u235

The story in a nutshell: French boy is raped by locals. The Dubai government tells him and his family to shut up about it or they'll throw the boy in prison for being a homosexual. In addition one of the rapists tested positive for AIDS, something they neglected to tell the parents for months. After threatening the family and eventually facing outrage from France itself Dubai is making some mutterings about it being a "crime".

The mother has taken out a website and started a page. Feel free to show your support:
boycottdubai.com

I have to hand it to the Bush administration, they constantly come up with new ways to expand my horizons. In this case it happens to be with a fabulously transparent, imitation press conference. Here's the brief:

Having been lambasted for a pathetic response to Katrina, FEMA wanted to be seen as pro-active with regards to the wildfires in California. So, they decided to host a press conference to discuss how well they were handling the situation. Only having a real press conference was too risky, since real reporters might actually ask real questions. Thus FEMA staged a "fake" press conference where FEMA employees posed as reporters using scripted queries.

Oh the press were there, well they were invited at the last minute... but they were only allowed to listen by calling in on an 800 number and not ask any questions.

The excuse behind this charade was "to get information out as soon as possible".

cha·rade
Pronunciation[shuh-reyd; especially Brit. shuh-rahd]

noun 1. charades, (used with a singular verb) a game in which the players are typically divided into two teams, members of which take turns at acting out in pantomime a word, phrase, title, etc., which the members of their own team must guess.
2. a word or phrase acted out in this game.
3. a blatant pretense or deception, esp. something so full of pretense as to be a travesty.

Of course once this event was exposed for the fully scripted vignette it was, administration officials took the high road and claimed complete ignorance and disgust at the event.

Do you think they would have been as outraged if they hadn't been caught?

Gods how I hate Barbie. That pink plastic is the scourge of any toy store I enter. Lately, however the toy designers at Mattel have stooped to an all time low: "Will that be cash or credit?" the little girl with the deaths-head grin plastered to her face says to her playmate.

Yes there have been plenty of toy cash registers in the past, but this one is especially vile. Built in the loathsome pink, with Barbie money and Barbie credit cards. The kids don't even have to add or subtract to make purchases, they simply "swipe" a barcode or press a button with the item's picture beside it and the digital amount is immediately displayed.

"Yeah Mommie that's what I want to do when I grow up - I want to Shop till I Drop", which, coincidentally happens to be the actual name of the toy.

Fuck Barbie and Fuck Mattel. Want the toy to have some actual value? Then include an option where the toy store can come and repossess the toy after a month or so. "Sorry, that's what really happens when you Shop till you Drop, and you don't have a job." Job-skill toys? No Barbie doesn't have any of that... unless you count the "Let's Look like a Ho" makeup sets.

I guess that's a valid profession for a Barbie girl.

There's hardly much to add to the AP News blurb... so I'll just let them do it for me. Take it away Associated Press!

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Women in several countries have begun sending their panties to Myanmar embassies in a culturally insulting gesture of protest against the recent brutal crackdown there, a campaign supporter said Friday.

"It's an extremely strong message in Burmese and in all Southeast Asian culture," said Liz Hilton, who supports an activist group that launched the "Panties for Peace" drive earlier this week.

The group, Lanna Action for Burma, says the country's superstitious generals, especially junta leader Gen. Than Shwe, also believe that contact with women's underwear saps them of power.

[...]

"You can post, deliver or fling your panties at the closest Burmese Embassy any day from today. Send early, send often!" the Lanna Action for Burma Web site urges.

Robs them of their powers eh? I wonder if you get double damage if you send panties with.... ok even I won't go there.

Who is Michael Heath? No one you should know. Basically he's some religious freak that has taken issue with the fact that King Middle School (also in Maine) can provide contraception for children who have parental permission to see a doctor. The dig is that because this school serves predominantly middle and lower-class kids, the health services is located in the school.

What the Idiot At Large fails to grasp is the "parental" part of all this. Kids cannot just get pills at random, they need permission from their parents first, to even see a doctor. As to why the school is offering contraception, the answer is because they had 17 pregnancies in the school (kids aged 11 to 13) in the previous year.

I fail to grasp why Christian conservatives get so angry when other adults decide what is right for their kids. It never is, or was about what the kids have access to - it's about what other parents can decide. And apparently the concept of being free to choose what can help your kid isn't an "American" ideal to this type of zealot. In their world only their values, including intolerance and bigotry is what is "right" for America.

54% of the school's children qualify for free lunch, meaning that 54% of the school is considered poor. Since clearly these kids are sexually active, and again quite clearly they don't have access to contraception why isn't it a reasonable alternative to offer counseling and medication at the school with parental consent?

These are kids, and if they're having sex they need help to prevent a pregnancy which would be physically and mentally harmful. In addition, according to their current policy a whole 5 kids out of 510 would have qualified for the program anyway.

So what's the big deal?

Remember the hoopla when the muslims in Nigeria set back the global eradication of Polio by refusing to vaccinate their children? As a result of religious stupidity and asinine posturing children died, suffered and the disease spread to many other countries that had almost become Polio-free.

It's one thing to laugh at uneducated and unwashed peoples who live in mud huts and fear the wrath of tribal elders. It's not so funny when it's idiots here at home.

Like who? Like Rachel Magni, "a 35-year-old stay-at-home mother in Newton, Mass." She won't vaccinate her kids because... she's afraid. But clearly she's not too afraid of what it could do to the children of the people around her. It's one thing to take a risk with your own life and your own child, it's quite another to do it to someone else.

