Obama’s gone all radical extremist ideological gender feminist on their asses. TIME – avid fan of Christina Hoff Sommers – reports on his gender-feminist press conference today:

President Barack Obama’s traditional end-of-year press conference Friday was historic for reasons that had nothing to do with the substance of the president’s comments. All eight of the reporters who questioned Obama were women—and nearly all were print reporters—an apparent first for a formal White House news conference, a venue traditionally dominated by male television correspondents.

It makes news, yet all-male gatherings hardly ever make news.

“The fact is, there are many women from a variety of news organizations who day-in and day-out do the hard work of covering the President of the United States,” said White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, after the event. “As the questioner list started to come together, we realized that we had a unique opportunity to highlight that fact at the President’s closely watched, end of the year news conference.”

And to irritate Fox News and Christina Hoff Sommers at the same time.

“It’s amazing for that to happen as that room is filled with a majority men,” said [April] Ryan, who shouted out a question to the president and was acknowledged over questions shouted by male reporters.

Makes a change, doesn’t it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

This is basically an ad for a 3D printer but I don’t care, the technology is just so astounding I have to share it anyway.

Tara Anderson, a director at 3D-printing company 3D Systems, adopted Derby from non-profit dog rescue Peace and Paws. “I kept looking at his photo and reading his story, and I cried literally every time,” says Tara in the video. So she decided to do something about it and created a pair of specially fitted prosthetic legs for Derby, built in a loop configuration similar to kids’ “jumping shoes” to stop him digging them into the ground. The result is one happy dog.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRmoowIN8aY

H/t karmacat

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Originally a comment by MrFancyPants on Yes that’s right, exactly like this.

I wonder if the people (mainly men?) complaining about “why is gender even an issue” are even professionals in a computer science field. If they are, they’re stunningly unobservant.

I am a computer science professional (formerly academic, now in the private sector) and I can confidently state that gender is a huge deal in this field. As an academic, I repeatedly saw promising female grad students drop out of the computer science program or switch to a different field, and it was apparent that this was happening due to the boys’ club nature of the research labs at that time (and at that university).

Now, as a private sector professional, I’m dealing with the effects of that: a depressingly small pool of qualified candidates for jobs, which is altogether unsurprising since society is basically turning away half of the potential graduates before they even really get started. Some of the positions that we are trying to fill at my firm (a tiny startup with excellent wages, benefits, and profit sharing) have been unfilled for five years or longer.

There are real reasons why women are not taking part in this field in greater numbers. We need to understand them if we’re going to change it. So for my part, at least, I think that it’s not only just “an issue” that women in engineering/computer science bring up gender, but it’s actually vitally important. So bravo to Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Wow. I knew the ISS now had a 3D printer, because it’s much more practical – that is, possible – to make needed equipment on board than it would be to pack all potentially needed equipment, but even knowing that, this story is very cool.

For the first time ever, hardware designed on the ground has been emailed to space to meet the needs of an astronaut. From a computer in California, Mike Chen of Made In Space and colleagues just 3D-printed a ratcheting socket wrench on the International Space Station. “We had overheard ISS Commander Barry Wilmore (who goes by “Butch”) mention over the radio that he needed one,” Chen writes in Medium this week. So they designed one and sent it up.

“The socket wrench we just manufactured is the first object we designed on the ground and sent digitally to space, on the fly,” he adds. It’s a lot faster to send data wirelessly on demand than to wait for a physical object to arrive via rockets, which can take months or even years.

The team started by designing the tool on a computer, then converting it into a 3D-printer-ready format. That’s then sent to NASA, which transmits the wrench to the space station. Once the code is received by the 3D printer, the wrench is manufactured: Plastic filament is heated and extruded layer by layer. The ISS tweeted this photo earlier this week, and you can see more pictures of the very cool wrench-printing process here.

And there’s Butch with the new wrench:

photo credit: Commander Barry Wilmore shows off a 3D printed ratchet / NASA

Pretty damn amazing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Siiiiigh.

At Wired, Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang tell us what happens when women in a STEM field talk about…oh, whatever.

