Via Rachel Dwyer ‏@RachelMJDwyer Aug 11

Karol Wojtyla was referred to in Saturday’s Credo column as “the first non-Catholic pope for 450 years”. This should, of course, have read “non-Italian”. We apologise for the error.

No need. I thank you for the error.… Read the rest

Hey it’s World Elephant Day. Twitter told me so.

So let’s have some elephants.

Via Laurent Baheux Photo ‏@laurentbaheux 10h

Via Elephant Family ‏@elephantfamily 5h

Via British Museum ‏@britishmuseum 4h

… Read the rest

Bic South Africa, much to its surprise, is getting irritated reactions to its so clever and friendly ad in honor of national women’s day. They thought the ad was “empowering.”

Let’s see it again, so that we know where we are.

How is it “empowering” to tell women to look like a girl? How is it “empowering” to tell them to think like a man? How is it “empowering” not to mention the word “woman”? How is it “empowering” to tell women to be like every kind of person except a woman?

How is it “empowering” to tell women they should look childlike? How is it “empowering” to tell women that thinking belongs to men? How is it “empowering” to … Read the rest

Murdered women in the US. The Huffington Post last October:

At least one third of all female homicide victims in the U.S. are killed by male intimate partners — husbands and ex-husbands, boyfriends and estranged lovers. While both men and women experience domestic violence, the graphics below should put to rest the myth that abuse occurs equally to both sexes.

The graphics illustrate that 85% of victims of domestic violence are women, and that women are far more likely than men to be killed by domestic partners.

Since the landmark Violence Against Women Act was passed in 1994, annual rates of domestic violence have plummeted by 64 percent. But still today, an average of three women are killed

The BBC did a backgrounder piece by Naomi Grimley on Amnesty and the decriminalization of sex work yesterday.

It’s not often that a liberal newspaper like The Guardian rails against an organisation like Amnesty International.
But last week the paper ran a stinging editorial questioning the wisdom of the human rights group.
It said Amnesty would make a “serious mistake” if it advocated the decriminalisation of prostitution – a decision the group’s international council will vote on later on Tuesday.

Women’s groups and Jimmy Carter have said similar things.

Amnesty’s leaked proposal says decriminalisation would be “based on the human rights principle that consensual sexual conduct between adults is entitled to protection from state interference” so long as violence or

Huh. I’ve seen (and probably heard) that “bye Felicia” thing a few times, so this time I decided to look up its origin.

So predictable.

Urban dictionary:

When someone says that they’re leaving and you could really give two shits less that they are. Their name then becomes “felicia”, a random bitch that nobody is sad to see go. They’re real name becomes irrelevant because nobody cares what it really is. Instead, they now are “felicia”. “hey guys i’m gonna go”
“bye felicia”
“who is felicia?”
“exactly bitch. buh bye.”

The entries farther down are a little more informative, but no more alluring.

A line from the 1995 film

Welp, that’s over.

From the Times again:

LONDON — Amnesty International has approved a controversial policy to endorse the de-criminalization of the sex trade, rejecting complaints by women’s rights groups who say it is tantamount to advocating the legalization of pimping and brothel owning.

Well, women’s rights groups…who cares what they say.

At its decision-making forum in Dublin on Tuesday, the human rights group approved the resolution to recommend “full decriminalization of all aspects of consensual sex work.” It argues its research suggests decriminalization is the best way to defend sex workers’ human rights.

While other people’s research suggests otherwise.

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women has argued that while it agrees with Amnesty that those who are prostituted should

Now that’s a helpful message…

… Read the rest

I found something.

A Facebook group, Let Clothes Be Clothes.

Down with gender-separated clothes.

Let Clothes be Clothes is asking retailers in the UK to rethink how they design and market children’s clothing. Just like many of our supporters, we’re concerned about how colours, styles and themes are split into for girls or for boys, and what message that sends out to children and adults. Children should decide their own interests, favourite colours and wear the styles they find most comfortable and enjoyable to wear.

Please send us your photographs, petition links and blog posts, and help us promote a more positive culture that offers a full range of options to every child, encourages gender equality, prevents bullying and

Good lord. Credulity defied yet again. Donald Trump’s idea of a good way to respond to persistent questions from a tv news presenter who has the bad taste to be a woman is to talk about her bleeding all over everything.

Trump is under fire for saying Friday night that [Megyn] Kelly, who pressed him on his previous attacks on women during Thursday night’s GOP presidential debate, had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her — wherever.”

Yeah that’s women for you – we’re just so damn wet and leaky. It’s gross.

The NY Times has more.

