Marriage, Megachurch and Other Unnatural Disasters

Cynical me, I know.


Separated at Birth, Reunited at the Altar
No, seriously. Some poor saps in England, given up for adoption, ended up getting married, and then finding out they were brother and sister.

There's an anime series like that, actually.

Aside from the whole 'eww' factor most people have, this really isn't a big issue. Studies have shown that one-generational inbreeding doesn't usually have a pernicious effect; if they decided never to have kids, it wouldn't matter at all.

Nevertheless, the marriage has been annulled. Who's to say if they'll go their separate ways?

Source: Fox Noise (I also saw it on Olbermann)

Proud Southern Tradition
So, there's a law on the books in Mississippi, and some other states, that says that spouses are property belonging to one another. Break up a marriage and you're stealing yourself from your spouse. Who can then sue anyone else you hook up with.

So there you go; slavery still exists in the South. Big surprise.

After then-named Sandra Valentine and businessman Jerry Fitch Sr. conceived a child during an affair, the Valentines divorced. Johnny then sued Fitch under the state's "alienation of affection" law, which entitles an abandoned spouse legal recourse for loss of companionship, love, and sex.

Mississippi is one of seven remaining states with such a law on the books, which considers a spouse the property of the other.

"I don't consider myself property," says Sandra Fitch, to ABC News.

Well, it apparently doesn't matter what you think, Sandra. You should have realized that you were no different than the gravy boat that you two got at the wedding.

Source: Raw Story

Gay In the Military.. With Kids
An article on the hardships gay soldiers face when they serve their country and have to hide their entire lives away, including their families, for fear of being outed and losing their jobs. What a country we live in, where it's ok to be in the Army as a convicted felon, but god forbid you're a homosexual.

An example of what we're talking about here, concerning their 3 and 5 year old sons:

Lewis explains "We can’t take them to the commissary together anymore. One of the boys will say ’Mom? Not you, my other mom.’ We can’t tell him, ’Don’t say that,’ because he’s going to say, ’Why?’ The best way to deal with it is just not to put them in that situation."

We really deserve to lose a War of Civilizations if this is the best we can muster.

Source: Bay Windows

Terrifying Church Commercial
The popcorn's been replaced.... by the Bread of Life!

*shudder*

Source: YouTube

Sunday Morning Stomachache News

Apple juice it soothes the pain...

I Just Hope It Doesn't Mean Another Costume Change
So the United Nations is teaming up with Marvel to do a comic promoting UN humanitarian efforts to children, starring Spiderman.

I've actually seen worse; I acquired for my brother in law a copy of a Target/Marvel comic to promote reading, when I worked at that hellstore. The plot involved traveling through time and reading hieroglypics, which were intrepreted as sequential art, thus proving that you had to have both literacy AND comics to defeat the villain and save the world.

Compared to that, this sounds positively restrained. Unless, of course, you get a new villain, Doc Republican, who tries to cut UN funding because he thinks that an army of black helicopters is going to invade his stately mansion, where he conducts illegal cloning experiments on puppies.

Hmm. I take it back; that could be entertaining, and couldn't be any worse than the original Spiderman Clone Saga..

Source: The BBC

Catholic Hospital Says Yes to Breast Implants, But Only for XX Women
Ok, long story short, a transgendered person wants to get breast implants. Their hospital says no, Catholic doctrine only allows us to give regular women breast implants. They're suing under a California law that prohibits religious discrimination in healthcare.

Honestly, it's about time. First we had to have an actual debate in Connecticut over making Catholic hospitals stock emergency contraception for rape victims, now this, and of course they still ban abortions and sterilization procedures. Why do we let any church dictate health policy in this country? If they want to help people by providing quality healthcare, fine, dandy; but they need to do it on reasonable, scientific terms, or they can pack up their game and go home to the Vatican already.

Source: PageOneQ

Fascism is What you Make of It?So, despite recent non-seller Liberal Fascism by that Doughiest of Pantloads, Jonah Goldberg, it seems that real world fascists remain stubbornly conservative. Sadly, No! highlights a recent ad by the Gathering of Eagles group, comparing anti-war protestors COde Pink to a lethal bacteriological strain, and noting how similar that was to certain Nazi propaganda tools... like....