“We’re 3 female computer scientists at MIT, here to answer questions about programming and academia. Ask us anything!” we wrote for our Reddit Ask Me Anything session last Friday. And then, boom:

“WHY DOES IT MATTER THAT YOU’RE FEMALE?”
“WHY DID YOU PUT GENDER IN THE TITLE?”
“WHY SHOULD YOUR GENDER MATTER IF YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT RESEARCH?”

Dozens of questions like these were interspersed with marriage proposals and requests to “make me a sandwich” in our AMA. We had intended for the AMA to be a chance to answer questions about what our lives are like as PhD students at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and what we could do to get more young people excited about programming.

So, naturally, what they got was what women do get, because that’s how life is now.

They wanted to talk about their work – programming, academia, MIT CSAIL – and how they got into it. They also wanted to talk about what it’s like to do that as women in a male-dominated field.

We decided to actively highlight the fact that we were three female computer scientists doing an AMA, to serve as role models in a field that’s less than 20 percent female.

As it turned out, people were extremely interested in our AMA, though some not for the reasons we expected. Within an hour, the thread had rocketed to the Reddit front page, with hundreds of thousands of pageviews and more than 4,700 comments. But to our surprise, the most common questions were about why our gender was relevant at all. Some people wondered why we did not simply present ourselves as “computer scientists.” Others questioned if calling attention to gender perpetuated sexism. Yet others felt that we were taking advantage of the fact that we were women to get more attention for our AMA.

Uh huh. Professional victims; gender feminists; radical feminists; cultural Marxists; ideologues; yadda yadda.

The interactions in the AMA itself showed that gender does still matter. Many of the comments and questions illustrated how women are often treated in male-dominated STEM fields. Commenters interacted with us in a way they would not have interacted with men, asking us about our bra sizes, how often we “copy male classmates’ answers,” and even demanding we show our contributions “or GTFO [Get The **** Out]”.

That’s “get the fuck out” as of course you know.

The dynamics of our AMA reflects gender issues that lead to disparities in who chooses to pursue careers in STEM fields. People treat girls and boys differently from an early age, giving them different feedback and expectations. There is strong evidence that American culture discourages even girls who demonstrate exceptional talent from pursuing STEM disciplines. For those few young women who continue to study science or engineering in college, there is still a good chance that they will leave afterward. There has recently been much discussion about how tech culture causes women to leave “in droves;” the “leaky pipeline” phenomenon of females choosing to stop pursuing careers in STEM is a well-known problem.

That’s why we wanted to talk about it. Head on. We made gender an explicit issue in the AMA to engage our audience in a discussion about both the existing problems and potential solutions. And in that way, it was a success. We were able to raise awareness about technical privilege, implicit bias, and imposter syndrome.

Good. (I look forward to Christina Hoff Sommers’s debunking of the whole thing, preferably in a video.)

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The BBC’s Panorama said; Apple said. Panorama did an investigation of bad working conditions for people who make Apple products; Apple said it was “offended.”

Apple has said it is “deeply offended” by a BBC investigation into conditions for workers involved in manufacturing its devices.

Rules on workers’ hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were routinely breached, the Panorama programme witnessed.

In a staff email, senior Apple executive Jeff Williams said he knew of no other company doing as much as Apple to improve conditions.

But he added: “We can still do better.”

Well let’s be real about this. Why does Apple get its products made in China in the first place? Because it’s cheaper. They can’t be ignorant of the logic of that.

Panorama’s editor Ceri Thomas said he stood by the programme’s journalism.

He said the team had found an exhausted workforce making Apple products in China, as well as children working in extremely dangerous tin mines in Bangka, Indonesia.

Those are some of the reasons outsourcing is popular. It’s cheaper, it’s less regulated, it’s faster.

The Panorama film showed exhausted workers falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai.

One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off.

Mr Williams said Apple had undertaken an audit of working hours.

“Several years ago, the vast majority of workers in our supply chain worked in excess of 60 hours, and 70+ hour work-weeks were typical.

“After years of slow progress and industry excuses, Apple decided to attack the problem by tracking the weekly hours of over one million workers, driving corrective actions with our suppliers and publishing the results on our website monthly – something no other company had ever done.

“This year, our suppliers have achieved an average of 93% compliance with our 60-hour limit.”