Megyn Kelly opened her Fox News program on Monday night by addressing the uproar overDonald

Arifur Rahman updates us on what Bangladesh is doing about the relentless attacks on secular bloggers.

Following the killing of Niloy, Bangladesh Olama League (a Islamist wing of Bangladesh Awami League, the party running the government now) have showed rage against Atheists openly in the capital. They then demanded law to be formed which will have provision of ‘Death Penalty’ for Atheistic writings. Among many other inhumane demands, they wanted all blogs having Athiestic writing to be shut down.

And they’re getting what they want.

The chief of police in Dhaka said this:

At a press briefing at the Police Headquarters on Sunday, he also suggested notifying police if anyone’s blog was found to be offensive to religions.

“There

News organizations keep asking women to go on debate shows with Milo Yiannopoulos. Last March Kate Smurthwaite wrote about what a terrible idea that is.

In the last week I’ve received over 1,700 nasty Twitter messages. Many of these messages have been retweeted and ‘favourited’ hundreds of times. I was going to print all the abuse out and hold it up for a photo to accompany this article. The document came out at 165 pages. To print my week’s abuse I’m going to have to buy a new printer cartridge.

You might assume that to provoke such a response I had said something deeply racist, incited rape or sexual violence or called for the death of a much-loved TV

You have got to be kidding.

The Times of India:

DHAKA: With four secular bloggers being killed by suspected Islamists in Bangladesh in recent months, police here have asked secular writers not to “cross the limit” and write anything which hurts religious beliefs of others.

“Do not cross the limit. Do not hurt anyone’s religious belief,” inspector general of police AKM Shahidul Hoque said as investigators struggled to nab the killers of secular blogger Niloy Chakrabarty Neel who was hacked to death at his flat here on Friday.

What “limit”? Religious belief covers a vast territory, and not hurting any possible variant of it requires not saying anything at all ever.

The “freethinkers” should keep in mind that hurting

Here’s Shira Banki playing the piano in 2009, when she was ten, at the Ron Shulamit Music School in Jerusalem.

This is the girl the tall man with the huge knife stabbed to death at the Gay Pride Parade.

… Read the rest

No reason. I just thought I would.

… Read the rest

Harald Hanche-Olsen wisely reminded me to add a new Withdrawing Room, so here it is.

The Withdrawing Room, for new readers who don’t already know, is where you can talk about any random thing you feel like talking about. Nothing is off-topic because there is no topic. Nothing is a derail because there is no rail.

We have this whole big rambling website, with lots of rooms,  to play with, so I might move it somewhere else later, but for now it’s here.

Have a slice of the view from my window:

… Read the rest

That same day in Jerusalem –

Hours after the stabbing at the gay parade, and in a separate incident, an 18-month-old Palestinian boy was killed in a firebombing attack on his family home early Friday morning that was attributed to right-wing Jewish extremists.

Unknown assailants, suspected to be extremist Jewish settlers, firebombed the home of a Palestinian family in the northern West Bank village of Duma, killing the toddler. The parents and brother of Ali Saad Dawabsha were hospitalized and are still fighting for their lives.

…

Chairperson of the Zionist Union’s Knesset faction Merav Michaeli said she expected the government to tell lawmakers how it intends to curb the threat of Jewish terror attacks.

“The two terrible Jewish terror

Shira Banki died on August 2.

She died of the stab wounds inflicted on her by a religious fanatic at Jerusalem’s Gay Pride parade three days before.

Stuart Winer at the Times of Israel has more.

Banki’s family said that their daughter was killed because of her tolerant views. They also indicated they place some blame on the police for not preventing the killer, Yishai Schlissel, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, from reaching the parade.

“Our wonderful Shira was murdered because of the fact that she was a happy 16-year-old girl, full of life and love, who came to support the rights of her friends and every person to live in their own way,” Banki’s family said in a statement. “For

Dear readers and especially commenters – ur-B&W has been pretty dormant for four years, so things are a little rusty.

Comments are sometimes slow to appear, but they do turn up.

It’s ok if you make a duplicate, I can just delete them. No worries.

It will take me awhile to oil all the joints.

Meanwhile, enjoy not having to see all those god damn ads!… Read the rest

Ten days ago, at the Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem, a Haredi man stabbed six people, one of whom died a few days later.

A police spokesperson identified the suspect as the same man who stabbed three people at the parade in 2005.

Yishai Schlissel, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for that attack and was released from prison three weeks ago.

It’s too bad they released him from prison just in time for the parade. It’s also too bad they didn’t make sure he didn’t do it again.

The attacker emerged behind marchers and began stabbing them while screaming, before being tackled by a police officer.

Dramatic images showed the assailant reaching inside his