What she's doing is lying to the state of Massachusetts by claiming an exemption from vaccinations for "religious reasons" where none exist. "I felt that the risk of the vaccine was worse than the risk of the actual disease". I wish there were a vaccination for your stupidity as well.

Honestly I have no problem at all if people don't want to protect their children from life-threatening diseases, so long as they keep the hell away from everyone else. No vaccine? Fine, then no public school for you. Homeschool your kids. Everyone will be happy.

Excepting of course your children when they do get some horrific disease and ask you "But Mom the other kids aren't getting sick - why is it just me?"

On the other hand, I hear property is pretty cheap in Nigeria...

Superior Court Judge Ernest Murphy got pissed when the Boston Herald misquoted him as telling a rape victim to "get over it". He then acted within the rules when he sued and won a libel suit against the paper. Apparently that wasn't enough so he started sending the paper letters, the content of which have landed him at the pointy end of ethical charges. One letter demanded that the publisher deliver a check for $3.26 million - ostensibly to speed the case to closure rather than dealing with the appeals process.

Ok, poor judgement on the part of the Judge but the really big flub came when he told the news how the whole event affected his family.

Murphy choked up as he described how the libel case took a severe toll on him and his family.

After Herald columnist Howie Carr criticized him, a posting in a Herald chat room suggested "maybe my daughters ought to be raped," Murphy recalled. The judge said after that, his 14-year-old daughter began wetting the bed and both of his daughters required therapy.

It's not like his family wasn't stressed enough but he's now told the entire world that his 14-year-old is wetting the bed. Brilliant. Even if her friends and classmates didn't know, they sure know now.

Based on that alone I think this guy needs to take a leave of absence based on an obvious lack of judgement.

It's easy to hate airports. The stench of sweat, jet exhaust, and sickly sweet or desperately salty odors of cheap, awful food. It's more or less the same for the people, tired, wired or otherwise jaded, yapping on phones or giving you a hostile glare for taking the only remaining seat (which, as chance would have it, happened to be next to *them*). The only real comfort is the fact that there's lots of people to watch. And when you get tired or run out of pulp to read at least there's something to gawk at. Lots to gawk at actually.

"No, I don't want you to be working 40 hours a week.."
"But Mom!"

I was privy to this conversation that was going on right behind my head. Mom and her two sons, one clearly in his later teens and one in his earlier looked like direct relatives of the great Ozzy himself. One of the boys sported altogether the worst pair of pants I'd ever seen.

On the previous flight I'd been gifted with a full view of patterned boxers when the baggy-jeans wearing kid behind me bent over to fiddle with his backpack. Full indeed. His pants were a good foot lower than his hips, leading me to wonder just how he'd make it down the isle without getting tangled. However, maybe just because the whole-baggy look is so old I wasn't nearly as piqued as later when I encountered this woman and her progeny.

In this case the pants were low - way low - but insanely tight. True, the kid had no leg muscles to speak of, giving the Parisian models a run for their emaciated aura. But with the "waist" and belt effectively cinching his legs together right below the crotch I had to believe that some mystical force propelled him forward when clearly no normal motion could occur.

Not baggy, but too low to walk? Not tight around the ass but tourniquet-ed about the top of the thighs? Damn but those really are some bad pants...

And by the way," he said, "we have gotten information from these high-value detainees that have helped protect you."

He who? You know, Herr Bush. The concept here being that although the US does not use or condone torture, *somehow* they got critical information from them. Sure...

I find is most especially hard to believe considering the quality of the highly publicized cases thus far. Had our government actually prevented some massive effort we would have heard about it with much flag waving and fanfare. Hell, we've heard about serious plots in Britain and Germany. But here? Uh no.

Yeah go on, like you really need an excuse to do whatever the hell you want anyway. We all knew you were torturing people. Why not just find your balls and state the fact that you don't care if you have to hurt or abuse someone so long as you feel you're doing your job?

At least that would be the honest truth.

I won't buy Vista.

There's lots of good reasons why. Good, solid, valid reasons. And most of all they're *my* reasons. I don't want it, I don't like it and I don't have to have it.

Microsoft of course is pissed about this because I'm not in a minority. Vista, since its launch, has sucked. It's been made fun of, and deservedly so.

So what's an almighty software giant like Microsoft to do?

Simple. Try and use their clout in other markets to force people to change.

What people?... Well gamers.

When I picked up a copy of Halo 2 for the PC I discovered this abusive campaign under the guise of "Games for Windows". In essence it was "either you play this game (which was released a stupid amount of time after the xbox version) on *our* terms or you don't play it at all." Basically a variant of the infantile: "Well either we play with my toys my way - or you can all just go home."

(Note that this is especially amusing since Microsoft has just recently enabled a path to "downgrade" to XP - admitting that yeah, Vista really does blow dead dogs.)

Honestly you think they'd know better. There isn't a more stubborn, truculent, mulish group than PC gamers. Numbers decimated by console offerings, we remain the few, the dedicated, the unyielding. Trying to lead us along by waving bright, shiny objects, such as Bioshock for example, simply isn't enough to make us want to renovate our precious computers with Vista filth.

As bad as it seems, in fact they did me a favor. I'd been torn between trying ET: Quake Wars or Halo 2. Now I didn't have to decide at all...