The Jew will be identified! The same battle which Pasteur and Koch had to fight must be led by us today. Innumerable sicknesses have their origin in one bacillus: the Jew! Japan would also have got it had it been remained open any longer to the Jew. We will get well when we eliminate the Jews. --Good Old Liberal Adolf

Yeah, I think we win this one again, Jonah.

Source: Sadly, No!


This Had Better Not Stop Me From Getting Eureka 7 Vol. 11 On Time
There used to be defective runs of dvds like this all the time, but these days it's so rare it's actually newsworthy. A bunch of Bandai dvds for their January 8th release window have a very high rate of defect; reportedly as much as 10-25% a title being unplayable. That's a fairly astonishing quality assurance problem.

But like I said; this had better not stop me from getting Eureka 7 Vol. 11. I need to know what happens to *blank* when they get to *blank* after *blank* *blankity blank*

Spoilers removed for your convenience.

Source: Anime News Network

Saturday Morning News Coming Down

W00t, Kinkos called about our evil surprise.

Kids Do the Darndest Things
So you hear a lot about kids imitating this or that, and how it's therefore the victim of imitation's responsibility to make a product that kids either won't want to imitate, or won't die from imitating.

But what if, and here's a radical thought, kids are just sort of, you know, stupid, and could die playing any number of games? What if they could, gasp, imitate beneficial behavior as well?

Cases in point. First, a four year old British girl who apparently hung herself by accident, again apparently imitating a Go, Diego Go episode. I'm not sure how they know exactly what she was playing at, since nobody was watching her, but that's the story they're going with.

On the other hand, a young boy tried to defend his mother with a toy lightsaber from some random jackass who assaulted her on the street. Police were thinking that the commotion (and if it wasn't a cheapo saber perhaps the flashing light and sound) helped to drive off Mr. Happy-Fist.

The Lesson here? Maybe we should just remember that kids are kids, and the world is a big, scary place, itself only a fragile soap-bubble thin shell over the howling gulf of madness, and therefore, you might want to supervise the children rather than trying to child-proof Planet Earth.

Sources: Fox Noise
Fox Noise

The Old Axiom Is Probably Right
You know, the one about something seeming too good to be true...

Well, anyway, there's an air-powered car coming to market, promising 200km a tankful of air, a cost of only 7k dollars, and a top speed near 70. It's made of fiberglass and uses a compressed air engine of sorts to power itself.

Great, huh? Well...

If you look at the fine print, it's not that they're lying, but sort of exaggerating the novelty here.

The deal is, this is an electric car. An extremely, extremely light electric car. Tiny too. Instead of using Lithium-Ion batteries as the energy storage mechanism, it uses a tank of compressed air, that it can charge up by being plugged into a wall socket, where it then draws your juice to compress its own internal air supply.

So what you have here isn't a magic air-car, it's a fiberglass alterna-Prius.

Also, they 'hope' to see compressed air charging stations that would allow the car to fill up as fast as a gasoline car, which of course is the same fallacy as hydrogen cars; it'll never happen. There's no economic incentive for Big Oil to become Big Air Compressor.

So that leaves its electric car capabilities. How are those? Sort of.. beta.

It takes quite a while to charge, it's an ultra-light with a low top speed, and it has little bugs like not yet having a heating system worked out, since its engine doesn't generate heat.

Which will come in really handy, from a French automaker. It's not like they have winter in Europe,

right?

*shrug*

I'm all for alternative energy storage mechanisms, but let's not pretend we're reinventing the wheel when all we're doing is changing the number of spokes.

Sources: Raw Story
Promo Site

Texas Still Sucks
So a black couple tried to move into a white neighborhood in Arlington, Texas. Some of the locals were not impressed with this decision, assaulting the woman and spraypainting the house with racist grafitti.

The cops duly charged the woman who performed the assault with, well, assault, and the city is making a big show out of unity or something like that. But the big thing on everybody's mind in Arlington isn't that, you know, their city is full of racist, violent fucks, but that... the victimized homeowner doesn't want to take down the graffiti.

See, the guy has this funny idea that, you know, maybe the Texas town should have to bear its racist shame publicly. The cops, the neighbors, the city, the local media, they all are rather opposed to this idea, and are pressuring the man, trying to make him remove the graffiti. Despite there being no law on the books to compel him to do so, as the victim of the crime.

They're even holding fundraisers and such, as if the problem was that he couldn't pay to get a new garage door (the old one now being colorfully decorated in red spray paint with 'Die Nigger' and so forth.

