Monday Afternoon Links

GrrlScientist needs your help. She’s been hospitalized and is being kept against her will:

I know this sounds preposterous, and I treated these threats as such until recently when a crisis caused reality to set in and i delivered my “72 hour letter” to the staff. This “72 hour letter” petitions the courts to either release me or to schedule a court date within 72 hours so I can argue my case. For reasons I don’t understand, my letter was not delivered until today — 72 hours after i’d written it, so my court date is next Wednesday. I am presently seeking a lawyer, preferably pro bono who knows how to handle such things.

Josh Marshall finds a statement by Kissinger that sets up a new stab-in-the-back myth around Iraq (via Uncle Kvetch’s comment on Majikthise).

“If you mean, by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible,” Mr. Kissinger told BBC News.

Hat-tip to Jessica: the President of Nicaragua signed into law the comprehensive abortion ban. The New York Times notes, “Abortion has been illegal in Nicaragua for more than a century, and most women who decide to end unwanted pregnancies seek procedures at underground clinics.”

Amanda writes about McCain’s support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. McCain is a long-term opportunist – he doesn’t flip-flop incessantly the way Kerry does, but instead builds a persona in line with what is popular. When Bush was popular, he was a maverick in order to capture pro-Bush independents; then when it became impossible, he started shoring up the base.

Trish needs help with a short story she’s writing.

I’m working on a short story that includes time in a rave. I haven’t been to a club in years. I plan to go to a few soon to get some story experience. The last bar I’ve been to was a hotel bar, which isn’t quite the same thing.

I’d like input from my readers. Please tell me about the clubs and raves you’ve been to recently. If you heard about cool things at clubs or raves that you liked but you hadn’t experienced it yourself, feel free to add that to comments, too. I’m going to go to a few good clubs in Boston soon for story ideas. This is going to be fun.

Mark Chu-Carroll refutes the creationist argument that the Sun is shrinking and thus the Earth can’t be older than a few myriad years. Not surprisingly, the argument is based on bad math and an insane theory of what powers the Sun.