Courtesy of jesusandmo.net:

• In large parts of 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. Then the striking clinic staff invade operating theaters to beat the shit out of scabs.
• 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 the Congo, we gang-rape hundreds of thousands of babies, girls and mothers, and destroy their vaginas with bullets, acid and anything else we can stick up there. Those who survive are permanently incontinent and banished from their villages.
• In America, we beat our chests in fearful fury when told outright lies we would not dream of questioning; 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 denude the sea of fish and dump our shit 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 obese 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 (at least the kind I listen to) puts a match to that despair. Musically, it is the only appropriate response.

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 (still deciding about the Blue one)
• Black Sabbath: Mob Rules, Heaven & Hell 
• Converge: Axe to Fall, You Fail Me, Jane Doe, No Heroes 
  Converge may be my favourite metal band. Hardcore punk plus metal equals metalcore.
• Deströyer 666: Cold Steel … for an Iron Age, Defiance
• 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, but with pop elements added.
• Dillinger Escape Plan: Ire Works, 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. I don’t care for their makeup and silly outfits, but the music is great.
• Meshuggah: Destroy Erase Improve
• Metallica: Metallica (the black album)
  Respek.
• Opeth: Ghost Reveries
• Primordial: To The Nameless Dead, The Gathering Wilderness
  Celtic Black Metal from Ireland. 
• Slayer: Reign in Blood

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

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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/

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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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