However, many neighbors were annoyed. "Everyone gets the drift," said one. "It needs to be taken off."

Oh, we get the drift all right. Southerners are happy enough, coddling racist extremists, but they dislike it when the rock is removed and all their animal-lovin cousins scurry out from underneath in full Klan regalia. Bad for the public image and all that.

So once again, I say: Texas sucks.

Source: Raw Story

Privacy For Me, Not For Thee
So a judge has been forced to resign after somebody nicked, and then released to the cops and the press, an audiocassette he made. Apparently the judge likes to indulge in some rather kinky voice recordings. The cops got the impression that there was something horrible going on, until they investigated, it was leaked to the press, who are now suing to get access to the tape to publish it, and the judge, despite having committed no crime, has been pressured into resigning from office.

For what? For having a private life and hurting no one? Come on, people. You can't abuse a dictaphone. Get over yourselves. Here, let me sacrifice my chances at ever being a judge.

I loooove to kill puppies. Their dead, limp bodies feel so soft and squishy. Their fur is so much nicer as it cools, and they make great throw-pillows until the guts start to putrefy. Hmm, guts. I could stab ice picks into their tiny brains all day long, it'd be so much fun, I wish the neighborhood had more dogs!

There. See. I wrote something disgusting. Apparently my public life is over now.

Sort of a relief, really. Who wants to dedicate their life to public service when the public are such a bunch of pearl-clutching pansies, hunched perpetually over their fainting couches?

Source: AZCentral.com

Idiot Science Watch
So some nutbars at Yale have conducted a study they claim shows that women and gays are worse drivers than straight men.

If you think that sounds a bit out there, and would be skeptical, Good for you!

First the headline: Women and gay men are 'worst drivers'

Wow, that sounds pretty ironclad. Let's check the article.

Research has revealed that both perform poorly in tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness when compared to heterosexual men.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, who conducted the study, believe the findings mean driving in a strange environment would be more difficult for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Oh, so they didn't test driving at all. They tested 'navigation and spatial awareness'. Well, that sounds a bit fishy. What does that even mean?

The research team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University.

In one, volunteers had to swim through an underwater maze to find a hidden platform, while the second involved exploring radial arms projecting from a central junction to receive 'rewards' .

So, what the study actually 'showed' is that women and gay men are worse at playing a couple of videogames, developed at Yale.

That's not nearly as big of a news story though, is it? Gee, I wonder why they would have extrapolated so wildly....

This part in particular makes me chuckle.

The results back earlier studies supporting the stereotype that women are poor navigators.

Although women are more successful in tests requiring them to remember the position of objects, men consistently do better in tasks requiring navigation and uncovering hidden objects.

God knows you never need to remember where stuff is when you're FINDING A PLACE.

Lolz. Seriously, these people are nitwits. You have a result that shows, potentially, if your copy of Tron there is actually a decent proxy, that women and gay men might have poorer navigational skills. So you run out and start screaming that they're poor drivers?

Might you want to, I dunno, actually put some subjects behind the wheel first? Test the actual, you know, driving?

Why do I have to know how to do these peoples' jobs better than they do?

Source: The Telegraph

Modern Technology, Medieval Politics

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut (In which case, try the Middle East)

Accusing Saudia Arabia of Abusing Liberty? You've Gone Too Far!
So the Saudis have arrested a blogger critical of their lousy, festering, tottering theocratic monarchy.

I'm so shocked I just might have to blink.

No, wait. It passed.

Source: The Washington Post

Highly Speculative Report Says Pakistani Military Offed Bhutto
That's not the part that really interests me about this article though. Anyone can speculate. But take a gander at this:

"It's worrying when half of your lower or mid-level Pak intelligence analysts have bin Laden screen savers on their computers," a former official of the CIA was reported to have commented.

Yeah, that IS troubling. Since when did Osama have a screensaver anyway?

Source: UPI


Man Wraps Car Around Pole, Blames Prehistoric Reptile
Seriously. He blames his car wreck on a giant winged reptile.

Wenatchee police cited the man with first-degree negligent driving. A breathalyzer test showed "a minimal amount of alcohol," said Wenatchee police Sgt. Cherie Smith.

A MINIMAL amount?
Dude, I think it's time you had that breathalyzer checked out. It seems to be reading a bit low.

