“Wildlife control contractors have shot almost 26,000 birds at John F. Kennedy International Airport over the past five years to stop them interfering with passenger flights — including more than 1,600 protected birds the airport did not have express permission to kill, internal records show.”

by Awl Sponsors

The Web needs us. It needs you and others like you to help protect our largest shared resource.

Mozilla is committed to promoting a free and open internet. They created the Firefox browser because they wanted a browser that benefits individuals and better our collective future. The Firefox team has imbued their product with an appreciation for privacy and accessibility, while giving users ultimate control over how they use the web and what information they choose to share with the world. See what’s at stake — for today and the next generation — in this open letter to those in charge.

Learn more about how people around the world want to shape the Web at https://webwewant.mozilla.org/en/.

All Those Guys Who Said “I Won’t Get Married Until George Clooney Can Get Married” Are Totally Screwed Now

“Will George Clooney’s engagement spur NYC singles into marriage?” [Via]

In January, Governor Cuomo proposed a legal weed baby step. The plan was to limit dispensing to a small group of hospitals: Marijuana would be legal for medicinal use but difficult to acquire, available for severe conditions and only at the discretion of a “board of doctors.” The boldest thing about this legislation was that it contained the word “marijuana” (legally: “MARIHUANA”); activists worried it was so cumbersome that nobody would bother to take advantage of it. Above all it was presented as safe: for patients, for The Children, and for politicians who might be interested in supporting it. But apparently not safe enough!

To get the bill through the Senate, sponsors made a few changes. Now they think it might have a chance of getting passed:

On Friday, Bolstered by growing public acceptance and hints of support from Gov. Cuomo, proponents of pot as medicine believe newly re-drafted legislation will be approved in Albany this spring — making New York the 22nd state to legalize medical marijuana.

“We’re closer to this than we have ever been before,” said Gabriel Sayegh of the Drug Policy Alliance.

But this re-draft was significant. Maybe fatally so! The original proposal gave doctors discretion about what constituted a “SEVERE DEBILITATING OR LIFE-THREATENING CONDITION”; now, there is a strict list:

CANCER POSITIVE STATUS FOR HUMAN IMMUNODEFICIENCY VIRUS OR ACQUIRED IMMUNE DEFICIENCY SYNDROME, AMYOTROPHIC LATERAL SCLEROSIS, ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE, MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY, TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY AND POST-CONCUSSION SYNDROME, DYSTONIA, PSORIASIS, PARKINSON’S DISEASE, MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS, DAMAGE TO THE NERVOUS TISSUE OF THE SPINAL CORD WITH
OBJECTIVE NEUROLOGICAL INDICATION OF INTRACTABLE SPASTICITY, EPILEPSY, CACHEXIA, WASTING SYNDROME, CROHN’S DISEASE, POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER, NEUROPATHY, RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS, LUPUS, AND DIABETES

No colitis or glaucoma! Certainly nothing like migraines or anxiety or even chronic pain. The entire bill, as written now, seems to position medical marijuana less as an option than as a prescription of last resort — a little green panic button hidden behind a locked panel of swirly hand-blown glass. The section of the bill in which it justifies itself is borderline apologetic: “Although for many patients other drugs may be more effective than marihuana, the Institute of Medicine noted that ‘there will likely always be a subpopulation of patients who do not respond well to other medications,’ Medical marihuana must be available to those patients.” To get to the Governor’s desk, the stricter Senate bill would have to be reconciled with the looser Assembly version, and this is a case where caution will likely prevail.

So this openly reluctant concession to public opinion, history, etc — should it pass — would affect a small group of people, some of whom are in great pain, and plant a small political flag. Or maybe not even that! Capital checked with some of the institutions that would theoretically cooperate with this program:

[R]epresentatives for several of the institutions in question, including Roswell Park Cancer Center, Montefiore Medical Center and New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, told Capital they had not had any recent discussions with the state about how to move the program forward.

It’s all very feet-draggy and 1990s; it’s significantly more restrictive than California’s Prop 215, which passed nearly 20 years ago and which, judging by opinion polling, would easily pass as a ballot measure in a theoretical New Yorkifornia.

Cuomo was openly against medical marijuana until about a year ago, even as he was agitating to reduce criminal arrests for possession of small quantities. So maybe he needs just a little bit more time, or an even tighter set of rules. Marijuana only on Tuesdays. Legal marijuana for the dead!

(Photo by Chris Yarzab)

“Despite how far the computer, Internet, and social media have come, they’re still in the relatively early stages of development — maybe even the infantile, pre-adolescent stages…. As these new technologies mature, so will the ways we use them. [We] now find it boring to go to chat rooms just to mess with people. And just think — most current versions of social media are still only a few years old. Eventually, people will grow tired of using computer power for petty teasing, and will use it for more practical and useful applications.”
 — Party enthusiast Andrew W.K. offers hope to those who worry about the negativity of the Internet. As someone whose low opinion of humanity expresses itself in a deep skepticism about its supposed progress — maturity, in this conception, is merely the ability to better disguise one’s selfish desires as efforts made for the good of others or disinterested actions that coincidentally happen to have happy results for the person making those decisions in the first place — I find it remarkably unlikely that the better angels of our nature will eventually emerge and make social media and the Internet in general something worthy of praise rather than a giant hole of suicide-inducing despair and bad behavior. But I am old enough to acknowledge that I am often incorrect about things, so it is quite possible that I could be wrong here. If the Internet does indeed transform itself into the beautiful butterfly prophesied above I will be the first person to celebrate its transformation. I mean, in truth I will be long dead in the highly unlikely event such a thing ever comes to pass, but sure, what a wonderful world that will be.

“Gef — who spelled his name phonetically, ‘because he didn’t know how to spell,’ Mr. Josiffe says — self-identified as a mongoose, but Mr. Josiffe has plenty of doubts. ‘The whole thing about a talking mongoose is a red herring,’ he says. Given the Irvings’ descriptions, he says Gef was smaller than a mongoose, perhaps a weasel or a squirrel.”

Two years ago, we told you that the creative class was bailing out of the big cities and setting up shop in Moscow, Idaho. It went pretty well! This year, Summer Commune is organizing to take place in…. Bloomington, Indiana, for the month of July:

Home to Lil’ Bub the cat, record labels JAGJAGUWAR and Secretly Canadian, the famed Kinsey Institute, and John Cougar Mellencamp, Bloomington, Indiana feels hidden away although it’s pretty centrally located. It’s far enough from the city to feel like farm country, but close enough to a major airport to make getting there super easy.

Intrigued? You can find out more here. “It’s like a utopian social experiment or a summer camp with more potlucks and no curfew,” say the organizers, Joshua Heller and Nicole Kelly.

★★ The grayness and rawness were less unpleasant, themselves, than the obvious fact that they were going to get worse. An ant-line of young men streamed though the turnstiles, dressed in matching black synthetic fleece, with non-English text embroidery. The dread was at last confirmed by big, scattered raindrops, and then little, abundant ones. A hood was enough to stop them, till the wind coming down the block yanked the hood back.

“I am of the cohort which lived inside a gilded bubble when young, and made a proper song and dance about it. Now that group is clearly beginning to think of itself as old, and you can be sure this won’t happen quietly.”
 — Jenny Diski on aging is just as good as Jenny Diski on anything else, which is to say you should be reading it right now, what are you even waiting for, seriously go ahead and click already.