Bob Dylan - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright
After months of publicly questioning the results of last June's elections in Iran, reform candidate Mehdi Karroubi openly acknowledges Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. No word on the more popular candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, but I expect he's generally just working towards not dying. In any case, it's actually an even more meaningless declaration than I'm making it sound: The BBC has the story here.
More good times ahead in Iran: Ahmadinejad has threatened to produce "highly enriched" uranium if the West doesn't accept Iran's counterproposal to the U.N. Actually, let me back up a bit.
Last November, the deal offered to Iran called for them to trade about 80 percent of their domestically produced low-grade uranium for more highly enriched fuel from Russia and France. In the counterproposal, Iran wanted to trade on its own soil and not all at one time, for whatever reason. Apparently, nobody has been able to work anything out, because the end of January is fast approaching and Iran has given the West until the beginning of February to make up their minds. Iranian leaders have been playing on nationalist, anti-Western sentiments to try and unite citizens around the nuclear cause, but the nation is still divided over the amazingly healthy elections last June (but it's anyone's guess as to exactly how divided). Also, the anniversary of the revolution is coming up, so there's bound to be a party or two for that.
I'm having a devil of a time figuring out why, but Israel's apology to Turkey over the little spat I wrote about a post or two ago isn't convincing many Middle Eastern commentators. The BBC has a nice little rundown of the various reactions here.
I remember sitting in a journalism class during my freshman year of college when it occurred to me that we, the viewers, are actually the products being sold, not the shows. We're sold to the advertisers! It makes perfect sense, and I'm almost embarrassed that I hadn't thought about it this way sooner, but networks actually take shows with a lot of viewers and essentially say to companies, "We have 150,000 viewers on Monday nights at 7, you can show them your commercial if you pay us x dollars." Sociological Images had a good post on Hulu and targeted marketing that reminded me of this today.
Finally, Jezebel has an interesting post on what the recent Supreme Court decision about corporations donating to political candidates might mean for Roe v. Wade. One doesn't have to understand all the intricate details of Supreme Court decisions (I certainly don't) to see that a Court willing to overturn decades of legal precedent is a potential threat to a woman's right to choose.
Bob Dylan was someone who inspired me to play guitar.
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