But you outsource for a reason. It’s no good pretending you don’t.

In the Panorama programme, children were seen mining for the tin typically used in devices such as smartphones and tablets.

The process can be extremely dangerous – miners can be buried alive when the walls of sand or mud collapse.

The programme spoke to 12-year-old Rianto who was working with his father at the bottom of a 70ft cliff of sand.

He said: “I worry about landslides. The earth slipping from up there to the bottom. It could happen.”

Cheap tin. Cheap raw materials, cheap labor, long hours, crap safety regulations. These things aren’t accidental.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Mark Oppenheimer has an article in the Atlantic piquantly titled The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side.

Eido Shimano is the founder of the contemporary Zen Buddhist network in the US. One night in 2010 a student at Dai Bosatsu, Shimano’s rural branch of the Zen Studies Society, stood up at the end of dinner and gave a rambling speech about secrecy, shame, and the need for openness.

Fred Forsyth, an artist who now lives in New York City, remembered that her speech “was very long, and she had clearly been preparing it.” She spoke of “authority” and “power,” and how she was “secretly in a relationship” with someone who wielded much more power than she did. As Daphna spoke, Forsyth realized that his fears were being confirmed. It was clear that Daphna was describing a prolonged sexual affair with Eido Shimano, who was sitting right there. A monk named Bonnie Shoultz recalled that Daphna was particularly upset that she’d had to keep the affair secret, for close to two years.

And she wasn’t the only one.

Daphna’s allegations, it turned out, were not the first hints that Shimano wasn’t the man his followers hoped he was, and that the world he had built was not what it seemed. One week earlier, the Zen Studies Society board had met to discuss allegations of several decades of sexual impropriety, allegations that had surfaced on the Internet.

The Internet!? Well then obviously they were false. True allegations are made only to the police, never on the Internet.

The charges were damning, and well sourced, and Shimano had not denied them. The board had drafted a new set of ethical guidelines, the text of which included an acknowledgment of past indiscretions by Shimano. The hope had been that this new ethics statement would resolve the online rumors, which largely referred to events many years in the past. But news of this more recent affair spread quickly, and it forced prompt action. On July 19, 2010, Shimano resigned from the board of the Zen Studies Society and said that he would step down as abbot in 2012.

Oh. So it turns out that allegations of sexual predation can be taken seriously even without police involvement. How astonishing.

But in early August 2010, I got an get e-mails from a member of the sanghawho believed that Shimano’s phased retirement, with attendant honors, dinners, and valedictory speeches, would only keep forestall the necessary healing in the sangha.

Because if the phased retirement goes with heaps of honors and flattery, then there’s no real acknowledgement of the harm done. This is always the problem when people who do harm don’t acknowledge the harm they’ve done.

This member hoped that, as a journalist who covered religion, I would tell the world about Shimano’s behavior. On August 20, 2010, I wrote an article for The New York Times in which I described the online allegations, recounted Daphna’s bombshell at Dai Bosatsu, and quoted several sources discussing the board’s deliberations. My article seemed to hasten Shimano’s departure: on September 7, he announced in a letter that rather than waiting until 2012, he would step down as abbot at the end of the year.

But he’s fighting back.

…he is currently suing his old society for the pension that he says he is owed, but which the society’s new leadership says he forfeited with his decades of bad behavior. In response to those charges, Shimano is arguing that, first, he was never the womanizer that he is alleged to be, and second, even if he was, that is no grounds to void his contract. According to Shimano, sex with students is not a violation of Buddhist precepts. By sleeping with a student, he now says, he might have been doing her a favor.

Shimano’s defense, as outrageous as it may sound to some, is worth inspecting. Not because I side with Shimano, but because his views of sexuality are widely held in certain precincts of American Buddhism. In this country, we have learned the hard way that religiosity is no guarantor of morality. But many Americans still imagine that Buddhists are the good kind of religious people—or that they are not religious at all, just “spiritual.” Buddhists, they know, or think they know, do not have the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim beliefs in “dualism,” in good and evil; they are not censorious, always worried about sin and shame. Drawn to what they imagine is a kindler, gentler way of being, imported from a more pacific part of the world, Buddhists themselves, confronted with the worst things a teacher can do, may choose to be willfully naive.

