug about reversing global warming. I think we've gone too far in the opposite direction, especially in light of the glacier that recently crushed Wasilla.

I think I started to dislike Gore when he stirred up a media storm after the Feds broke up the terrorist ring conspiring to fly airplanes into buildings back in 2001. He could have let it pass quietly, as Bill Clinton did with the millennium plot arrests in 2000. Instead, Gore held a press conference to milk it for political gain and scare us into a 15 cent per gallon gas tax. But who can afford to pay over a dollar and a half per gallon? No wonder we're resorting to electric cars these days.

And why did he pressure the universally admired Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to step down early in 2002? Replacing him with that old warhorse Paul Volcker was a nasty surprise, especially when Volcker choked off a promising housing boom in 2002 and imposed old, outdated regulations on lenders. Some properties lost as much as 8% of their value that year. Now housing prices are rising really slowly, and GDP barely grew by 3% this year.

To be sure, Gore did accomplish some good things in foreign policy. The Middle East is definitely better off now that Israel and Palestine are separate states. It was clever to transfer the most diehard West Bank settlers to the Gore Biosphere in North Dakota. But in Iraq, even after the demise of Saddam from virulent salmonella, Qusay has proved to be no more agreeable than his father, and Uday is simply out of control. (Grinding up the players of the national football team and roasting the remains on a stadium-sized spit was the nadir of his coaching.) When a group of foreign-policy luminaries - from Bill Kristol to Paul Wolfowitz and Kenneth Pollack - urged Gore to invade Iraq and remake the entire Middle East, the president didn't even listen. That's rude.

Then, of course, there were the countless scandals and ethics problems. Recall that in 2003 a department of justice official failed to report receiving a bottle of Bordeaux wine from the French government, even though experts agree that its value would be in excess of the amount permitted as a gift. Then there was the case of politicising federal agencies, when Gore officials were accused of changing the wording in a report on global warming to say that it was a "severe" rather than a "serious" threat. The Republicans held hearings on that for weeks.

Of course, the biggest disappointment was Gore's failure to handle Hurricane Katrina properly. Not only did the massive evacuation of New Orleans prove a costly and time-consuming overreaction, since the levees - fortified in 2003 - held up fine. The emergency management agency also took over 24 hours to set up trailers for evacuees along the Gulf Coast, leaving them without government housing assistance for a full day. And Gore's decision to single-handedly venture into a flattened house in Mississippi and free a trapped two-year-old showed him to be an irresponsible showboat. Sure, President Gore knows CPR, hears like a German shepherd, and has the strength of 10 men - but we didn't need to see it.

All in all, the Gore combination of psychodrama and condescension won't be missed. It's also time for the Democrat stranglehold on power to end. What we need now is a bit of adult behaviour: a Dick Cheney presidency won't be eventful, but at least it will be calm.

Interesting photos by Sam Bassett.

"flying lessons" by Mehmet Karacabey

And perhaps a solution for Generation Wait.

But we are left with questions. How did this happen? No, really, how? What happened in the 2000 election? Can we go back in time and fix it? Bush was elected legitimately in 2004? How did a person such as this achieve the highest office in America? What does that say about our nation? People actually gave up freedoms for security? America started a war? What year is this? Where are we? What...the...hell?

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and all these other assholes we're tired of hearing about are finally leaving. Bye, George, bye.

Let's look back in horror a bit. In his acceptance speech at the RNC on August 3, 2000, Governor George W. Bush said:

It's funny in a very sad sort of way now.

He's said a few other things, too:

Disregard for the holiest of texts both divine and secular—the Bible and United States Constitution—allowed torture and loss of privacy. Deregulation led to deterioration of the economy. No Child Left Behind hasn't created better education. Lies and perhaps greed brought the world a new American war in the Middle East. With more than a million dead as a result of The Goddamn Bush War, it is surely Governor Bush's worst mistake. He cannot be forgiven these things. Thank goodness it's over.

Sure, it was eight long years and anyone can make this many mistakes in that time. The thing is that this is an itty bitty fraction of his blunders and blatherskite. He did it all the time. And, sure, some wise, compassionate people aren't great speakers. Even Moses had to have Aaron speak for him, right? Regrettably, that isn't the case here, as is seen in the backwards and noxious actions of the past administration.

The old sentiments don't seem cheesy today. Time for some euphoria.

www.whitehouse.gov has already changed.

The Big Picture has some great photos from yesterday's inauguration of Barack Obama.

We're All Gonna Die — 100 meters of existence

The image to the right is 100 meters long (100 m x 78 cm).

There are 178 people in the picture. All people were shot from the same spot on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin in the summer 2007.

On January 18, 2009, Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen, grandson Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, and the crowd in singing the Woody Guthrie song "This Land Is Your Land" in the finale of Barack Obama's Inaugural concert in Washington, D.C. The performance was noteworthy for the inclusion of two verses not often included in the song, one about a "private property" sign the narrator of the song violates, and the other making a passing reference to a Depression-era relief office.

Pete Seeger will be 90 this May. He was a huge part of folk music and protest/civil rights culture in the middle of the 20th century. Seeger was blacklisted in the 1950s and banned from radio and television into the 1960s. I'm glad he lived long enough to see the changes he sang about for decades start to come to life.

Here's video of Seeger and Arlo Guthrie (Woody's son) singing the song in 1993.

Big, beautiful shots by Greg Williams. Lots of movie stars and sets.

Worth a full watch just to see who's in it.

This is an excerpt from OUTLAWED, a documentary produced through the efforts of WINTESS and fourteen human rights groups. Warning: if you care about the United States or, more importantly, humanity as a whole, this will disturb and probably enrage you.

From Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing:

Speaking on my own behalf here: What happens with Guantánamo and the legal process surrounding the men still held there should matter to each and every person who reads this blog post. The safety of our nation does not require us to abandon universally-recognized principles of human rights. Torture and disappearances do not make America more secure.

Paraphrasing what one person from WITNESS told us in email -- if more Americans realized they live in a nation where, on a street corner in the town where you live, any one of us could be picked up, pushed into an unmarked van, then moved around detention centers all over the world, tortured, without a charge or a word to your family, surely there would be more outcry.

Guantanamo Bay is a travesty, but imagine what we are completely unaware of as far as extraordinary rendition—or "torture by proxy"—is concerned.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks the United States, in particular the CIA, has rendered hundreds of people suspected by the government of being terrorists — or of aiding and abetting terrorist organizations — to third-party states such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, and Uzbekistan. Such "ghost detainees" are kept outside of judicial oversight, often without ever entering US territory, and may or may not ultimately be devolved to the custody of the United States.

According to a December 4, 2005 article in the Washington Post by Dana Priest:
"Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons – referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe."

OUTLAWED is just 27 minutes, and can be viewed entirely for free right here.

Some people are still trying to ban profanity? Yeah, they are. What the fuck?

From Of Time and the City (2008) by Terence Davies

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."   — Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Bubble Calendar: a poster-sized calendar with a bubble to pop every day.

After reading The Mysterious Stranger I found this awesome, creepy stop motion video.

Photo by Ten Directions

Milhouse: Boy, Bart, Laddie's the best dog in the world. He's a lot different than your old dog.

Bart: Santa's Little Helper? I guess I was the only one who loved him.

Milhouse: You got that right. Remember the time Santa's Little Helper ate my goldfish, and you lied and said I never had any goldfish? Well, why did I have the bowl, Bart? Why did I have the bowl?

New York photographer Flora Hanitijo.