Source: HeraldNet


Blackwater Kicked Out of Mercenary Club
There's apparently a trade organization for international killers for hire, aka mercenaries. This organization is booting Blackwater for being too savage.

Not making this up.
Source: OpenLeft

Vomit In Your Mouth
Finally, in a story to truly sicken anyone with a conscience or sense of decency of any kind, the last of the Haditha psychos has seen their murder charge dropped. No one will face murder charges for the slaughter of 24 innocent civilians in Iraq.

Not. One. Person.

They killed two dozen people, over several hours, in a rampage of sheer terror, and not one gets a trial for murder.

Not one.

Source: The BBC

Huge Sundry News Post

I'm going to get around to a big post about the Bhutto assassination, but the story over there seems to be changing by the hour, so there's not a lot of point. I had just finished my post on Afghanistan when she was killed and I saw the rumors floating down the newsie sites to that effect, but the same rumors came out a month ago at the last attempt on her life, so I just sort of shrugged and went ahead.

Oops. At any rate, have some regular news in the meantime.

Those Scientists are Real Good at Fightin', Tuggah!
So a couple of researchers at one of our Antarctic bases got drunk and into a brawl. One of them was hurt badly enough that he had to be flown to New Zealand for treatment with badly busted jaw.

Fellows, honestly, it might be a good idea to keep your tempers in check if the nearest hospital is on another continent. Just a hint.

Source: The Guardian

Uruguay Is Ahead of Us in Civil Rights
It's nice when South America joins the civilized world in making us look bad on gay rights. In this case, Uruguay has passed a national civil union law, which is a good first step.

Personally I think the government should be out of the idiot marriage business entirely, but if you're going to give tax breaks to one set of couples it's not fair to deny them to others.

Source: Page One Q

Huckabee Makes Some Hay
Bhutto's dead, so he thinks we have to clamp down the border against all those 'unusual' Pakistanis that must be headed here to assassinate OUR Pakistani politicians.

Which we have an abundance of.

This thinly veiled call for pointless racist profiling comes along with a statement about how much he respected the late politician for, well, being a woman and not a religious crazy.

Huckabee called Bhutto's death is a tragedy, but he suggested she had been a threat to Islamic fundamentalists. "An educated, sophisticated, strong, capable woman leader -- that does pose a threat to those who don't believe that women should be given that platform and that level of equality," Huckabee said.

Hmm, people who don't believe women should be given an equal platform in life... I wonder...

In August of 1998, Huckabee was one of 131 signatories to a full page USA Today Ad which declared: "I affirm the statement on the family issued by the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention." What was in the family statement from the SBC? "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ

Wow. Pot, meet Kettle.

Sources: Radio Iowa (for the Huckabee haymaking)
The Daily Kos (for the woman-hating)

Cost of War in Iraq
This Firedoglake entry is a handy rundown of how your money is being spent, and how the death is being distributed. Short answer: 15 billion a month, and there's a handy geographical breakdown of the Lancet study showing the way we've killed 650k Iraqis in this war.

Fifteen billion per month. More dead in Iraq than died from our Civil War.

Great job, El Presidente!

Source: Firedoglake

Kucinich Mad Over Pizza Ad
His supporters are tired of him being made fun of for believing in UFOs, or refusing to say he doesn't.

Guys, seriously. I know he's got solid positions on most of the issues, but the man is a flake. Nobody's going to stop making fun of his flakiness.

Source: Plain Dealer Blog

Bush Cronies Everywhere
So there's a big kerfluffle at the Fish and Wildlife service because their top political appointee for a while was, err, sabotaging her agency's work in favor of big business. Since she got shitcanned for improperly influencing a decision to remove an animal from the Threatened species list (said animal happened to live on land she owned), they've had to reverse a ton of similarly tainted rulings, and the whole institution is in a humiliating state. Wildlife groups are now suing the administration to get records of just how corrupt she was and asesss the damage.

Aside from the all too typical Bush administration story here, you have a bit of life's unintentional humor.

"This is a lawsuit we've been forced to file to receive documents that we're entitled to that demonstrate the severity of Julie MacDonald's involvement in overturning endangered species and habitat decisions," said William Snape, the group's senior counsel. Snape filed the suit under the Freedom of Information Act.

When a guy named Snape says you're overdoing the villainy, you might want to listen.