Which describes how this always goes. Drawn to what they imagine is a better, cleverer / funnier / wiser / more skeptical way of being, fans / followers / admirers themselves, confronted with the worst things a comedian / actor / football player / skeptic / atheist can do, may choose to be willfully naive.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Meet Fools Do Art.

His name is Chris.  His name is Francesco. They love recreating famous paintings. All of the painting remixes are done at the Squarespace office in NYC. The only rules are that all props must be things found in the office and all editing must be done on a phone (Android or iPhone). Enjoy!

Update: Must add the new one. H/t chigau.

The most recent one, dated December 17, is my favorite:

You can send them suggestions.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Oh look. Looky there. A headline on a Guardian Comment is Free post by Ben Doherty –

Pakistan attack reveals the truth about terrorism: it kills more poor Muslims than rich westerners

Golly gee, that’s exactly what I was saying in that post on Sunday that got so many people in such a (mostly fake) rage. How shockingly ideological to make that point! Why shouldn’t terrorism kill more poor Muslims than rich westerners? Why even mention it? It’s political correctness run mad.

Doherty commits the thought-crime all over again in the first paragraph. (Or, rather, he commits it too, since it was probably an editor who chose the title.)

Those who suffer most from Islamist extremism are not people in rich western nations, but other poor Muslims.

Shocking. He’s fighting class warfare by saying that. Shocking shocking.

But enough of that. His point is serious and of course it’s true. Nigeria all by itself is testimony to that, not to mention Syria and Iraq.

In 2012, there were 140 incidents of terrorism in the west. In 2013, that figure was more than 250, the increase driven by a sharp rise in attacks in Northern Ireland and Greece. Twelve people died.

But those figures are dwarfed by attacks outside the west.

In non-western countries, the increase was from 8,000 incidents in 2012 to more than 11,000 in 2013, the rise driven by continuing sectarian violence in Iraq and Pakistan, and deepening unrest in the Philippines and Egypt.

The number of non-western terrorism deaths in 2013 was over 22,000.

In November of this year, nearly 5,000 people died in Islamist fundamentalist terror attacks, the majority of those at the hands of Islamic State (Isis) or Boko Haram.

Just over half the dead were civilians, “the vast majority … Muslim,” the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation said.

The children and teachers murdered in Peshawar? It seems safe to assume they were mostly or all Muslims, culturally or observantly or anything in between. The “militants” are not there to fight for justice or equality.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

And speaking of doing horrible things to people…The Guardian reports another one of Ireland’s grim secrets.

“Mary” was delighted to be pregnant at 23, but she was in labor for a long time, and they got worried about her heartbeat, so they called in the doctor.

When the doctor arrived, he did something Mary cannot forget. “They gave me gas and air and an injection, and took me to another room, where they tied my legs up on each side,” she recalls. “There were two nurses on each side of me. I saw this doctor at the end of my bed with a big, long silver thing. They made a hole in your private parts, and he inserted this silver thing up and cut the pubic bone and pushed it over to widen your pelvis for you to deliver your baby yourself.”

Petrified and in agony, Mary had been subjected to a symphysiotomy – a controversial operation that was seldom used in the rest of Europe after the mid-20th century, but which was carried out on an estimated 1,500 women in Ireland between the 1940s and 1980s.

The procedure involves slicing through the cartilage and ligaments of a pelvic joint (or in extreme cases, called pubiotomy, sawing through the bone of the pelvis itself) to widen it and allow a baby to be delivered unobstructed.

What could possibly go wrong? Besides everything?

Critics blame the continued use of the operation on a toxic mix of medical experimentation, Catholic aversion to caesarean sections and an institutional disregard for women’s autonomy. They claim it has left hundreds of surviving women with life-long pain, disability and emotional trauma. For some in Ireland, it is yet another scandal perpetrated against women and girls, joining revelations over the Magdalene laundries (where “wayward” women were abused), the deaths of children at mother-and-baby homes and sex abuse in the Catholic church.

It ruined Mary physically.

