Gendercide

Half the Sky: how the trafficking of women today is on par with genocide

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/19/women-slavery-half-the-sky

Monster list of free online apps

Gizmo’s Freeware has carved out a niche for itself in the freeware reviewing community by creating and maintaining a variety of “best of” lists.  This one may be their best yet: scores of best-in-class Web apps and services, divided into 11 major categories. Bookmark this.

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BP is "burning sea turtles alive"

BP’s belief that burning sea turtles alive is necessary collateral damage in their cleanup efforts is a bit like FIFA saying that replays revealing a ref’s mistakes should not be shown on the big screen in the stadium where the match is being played.  It completely evades the original problem that brought us to this miserable state of affairs.

A rare and endangered species of sea turtle is being burned alive in BP’s controlled burns of the oil swirling around the Gulf of Mexico, and a boat captain tasked with saving them says the company has blocked rescue efforts.

Mike Ellis, a boat captain involved in a three-week effort to rescue as many sea turtles from unfolding disaster as possible, says BP effectively shut down the operation by preventing boats from coming out to rescue the turtles.

"They ran us out of there and then they shut us down, they would not let us get back in there," Ellis said in an interview with conservation biologist Catherine Craig.

Part of BP’s efforts to contain the oil spill are controlled burns. Fire-resistant booms are used to corral an area of oil, then the area within the boom is lit on fire, burning off the oil and whatever marine life may have been inside.

"Once the turtles get in there they can’t get out," Ellis said.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0620/bp-burning-sea-turtles-alive/

Raped & pregnant at 16, girl gets 101 lashes for immoral behaviour; rapist pardoned

Ah, religion. Time-honoured tool of self-righteous male monsters.

Bangladesh’s High Court has ordered authorities in an eastern district to protect and produce in court a 16-year-old girl who was lashed 101 times earlier this month after becoming pregnant as the result of a rape. The girl, who has not been named, received the punishment on the orders of village elders in the Brahmanbaria district who issued a “fatwa,” or Islamic ruling, declaring that she be flogged for immoral behavior. The elders pardoned the 20 year-old rapist. The incident occurred five months after the country’s highest court issued a ruling ordering authorities to investigate incidents of extra-judicial punishments and take action against those responsible.

The August ruling came after a rash of earlier floggings of women, including one who spoke to a man from a different community, another who filed a rape complaint, and a third who refused sexual advances made by a relative. In each case locally-issued fatwas ordered punishment of 101 lashes.

http://www.wluml.org/node/5903

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Sometimes you just have to stand up and say …

Why Listen to Metal?

It’s hard not to despair when you take off the twin blinkers of denial and escape and take a hard look at the world.

• In Africa, we roam the countryside in search of albinos to chop up so that we can use their body parts for magical rites.  The witches we just chop up.
• In Pakistan, we throw acid in girls’ faces for daring to go to school.
• In Afghanistan, we flog girls for wearing trousers or simply daring to expose their faces in public.
• In South Africa, we riot for libraries by burning buses.  When we get the libraries, we burn them and the replacement buses while we riot for clinics.
• In South Africa, we rape infants because this will cure us of AIDS.
• All over the Middle East, we murder our women for the dishonour they bring on our families by getting raped.
• In Palestine, we justify genocide because it’s them or us. Even though we have all the tanks and fighter jets and nuclear bombs.
• In America, we beat our chests in righteous fury in response to patent lies; millions of Iraqis die.
• In America, lobbyists for arms manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, oil companies and health insurers achieve victory upon victory over justice and common sense.
• Everywhere we incinerate our planet’s forest lungs to make room for cattle ranches to feed our lust for McBurgers.
• We take all the fish out of the sea – to the point where we cannot sustain ourselves with what is left – and dump our waste in it instead.
• We pay teachers, nurses and rescue workers next to nothing.  Even though they are among the few who stand between us and total collapse.
• We let our politicians grow fat on pimping out public property and the common weal, century after century, because we would rather not see what is done in our name. All we really want is to be soothed by the best teller of lies, and to have a chance, however illusory, to put on a few pounds of our own.

Metal puts a match to that despair.

Amazing Metal

Here’s a whittled list of excellent metal.  This post will see many updates.

When metal is done really well, it kind of makes everything else (except for some works by a few immortal jazz artists and classical composers such as JS Bach and Arvo Pärt) pale into insignificance.

• Arcturus: The Sham Mirrors
• Baroness: The Red Album (must still get the Blue one)
• Black Sabbath: Mob Rules
• Converge: Axe to Fall, You Fail Me, Jane Doe, No Heroes 
  Converge may be my favourite metal band. Hardcore punk plus metal equals metalcore, which is a label you could apply to them, except that the complexity and depth of their work lands them in mathcore territory.
• Devin Townsend: Addicted 
  Making less dense metal than the delicious noise from his Strapping Young Lad days, Devin Townsend now occupies post-metal territory.  Still gigantic and unstoppable, but with pop elements added. Extremely catchy.
• The Dillinger Escape Plan: Option Paralysis
• High on Fire: Snakes for the Divine (must still get Surrounded by Thieves)
• Immortal: All Shall Fall
  Here’s a Nordic band that makes black metal you can groove to.  Evil has never tasted so sweet. Hahahahaha!
• Isis: Oceanic
  Imagine getting mugged in a mansion set in a rustic wonderland.
• Meshuggah: Destroy Erase Improve
• Metallica: Metallica (the black album)
  Respek.
• Neurosis: Times of Grace
• Primordial: To The Nameless Dead, The Gathering Wilderness
  Celtic Black Metal from Ireland. 
• Slayer: Reign in Blood
• Opeth: Ghost Reveries

Metal Meta-review site

Web of Metal aggregates metal-album reviews from several different sites. Since once metalhead’s thrash is another’s trash, this is an important sanity check.

http://www.webofmetal.com/home

Listen to Rhoda Kadalie

She has a lot to say about the subversion of the South African legal system by corrupt ANC politicians. A lone voice in the wilderness.

Business Day article – "RHODA KADALIE: ANC turning ‘justice’ into a game only it can win" – http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=109472

Zapiro draws Muhammad

What took him so long?  Go see, then read the comments.

Mine, if the understandably nervous Mail & Guardian editors didn’t let it through by now, was a rare pro-Zapiro comment. It is childish to be offended. No wonder these offended parties display further childishness by stomping about and wagging their forefingers while bellowing purple prose.

Most of the human race seems to consist of superstitious crackpots only a step away from separating bodies from heads, setting the corpses alight and dragging them through the streets.

We are creatures of eternal carnage. Only the faces change.

For the sake of all non-human life on this planet, never mind the rest of the universe, I honestly hope our species dies out very soon.