Source: Raw Story

What a Great Venue
Beijing's legendary air pollution is still astoundingly bad, despite their draconian efforts to clear the air.

Beijingers were warned to stay indoors on Thursday as pollution levels across the capital hit the top of the scale, despite repeated assurances by the government that air quality was improving.

"This is as bad as it can get," a spokeswoman for the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau told AFP.

This isn't a fluke either, by any means.

Beijing's air quality is routinely rated among the worst in the world by international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, with rampant coal burning, regular dust storms and a growing number of cars cited as the main reasons.

Heckuva job, whoever made the call to hold the Olympics there, lol.

Source: Raw Story

You Don't Need Health Care If You're Old, You Just Need A Tar Pit To Jump In
New ruling says that once you're eligible for what's left of Medicare, your employer can reneg on your health benefits and leave you out in the cold.

What a wonderful country we live in.

Source: The New York Times

"Terrorist" Walks
So there was once a guy named David Hicks. Still is, if you want to get technical. The US's mercenary allies, the drug-dealing Northern Alliance, picked him up in Afghanistan. The military said he was aiding Al-Queda, and after a sham trial, 'proved' it. He was sentenced to a long term, but allowed to serve only 9 months of it, the last of which he could serve in his home country of Australia. He's about to go free.

You have to read between the lines on this one, but if you do, the real story is readily apparent.

Hicks became the first person convicted at a U.S. war-crimes trial since World War II when he pleaded guilty in March to providing material support to al-Qaida.

The former Outback cowboy was captured in December 2001 by the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, where he had been fighting with the Taliban. A month later, he was sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he spent more than five years without trial.

A U.S. military tribunal sentenced Hicks — a Muslim convert who has since renounced the faith — to seven years in prison, with all but nine months being suspended, after he confessed to aiding al-Qaida during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan following Sept. 11, 2001.

Under a plea bargain, Hicks was allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence at Yatala prison in his hometown of Adelaide in South Australia state, but was ordered to remain silent about any alleged abuse he suffered while in custody.

So, here's how it goes. This man was picked up in Afghanistan by the NA at a time we offered bounties on anyone from Al-Queda. We didn't check those claims very carefully, or at all, because the more we caught, the better it looked on paper. We sent this guy around our world tour of torture sites and did some monstrously heinous things to him, things so bad that they're still terrified he'll talk. Having not actually done anything or been a terrorist, after they beat a confession out of the man and broke him, they sent him home, to live out the rest of his days as a shell of a human being.

This is life in the American Empire, folks. Don't turn your backs.

Source: Raw Story

Wall Street Weighs In On Writer's Strike
Bear Sterns, a large investment firm, has concluded that if the writers were given absolutely everything they want it would amount to less than 1% of the annual revenue of the major studios.

Basically, the big institutional investors are starting to get pissy about how badly the studios are handling this, and I imagine this is the first in a slew of leaks designed to pressure them to settle already, before the bottom falls out of the market.

Source: Firedoglake

Denturist: A Non-Dentist Who Makes Dentures
The things you learn reading about the appalling state of dental care in Kentucky and West Virginia.

A sickening article in some respects; in others, well... if you lose all your teeth because you do meth or chew tobacco, I feel less sympathetic.

Also, the evil bastard in me can't help but joke: People in Kentucky have teeth?

Source: The New York Times

Think About This When You See One of Those Annoying Whopper Commercials
In an article about the appalling and inhuman slavery that fuels our fresh fruit industry in the US, it's nice to know that some people will go the extra mile to be dicks. Burger King is fighting an effort to slightly increase the pay given to tomato pickers because it won't 'solve' the problem. No shit. But doing nothing is better? Meanwhile, Whole Foods has been getting their tasty yuppie tomatoes from some of the more notorious slaver operations.

Ahh, corporate greed. Is there nothing they won't do for a dollar?

Jimmy Carter has been doing his usual exemplary work, trying to help these poor people. He may have been a week chief executive, but honestly, he has to have been the best human being to serve in the White House in the last century.

Source: The Independent

Lit Majors Need Help
A short article about how I Am Legend is supposedly some kind of grand symbol for the War on Terror era.

Riiight. Or, alternately, and this is just a theory: it's a shitty mediocre action movie based on a mediocre action movie based on a Vincent Price scare-flick based on a mediocre Matheson story. Written almost a half century ago. Having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.