“I hold down a job, but only because of the painkillers,” she says. “I have arthritis in my hip and in the bottom of my spine. I walk with a limp. No one can help – there’s no way back. Getting up and down stairs or getting up on a chair I can’t really do. You get one leg up, then the other slips down.”

The worst problem, she says, is incontinence. “I wear pads the whole time, and have been since the age of 23. My sisters all had babies and none had this problem. A lot of people might have a little leak, but this is a whole flow … It’s very embarrassing.”

Mary and her husband went on to have three boys as well as their daughter. She believes she should have been offered a caesarean section much earlier. But campaigners and historians say it was exactly to avoid caesarean sections that symphysiotomy was used in Ireland.

Symphysiotomy was first used in the 19th century. As caesarean sections grew safer, the use of the operation declined in the developed world. But Alex Spain, the master of Dublin’s National Maternity Hospital (NMH) until 1948, disapproved. According to Jacqueline Morrissey, a historian who <a class=” data-link-name=”in body link” data-component=”in-body-link”>began investigating the practice in the 1990s, it was Spain’s Catholic beliefs, not his medical judgment, that guided his actions. At the time, the established medical consensus was that having more than three caesarean sections was dangerous, and that further pregnancies would have to be stopped by sterilisation or contraception. Spain considered this unacceptable, says Morrissey, and talked about “the mutilating operation of sterilisation and marital difficulty”.

So that’s terrifying.

The real argument, according to Mairead Enright, a law lecturer at the University of Kent who specialises in religion and law, is whether medical staff were negligent in using “a procedure so inherently defective that any doctor should have realised it was wrong”.

“The consequences for women afterwards were so severe that they should have known it was not the proper way to go,” she argues. “Depriving a woman of one medical treatment, which has problems, and substituting another that has guaranteed morbidity to circumvent contraception is gender-based violence.”

More sadism from the loving god.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Yesterday the Telegraph reported some heart-breaking details of the slaughter at the army school in Peshawar. Be warned: they’re not happy reading.

The Taliban attackers reserved particularly horrific deaths for the adults, pouring fuel over at least three and setting them alight and killing the head, Tahira Qazi, with a hand grenade.

“Our principal showed extreme bravery,” Wasif Ali, a grade six pupil, said from his bed at the Lady Reading Hospital, where he was being treated for abdominal and head injuries. “She wasn’t afraid even when the militants were firing shots.” He said that as the firing started, she rushed from classroom to classroom, shouting at those inside to lock themselves in. Other pupils said she was trying to console them as well as protect them.

She was joined by another teacher, Saeed Khan, who tried to prevent pupils running away, fearing they would be exposing themselves to more danger, and told them to lie on the floor of the classrooms.

“All the 900 students would have been killed, had both those teachers not come out in the middle of it all,” said Jaffar Gul, a boy who sustained head injuries. “God bless both.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Here’s a disquieting press release from NASA:

NASA Satellites Measure Increase of Sun’s Energy Absorbed in the Arctic

NASA satellite instruments have observed a marked increase in solar radiation absorbed in the Arctic since the year 2000 – a trend that aligns with the steady decrease in Arctic sea ice during the same period.

While sea ice is mostly white and reflects the sun’s rays, ocean water is dark and absorbs the sun’s energy at a higher rate. A decline in the region’s albedo – its reflectivity, in effect – has been a key concern among scientists since the summer Arctic sea ice cover began shrinking in recent decades. As more of the sun’s energy is absorbed by the climate system, it enhances ongoing warming in the region, which is more pronounced than anywhere else on the planet.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Boko Haram this time.

Militants have stormed a remote village in north-eastern Nigeria, killing at least 33 people and kidnapping about 200, a survivor has told the BBC.

He said that suspected Boko Haram militants had seized young men, women and children from Gumsuri village.

The attack happened on Sunday but news has only just emerged, after survivors reached the city of Maiduguri.

The BBC headline is peculiar: Boko Haram unrest: Nigerian militants ‘kidnap 200 villagers’. It’s not “unrest” – it’s organized murder and kidnapping. And the people doing it aren’t really “militants”; their goal is to kill some people and enslave others. Calling them “militants” makes it sound as if they have genuine political goals, but it’s not at all clear that they do. It’s much clearer that they love violence and murder and sexual enslavement.

