Hello!
I submitted my application to attend TEDxUofM on Friday. They only have 300 seats, which means they’ll probably read twice as many applications, so I included a short haiku at the end to help show how fun I am & to hopefully make my application stick out. The conference is April 10th, so they should be releasing the attendance list fairly soon.
I heard a really interesting piece on the radio the other day about how the internet is being used to undermine extremist groups – mostly by helping reservse the isolation that many of their recruits feel. I couldn’t find a link to the piece I heard by The World, but the BBC had a very similar article. Very interesting.
This is an interesting article – U.S. Will Undergo Human Rights Scrutiny. Here’s the opening paragraph:
Rolling out the State Department’s latest human rights report, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that, for the first time, the United States will submit itself to a process in which its record might be judged by some of the world’s worst human rights abusers.
Lastly, another very interesting article – Germany fights to keep Holocaust organiser’s files sealed.
The secrecy order is being challenged in a benchmark court case against the BND, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, which wants the 4,500 pages of documents on Adolf Eichmann to remain out of the public domain. The service claims that intelligence agencies in other countries will be “frightened off” in future data-sharing if they are disclosed, Der Spiegel reported.
Yesterday we spent the afternoon & evening in Jackson. Joel’s band [Fields of Industry] & two friend’s bands [Long Whisker & God & the Architects] played a showed at the Michigan Theater.It was a really wonderful night full of friends from Jackson, Chicago & Ypsilanti, full of love & full of joy.
Today in Jackson, a local group is organizing a “white pride march” to “fight for the rights of whites.” The idea of needing to march to defend the whites’ rights is pretty ridiculous in itself, but it seems the march is being organized by Battalion 14 Michigan, a group whose recruitment videos uses neo-Nazi imagery. More about that here. Yikes.
Our friend did some henna this weekend – I thought it’d help lessen the itch for a new tattoo, but no luck.
I suppose I should stop procrastinating & do my homework & study for my exam & work hard because there are only 5 weeks left in the semester & I leave for Egypt in 39 days & life is too amazing & great to let go.