Source: NPR

Women in Iraq

There has been a lot of news coverage devoted over the last few days to the ghoulish story of an employee of KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root), a former subsidiary of Halliburton (Dick Cheney's private empire), and her vicious gang rape and imprisonment by her fellow colleagues.

As horrible as this story is, it's only the latest in a raft of stories about the catastrophic decline of the rights of women in Iraq. For all the rhetoric about liberating the Iraqi people, all the blase Bush administration propaganda about 'rape rooms' under Saddam, the endless litany of human rights abuses recited during the war, after our WMD excuse fell through, what does it say about the grand military experiment by the greatest power in the world when we sit by and allow this slide into the dark ages to occur?

Nothing good, that's for sure.

First, it's worth noting that since the United States took power, of a sort, in Iraq, women have been under ever-increasing pressure from the theocratic thugs who are seizing the reins of government.

The government under Saddam was a mostly secular dictatorship. It had little interest, in particular, in abusing or oppressing women. I mean, it had a great deal of interest in abusing and oppressing, well, everyone. And a definite focus on genocide against certain ethnic groups (say, the Kurds, Mash Arabs, etc).

Despite what your Neo-Conservatives might claim, it does not diminish these terrible crimes to note that under Saddam, Iraqi women had it better than they do today. The United States shares no small part of the blame for this sad state of affairs.

As the Shiite theocratic parties take control, women are being subjected to a reign of terror. Notably starting in the Shiite stronghold of Basra, in Iraq's south, but having spread north as society crumbles, women are targeted for torture, mutilation and death. Their crimes? Wearing makeup. Not wearing a veil. Seeking basic human rights and dignity.

BASRA, Iraq, Dec 5 (Reuters) - Women in Iraq's southern city of Basra are living in fear. More than 40 have been killed and their bodies dumped in the streets in the past five months for behaviour deemed un-Islamic, the city's police chief says.

A warning scrawled in red on a wall threatens any woman who wears makeup or appears in public without an Islamic headscarf with dire punishment.

"Whoever disobeys will be punished. God is our witness that we have conveyed this message," it says.

Good to know they have God on their side; just like every other lunatic killer in the world.

Funny how God never tells people to get along and respect civil rights, huh.

A group of tribal Shi'ite leaders told Reuters in October that Shi'ite Islamist political parties were imposing strict Islamic rules in southern provinces and using their armed followers to create a state of fear.

The sheikhs, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the conservative attitudes meant that only religious music was now allowed to be played in public places and dancing was forbidden, as was drinking alcohol.

You know the news is depressing when it reads like The Handmaid's Tale.

The United States meanwhile stands by and does nothing to stop this erosion of rights; hell, we even set the example, as with the recent KBR scandal.

The Kellogg Brown and Root scandal serves to illustrate both the complete lawlessness we have devised in Iraq and the low regard we hold, not just Iraqi women, but our own, when outside of the civilizing legal framework at home.  

The story is as simple as it is ghastly.

Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job.

"Don't plan on working back in Iraq. There won't be a position here, and there won't be a position in Houston," Jones says she was told.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.

Her co-workers raped her; her company decided to imprison her and try to shut her up. They held her against her will in a box, a literal god damned box, for being a rape victim. Because it was bad PR.

In the end, it took a minor miracle to even get out of this abduction alive.

Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.

"I said, 'Dad, I've been raped. I don't know what to do. I'm in this container, and I'm not able to leave,'" she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.

"We contacted the State Department first," Poe told ABCNews.com, "and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen" -- from her American employer.

Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones' camp, where they rescued her from the container.

That's right; we had to send the State Department to rescue a kidnapped rape victim from an American company. It sounds like the plot to bad movie, doesn

But this really happened.

Will the men who raped her face prosecution? Well, that's unlikely for two reasons. One is the fact that US military contractors in Iraq are exempt from Iraqi and US law, a legacy of Paul Bremer, Viceroy of Iraq.

The other is the fact that the Army ensured that the evidence of her rape would be conveniently disappeared.

Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped "both vaginally and anally," but that the the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.

They handed over the evidence of a crime. To the criminals.

Gee Mr. Corleone, could you hold on to this pistol for us? We'd be EVER so grateful!

Even as we allow our contractors to run rampant, we let our 'allies' in the Iraqi government disarm and segregate women, driving them out of professional work and literally leaving them helpless second-class citizens.