Residents told the BBC that armed militants attacked the border town of Amchide on Wednesday, arriving in two vehicles with many others on foot.

They raided the market area, setting fire to shops and more than 50 houses.

They’re armed criminals. Why dignify them with the title “militants”?

Guess who the people “kidnapped” were.

A vigilante group that had protected the village from previous attacks was overpowered by the militants, AFP reported.

“After killing our youths, the insurgents have taken away our wives and daughters,” a resident who fled to Maiduguri was quoted as saying.

Militants, insurgents, yadda yadda – they’re men who kill other men and enslave women. That’s their “politics”; that’s their “ideology.”

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The NSS is taking nominations for Secularist of the Year.

Who do you think should be the 2015 Secularist of the year?

The Irwin Prize for Secularist of the Year is awarded annually in recognition of an individual or an organisation considered to have made an outstanding contribution to the secular cause.

This year’s prize will be presented on Saturday 28 March at a lunch event in central London so please get your nominations to us by Friday 23 January.

The nomination form is right there on the page, so if you have a candidate, get to it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Some people and institutions do take misogyny seriously. Dalhousie University apparently does.

Dalhousie University in Halifax has launched an investigation into disturbing, sexually explicit Facebook posts attributed to male students in the faculty of dentistry, CBC News has learned.

The men were part of a Facebook group called the Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen. The group was removed from Facebook late last week.

I wonder by whom. Facebook doesn’t remove groups like that, and no one else could, so I guess the members removed it.

The university is working on what to do about it. Exams have been postponed until next month.

CBC News obtained screenshots of the group’s posts, which are sexually explicit and appear to involve discussions of female classmates.

In one post, members were polled and asked, “Who would you hate f–k?” They were given two names to vote on.

Yeah that hate fuck idea is nice. Jian Ghomeshi told a colleague he wanted to hate fuck her at a meeting, which tells you something.

Another post shows a woman wearing a bikini. The caption says, “Bang until stress is relieved or unconscious (girl).”

You know…I know of several Facebook groups that are way worse than that. That’s mild in comparison. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

Their conversations also include jokes about using chloroform on women.

The words: “Does this rag smell like chloroform to you??” were superimposed on one photo.

In response to another photo of a bikini-clad woman, two members wrote: “Can you tell me what this chloroform smells like?” and “Does this mask smell like nitrous oxide to you?”

Haha – geddit? Gas her unconscious so that you can fuck her – with or without hate – whether she’s willing or not.

One thing the internet has certainly given us is a much deeper knowledge of how many men really hate women, and how taken for granted it is. Not one of my favorite things about the technology.

H/t Ibis.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So I had to read John Sauven’s* blog post about how sincerely, deeply, utterly sorry he is about the Nazca lines and how strongly he hopes Peru will just take his word for that and stop bothering them.

Words are never enough, he says in the title, and yet they seem to be all he’s offering.

Words are not enough. I know that. But I want to start by saying how deeply disappointed and sorry I am for the activity undertaken in the name of Greenpeace at the Nazca lines in Peru last week during the climate talks.

The place chosen for holding a banner showed a regrettable disregard for the culture of Peru and the importance of not going to fragile and culturally important sites without authorisation. Greenpeace International’s Executive Director, Kumi Naidoo, has this week met with the Peruvian Minister of Culture, who is responsible for the site, to offer an apology. Kumi has assured the Minister that we will fully participate in any investigation into the activity.

“Fully” of course meaning “not including telling Peru who was involved in the ‘activity’.” (Note the evasive word. Trespass, invasion, damage – those would have been better words.) “Fully participate” meaning “in whatever sense we mean by ‘fully’ and not at all what Peru might mean by it.”

In short, he’s basically told an untruth right at the outset. They’re not fully participating.

Greenpeace International is conducting an investigation into how it was possible for this to have happened. The result of this investigation will inform changes that Greenpeace will make to try and ensure something like this can never happen again.

Like the church, like the military, like the universities. But they committed a crime. They don’t get to keep the investigation in-house. Sure, they need to look at their own organization to find out why someone agreed to such a bad move, but they don’t get to be in charge of the whole investigation, and they shouldn’t be stonewalling.

