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\x0a “For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.”\x0a

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\x0a From the YouTube Blog. This Viacom vs Google battle seems to be heating up.\x0a

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When 4yo Francis came home today, he went into his room and closed the door. When I poked my head in to see if everything was okay he looked back and said “excuse me.” When did four become the start of the teenage years?

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\x0a “When you’ve seen a U.F.O., as Kucinich says he has, a mere lobbying session at 32,000 feet by the Leader of the Free World, urging you to join your party in a cause that has eluded Democratic presidents since Franklin Roosevelt, is a tough match.”\x0a

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\x0a Timothy Egan, “The Purists” (NYTimes)\x0a

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YAF Conference 2010: An interview with Faith Kelley & Micah Bales, two of the organizers of the upcoming young adult Friends conference in Wichita Kansas. For more information, see yaf2010.wordpress.com.

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Just received an email from Chris Bravo and Lindsey Schneider over on the Silence Opens Doors project, which is doing videos on silence. This is a piece they did about silence at Brooklyn Friends Meeting. More about the project:

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We are working on a feature length documentary and new media project called Silence Opens Doors (www.silenceopensdoors.com), which approaches silence and noise as cultural phenomena across a broad spectrum of disciplines. A major component of what we are looking into is Quaker silent worship, and so last weekend we went to visit the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House to talk with a few of their members about what it means to settle down into silence and listen to the divine and those around you.

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\x0a Young Adult Friends Conference 2010\x0a \x0a \x0a

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We’re enjoying a few days of visiting from Micah Bales and Faith Kelley. They’re two of the organizers of this May’s YAF conference in Wichita. Hopefully I can get a video interview out of them before they leave!

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\x0a $Stained glass: \x0a\x0aThe sun coming in at St Mary’s Malaga.$ \x0a \x0a \x0a

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The sun coming in at St Mary’s Malaga.

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Biking Directions on Google Maps

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This is so cool. This is what the future is supposed to look like. I wonder how well it works…

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\x0a Out of the closet but stuck in his voting pattern - CNN.com\x0a \x0a \x0a

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Politician known for stance against gay-marriage announces he’s gay after being arrested for drunk driving outside a gay bar. Trying to explain the seeming-inconsistency of the voting record is Wayne Besen of truthwinsout.org:

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“It’s a perfect mask for someone who’s trying to stay in the closet,” said Besen in a telephone interview. “They hope that people will think that they’re heterosexual. It’s quite common; we’ve seen it over and over again. … They’re already living a lie and this takes it to a new level.”
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He added, “They’re willing to harm themselves to protect an image of who they’re not. It shows how extreme and harmful that homophobia is. The closet will force people to make decisions that will harm their own lives.”
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\x0a Quakerthink Kevin R gives some helpful advice for driving around big trucks\x0a \x0a \x0a

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What ever driver should know:

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The job I currently hold down might fall into the last category: Big Truck Driver. I drive a Big Truck for a living now, and while lots of people might consider that a fairly mundane way to spend 70-hour work weeks, I can attest that there is a lot that goes on that most people are simply not aware of. I know this personally, because driving a Big Truck exposes me to people every day, in every part of the country, who not only are not aware of what is going on with a Big Truck nearby, but are also unaware of how close they come to death by making bad decisions in its vicinity. Driving 400-plus miles a day for weeks at a time, I see the bodies on the roadside under the sheets often enough to know that some of them came too close.
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