BAGHDAD -- The Iraqi government has ordered all policewomen to hand in their guns for redistribution to men or face having their pay withheld, thwarting a U.S. initiative to bring women into the nation's police force.

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, issued the order late last month, according to ministry documents, U.S. officials and several of the women. It affects all officers who have earned the title "policewoman" by graduating from the police academy. It does not apply to men in the same type of jobs.

Of course it doesn't.

We've spent 800 billion dollars on this experiment in government by explosion, and what do we get for it? A LESS democratic, more violent, more religiously hostile society? Gee, what a value.

Critics say the move is the latest sign of the religious and cultural conservatism that has taken hold in Iraq since Saddam Hussein's ouster ushered in a government dominated by Shiite Muslims. Now, that tendency is hampering efforts to bring stability to Iraq by driving women from the force, said U.S. Army Brig. Gen. David Phillips, who has led the effort to recruit female officers.

Even better of course is the fact that this will end up getting more of our soldiers killed.

Without policewomen, Phillips said, there will be no officers to give pat-down searches to female suspects, even though women have joined the ranks of suicide bombers in Iraq. Last week, a female bomber killed at least 16 people north of Baghdad, at least the fifth such attack in Iraq this year.

Oh good, we had too much security going on. 

It's not so hot for the Iraqi women either, naturally.

Another U.S. advisor noted that forcing out female officers will hamper investigation of crimes such as rape, which stigmatizes women in Iraq, because few victims feel comfortable reporting it to policemen.

This of course assumes that you want such crimes prosecuted in the first place.

What about the women who have taken our side and taken up arms, literally, to try and put their shattered country back together?

Well guess what. It's not good to be a US ally in the Middle East (Israel excepted of course) -- just ask the Kurds.

Policewomen say the decree also will leave them unable to protect themselves at work or off duty. Scores of police employees, both officers and administrative workers, have been killed by insurgents. Men and women have traditionally been allowed to carry their Glock pistols with them after hours for security.

"We are considered policewomen. We face kidnapping. We could be assassinated. If anyone knew where we worked, of course they would try to do something to us," said a 27-year-old interviewed Sunday.

"How can I be a policewoman without a weapon?" she asked incredulously as three female colleagues nodded in agreement.

Well, you're not supposed to be one. That's the point. You're supposed to stay at home, wear a veil, shut up and pop out kids. If you get out of line, there's a Mahdi militia man ready to teach you the error of your ways.

With a power drill.

Phillips, who works closely with Interior Ministry officials, said he got wind of the latest move to rein in female officers last month. When he questioned the plan, Phillips said, he was told by one ministry official: "Females are taken care of by men in this country. They are not out there being police officers."

Oh, they're getting taken care of, all right. That's the whole frikkin problem.

What does out esteemed occupying Army have to say about this?

Phillips, though, said U.S. officials have limited options.

"It's a sovereign nation. We turned over the running of their own police force to them," he said. "We don't have a veto."

OH, SO **NOW** THEY ARE A SOVEREIGN NATION. THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW FIVE YEARS AGO.

I... wow... I think I need to go lay down. I'm about to blow a blood vessel here.



Sources: ABC News
                The LA Times
                Reuters
                

Double Length Superspecial Interblag News of the Day

Not all politics, something for everybody this time.

So many interesting bits of weirdness around today, it's hard to get started, so I might as well hop into it.

Fuckwit College Editorials
Boy do we ever get a lot of these around here at IU, in our own paper, the Indiana Daily Student (or as it was always called in my undergraduate days, the Indiana Daily Stupid. Not the cleverest riposte, but incredibly accurate)

In this case, at the Daily Texan, we have a college age male actually trying to make the case that women wearing pants are evil, and that it would be best for all concerned for them to submit to his 'benevolent' domination.

Yeah...

Source: Feministe

Guitar Hero(ine)

While I can't agree with everything said in this article (like the claim that a guitar shaped like a woman's leg in fishnets is somehow an assault on the senses, a visceral attack), I have to admit, the skimpy outfits, heavy promotion of Axe bodyspray and its assorted floozies within the game, to the point that it interferes with gameplay.. that's not a good sign. Activision appears to think that, you know, they should toss away a good portion of the next-gen gaming market share, which includes women, families, and what you might term 'soft-core' or 'casual' games (I prefer soft-core myself just because a: it'll rile some oversensitive types up, and b: all consumer gaming is casual. Game testers and programmers do the non-casual gaming, and that's called WORK, boys and girls), in order to court the drunken frat boy market. It's worked before; look at the sports heavy initial lineup for the original Xbox.

