Crime, Punishment and Gettin' Your Face Smashed In

Justice and injustice on America's Indian Reservations

From Mother Jones. One in three American Indian women will be raped in her lifetime. On some reservations crime levels are 20 times the national average. The story of vigilante justice that may be the only justice available.

And, as for those rumors that all Native Americans are getting rich off the tribal casino interests:

A quarter of American Indians live below the poverty level; Ruben is on food stamps. His casino royalty check last year was for $8. "I'd rather they send a midget to my house to knock on the door," he says, "and when I open it, have him punch me in the nuts and say, 'Thanks for bein' Pawnee.'"

Mac McClellan covers human rights for Mother Jones.

Things required for Thanksgiving Day

1. turkey, 2. Alice's Restaurant, 3. cranberry sauce

A big shout out to Metafilter for giving us the lyrics to Alice's Restaurant in their entirety

At left, Arlo and family

ican going to graduate to now

A grad student thanks her professional term paper writer

The Chronicle publishes a guy who makes over $60,000 a year writing term papers for struggling college students. Best part is the comments section where educators line up to claim no responsibility for the problem.

He offers a free sample sentence that will work in any paper you write,

A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come.

Viva Linkdump!

Here's some stuff I been carrying around in my pocket...

How home runs happen,,.that anyone can even hit a big-league pitch is a wonder in itself. That some can hit home runs is practically a miracle. On paper, at least, the feat seems impossible.

The Navy has figured out how to turn a stream of sea water into an antenna... Damn, those guys at NRL are frickin clever...

Sick of waiting for red lights? Buy your way through.

to Mollie: sorry the packhorse librarian program ended in 1943.

S.O.S....S.O.S.... uh... nevermind.

A tale of Ed White...

I don't know if this story is true, but it ought to be...

From The Lampshade by Mark Jacobson

"Weird tattoo you got there," I mentioned to Skip, referencing the image on his right bicep depicting an astronaut, wearing a NASA suit, floating free beside a Gemini space capsule. "Who's that?"
"Who?" Skip replied, ever peeved at the ignorant, poking an index finger at his upper arm. "That's Ed White, my hero."
"Ed White, the astronaut, is your hero?"
"First American to ever walk in space. Ed fucking White."
It was at this point that Skip's version of the Ed White spacewalk diverged from the official NASA account. As per many published stories at the time, Skip believed that when White made his historic jaunt on June 3, 1965, the astronaut was subject to a condition know to scuba divers as being "narked," or so one theory goes. This occurs when the change in external pressure makes nitrogen more soluble in the body tissues, causing the diver, or in this case the spacewalker, to experience sensations not unlike ingesting several drinks or breathing nitrous oxide. In other words, while floating amid the boundless expanse of the universe, Ed White was stoned out of his mind.
He was enjoying himself so much that he refused to return to the space capsule. When fellow astronaut James McDivitt signaled that the walk should conclude, White replied,"No way." "McDivitt had to drag White back in," Skip recounted. When White was finally pulled back into the ship, he said,"This is the saddest moment of my life, coming back in here."