The first comment says that nicely.

The phrase “hold the people responsible accountable” has been tossed about by Greenpeace, without ever defining what that means. Will you turn them over to Peruvian authorities, or will you just withhold their team T-Shirts? You say words are not enough. When will you actually offer more than words? If it was oil rather than footprints spread out over the sacred desert site, would Greenpeace accept an apology from BP or Haliburton?

Would they and should they? No and no.

*Sauven is the executive director of Greenpeace UK.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Peru is planning to extradite the Greenpeacers who scratched up the Nazca hummingbird site.

Castillo told the Guardian that Peruvian authorities had identified six members of the group who participated in the protest at the Unesco world heritage site last week, adding that prosecutors have filed charges of attacking archaeological monuments – a crime punishable by up to six years in prison.

But the minister said Greenpeace had refused to name all the protesters – leaving Peru no choice but to pursue it “through our legal means”.

“Greenpeace says it wants to take responsibility but in not giving us the names so that those responsible can appear before a judge in Peru it is refusing to do that,” he told the Guardian. “It’s a contradiction in terms.”

“It makes you wonder if they really are as ashamed as they say they are.”

That sounds consistent with their stunted non-apology that carefully avoided mentioning damage or harm and just talked about having “offended,” as if that were all they’d done.

Archaeologists say footprints left by the activists could remain in the arid desert ground for decades. Castillo said that footage of the protest showed the activists acting as if they were on a “picnic”.

The still photographs certainly show them taking no care at all about how they treated the site – standing on it in their trainers and kneeling on it in their blue jeans, as if it were the sturdy linoleum floor of their kitchen.

“It’s not a matter of money. The destruction is irreparable,” said Ana María Cogorno, president of the Maria Reiche Association, named after the German archaeologist whose groundbreaking research on the Nazca lines from 1940 onwards saw them gain recognition and protection.

The hummingbird etching on which the Greenpeace stunt was laid was the “only one of the lines which was completely untouched and perfectly conserved,” she said. “It’s one of the symbols of Peru,” she added.

Siiiiigh. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know it was the only completely untouched site.

After a meeting with Greenpeace’s executive director, Kumi Naidoo, on Monday, Peru’s minister for culture, Diana Álvarez-Calderón, said the group’s failure to reveal the protesters’ names amounted to a “ kind of cover-up”.

And adds insult to injury, if you ask me.

In a blogpost on Tuesday John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK,made clear his disapproval of the stunt, which was apparently organised to highlight the slow progress of the United Nations climate talks in Lima.

“For many years, Greenpeace offices around the world have been making concerted efforts to reach out to and collaborate with communities everywhere. We understand the importance of being a respectful ally who can learn from our partners and ensure the work we do reflects and supports all communities. This action did not measure up to that commitment. But this activity is not who we are. It is not what we believe in, and this is not what I believe in,” Sauven wrote.

That’s disgusting. It’s just a bunch of PR babble saying how nice they are and how well they mean. Obviously they don’t  understand the importance of being a respectful ally; if they did they wouldn’t have pulled this stupid stunt.

Kyle Ash, a Greenpeace spokesman, said that the group had taken “every care” to avoid any damage. “The surprise to us was that this resulted in some kind of moral offence. We definitely regret that and we want to figure out a way to resolve it.”

The group did not take “every care”; you have only to glance at any of the photos of them in action to see that. Stop telling self-admiring lies!

Greenpeace sucks.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Taliban released pictures of the gunmen who killed 148 children and teachers in Peshawar and injured 121 more. The Taliban is proud of them, apparently.

The Times of India reports.

The Pakistani Taliban released the pictures as they issued a statement claiming the attack was justified because the Pakistani army had long been killing innocent children and families of their fighters.

Pakistani Taliban spokesman Mohammad Khurasani also vowed more attacks as he warned civilians to detach themselves from all military institutions.

In photos released by the group, between six and seven men carrying guns can be seen pictured in front of a white banner.

Brave heroes.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

A laugh, because we need one these days.

I wish Cooper knew how to do that.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Wbx-aqtYk

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)