But that doesn't mean it's a good idea in this day and age, when the Wii stalks the earth.

Source: TheCurvature.com

Apparently Rock Band, by the original creators of Guitar Hero, takes a much more balanced, and less commercially crass approach. You might want to stick with that one.

Source: Feministe

Crazy But (Mostly) Harmless Cult Alert:

So in Italy, it seems, for decades, a sort of loose cult of artisans crafted an incredibly elaborate series of cave/vault like churches underground, without permission from local authorities. They did this competently enough that the structures are sound, and due to their neglecting to pay taxes on it or inform the authorities or what not, they're now in possession of the government.

It really is amazing what nuts with time to spare can accomplish. The work they did is amazing. Yet the art itself is uninspired and tacky. It's like a children's playground for hackneyed neo-paganism.

Still worth a look-see.

Source: The Daily Mail

Torture in Lieu of Ticket:

As picked up by the excellent Digby, there is now a video floating around on Youtube of a cop torturing a man for refusing to sign a confession on a traffic ticket. You read that correctly.

I sort of expect that sort of behavior, really, but the idiot cop forgot he was on his dashboard camera the whole time. Needless to say, there's a major lawsuit forthcoming, and good on the taser victim for that. We now live in a country where if you fail to lick the boots of your traffic cop, they can torture you with high voltage. Bravo.

Source: Hullabaloo

Random Wikipedia Coolness of the Day
Birds that vocalize don't have a larynx, like we mammals, they have a syrinx. This structure lacks vocal cords but otherwise serves the same function, with a twist -- it's located farther down the throat, where the lungs branch off in the bronchial tubes. As a result, some birds can sing two sounds at once.

This is wicked cool.

Source: Wikipedia (duh)

Also, here's a Gobi fish that lives symbiotically with a shrimp. The shrimp is mostly blind, so it digs a burrow for both, and the fish acts as a lookout when they're above ground level. neat.

Source: Wikipedia

Finally, did you know that the Poinsettias you get at holiday time are produced using a deliberate infection by a little known category of bacteria called Phytoplasmas? See, without the infection, they produce a single stem, not the cute bushy arrangement full of flowers that people love. So they dose the plants with a disease to alter that. This is somewhat similar to the striped tulip thing the Dutch get mocked for. Apparently, striped tulips are now produced without the disease that originally caused so much adoration.

Sources: Wikipedia (Poinsettia: Cultivation), (Phytoplasma), (Tulip [Introduction to Western Europe])

Marilyn Manson, Perhaps Crazy After All:

Having most recently made the news for bottling his own brand of the highly overrated absinthe, Manson is now getting deeper embroiled in a lawsuit brought by his former bandmate (who operated under the equally cheerful name Madonna Wayne Gacy), for basically embezzling band funds.

To buy human remains. Lots of them.

Included in the list of alleged props: masks made from skin and the skeleton of a little Chinese girl.

Seriously.

Source: The Daily Mail

Science and Morality Watch:

A tragic story about a new baby that has a horrific degenerative disease that causes Alzheimer's like symptoms as young as five, and death before adulthood. It's your standard autosomal recessive genetic disorder, so both parents have to give you a faulty gene. There is a test to determine if you have the gene, it seems, and you're supposed to have the test done if your family has a history.

This woman didn't do what might be argued is due diligence and was unaware of a family member who had a child die of the same illness months before. Now she has a kid that will know nothing but a life of increasing suffering as his own cells die from a glut of cholesterol piling up like toilet paper in a clogged sewage line.

Why is it that people rush into breeding? Why can't they get a comprehensive DNA battery done before they do so? Why for that matter don't we test all fetuses in the womb, to see if we could spare them from, you know, this ghastly and unspeakable, untreatable hell? I know I'll get called a Eugenicist for saying that, but fuck. I'm not the one who is putting a child through five years of torture.

Source: The Daily Mail

Well, that's about it for the news today. Very little in the way of mainstream politics that caught my eye; the whole cell phone tracking scandal I already posted about, and the grind on the FISA bill and Congressional oversight continues apace.

Peace out, word to your mother.