There’s a dead rat outside my door. Ew. I’m hoping a crow will come along and take it away. Or a cat. Or a dog. Or a swat team. Or the National Guard. Or the mayor. Or a wolf. Or a raccoon. Or a bald eagle. Or that neighbor with the very loud voice.… Read the rest
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The glories of life in Northern Mali now that the Islamists have taken over.
Women and girls no longer have to suffer the indignity of having naked hair and necks, because they are all required to wear the hijab.
Poor Toula for instance used to be able to swim in the Niger river, but happily for her she can no longer do that.
… Read the rest“These barbarians have refused everything. They don’t want to see girls bathing,” says Toula who, like other residents, asked her last name not be used.
The freedoms formerly enjoyed by Toula and other women in Gao, previously one of the region’s most cosmopolitan and lively towns, disappeared almost overnight.
Most noticeably, women are now forced to
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“I can’t stand how I am at the moment, covered in a veil from head to toe. It’s as if I was in prison,” 15-year-old Aicha said.… Read the rest
The Islamists told her to stop talking to men, but she didn’t stop, so they assaulted her.… Read the rest
The chances are good that at best Malala will be less than she would have been if those shits hadn’t shot her in the head. Time talked to a brain injury expert.
… Read the restWhen will they be able to tell what the long-term damage is?
Months to years. It’s six months to a year before you get a sense of what the long-term damage is. Her recovery and prognosis depend on what the initial neurological deficits are. Young people do much better, prognostically, for recovery. In the early stages there may be a lot of fairly dramatic improvements. The question becomes, What will be the long-term deficits, compared to her baseline? That’s often a much more difficult question that takes time.
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Given the severity of the injury, there is a strong possibility there may be some higher-level cognitive deficits.… Read the rest
Religious leaders should not be in charge of human rights but rather men and women who are striving for an equal society.… Read the rest
Some grey bloke has a new video about charismatic atheist doodz…
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I want to post a picture of a Mars rock. It has to be a pyramidal rock. Luckily, there is a picture of a pyramidal rock at NASA.
[robotic voice] “Look at this glorious picture of a pyramidal rock on Mars. I am such a geek.”
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Hahahahahahahahahaha… Read the rest
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Drop everything and read this article by Soraya Chemaly on a book about the link between violence against girls and women and military conflict.
If you take one idea away from the year 2012 this should be this:
“The very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated. What’s more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies.”
U.S.? Look at yourself in the mirror.
… Read the restThere is a direct relationship between the treatment of women in everyday life — in homes, on streets, at schools and
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Sometimes the ugliness is just suffocating, and also hard to believe.
Take a good idea…
On Mix It Up at Lunch Day, schoolchildren around the country are encouraged to hang out with someone they normally might not speak to.
The program, started 11 years ago by the Southern Poverty Law Center and now in more than 2,500 schools, was intended as a way to break up cliques and prevent bullying.
And it would also teach children some useful things – such as, that you don’t have to eat lunch with the same people every single day; that it can be interesting and fun to get to know different people; that it can be a nuisance to have to … Read the rest
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Hahahaha this is great – did you know the Apple logo is blasphemous?
Yes well once you’re told of course you can see it. Apple; bite missing. But would you have thought of it if you hadn’t been told? Aha!!1! I thought not. You’re probably blasphemous yourself.
… Read the restIn this case it’s a sect of ultra-Orthodox believers in Russia that are claiming that the Apple logo is indeed blasphemous:
Radical orthodox Christians from Russia remove Apple logotype from the company’s products and put a cross sign instead of them. The orthodox find the half-bitten apple logotype anti-Christian and insulting their belief, something that may potentially cause serious problems for Apple’s products in the country.
Interfax news-agency reports about “several” cases,
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A bit of housekeeping. Boring, I know, but it’s an outrageous vicious lie and it’s sticking in my head the way corn sticks in your teeth. It’s so outrageous and so vicious that this one time I will even link to the pit. It may be futile or even worse than futile, since Studies Have Shown that correcting a lie enforces the lie rather than correcting it; nevertheless I can’t just let it sit there.
One “Richard Strawkins” (see what I mean about how this works? the lie won’t damage him [I'll assume he really is male] because that’s not his name; it will damage only me) said on October 5, in a discussion of Dawkins’s foreword to the … Read the rest
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It’s Brendan! Again! Yes he’s back, that mischief-loving scamp from Living Libertarian Marxism or do I mean Zombie Catholic Theocracy. What is it this time? It’s that the reporting and commentary on Jimmy Savile is – wait for it – a witch-hunt.
Wut? The guy’s dead. How can it be a witch hunt when he’s dead?
… Read the restWith each passing day – hour, in fact – the Jimmy Savile scandal looks more and more like a modern-day version of the hysteria that gripped seventeenth-century Salem, when a small town in Massachusetts became convinced that it had witches in its midst. Since the first accusations of child abuse were made against the late BBC entertainer in an ITV documentary on 3 October,
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She’s getting specialist treatment.
… Read the restAlthough Pakistan had initially insisted she could be treated in her home country, a military statement said that a panel of doctors had recommended she be “shifted abroad to a UK centre which has the capability to provide integrated care to children who have sustained severe injury”.
On arrival at Birmingham Airport, she was taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital by ambulance, travelling at a slow speed because of the nature of her wounds.
The hospital has a recently-opened major trauma centre specialising in both gunshot wounds and head injuries.
Its specialist team has 10 years of experience of treating UK military casualties and Medical Director Dr David Rosser said Malala Yousafzai “could be viewed as
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The panel of doctors recommended that Malala be shifted abroad to a UK center which can provide integrated care to severely injured children.… Read the rest
Those pushing this struggle forward are not foreign. They are people like the teachers assassinated simply for going to work.… Read the rest
Al Jazeera has a grim update about Malala, but it’s from an unnamed source who isn’t authorized to talk to the media, so…who knows. The latest on the record news though is better.
… Read the restMilitary surgeons conducted three consecutive clinical examinations on Sunday and compiled a report which stated: “Malala’s condition is stable and she is recovering from her injury steadily.”
According to military surgeons at the Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology, Rawalpindi, Malala respired without a ventilator on Sunday for a few moments after successfully moving her limbs on Saturday.
“It was an amazing development made by her body. Usually patients on ventilators with such a complicated head injury never show such signs … Keeping our fingers crossed to see
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Mind you, my friend the author of Jesus and Mo may not like it much, especially given the feeble quality of the wit. But my monstrous ego is flattered.
I don’t get any lines though. I just say Peezus Christ at the end every time.
I’m not even in the latest one (number 8). I guess I’m just there for the rhyme. Monstrous ego deflated.
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Aorati Melani is the blogger, which is Invisible Ink in English.
… Read the restIn front of the theater, another crowd had gathered, and another group of policemen was preventing them for approaching. Behind the police, there were a few people, priests, monks, a lady with a scarf on her head and some men in suits, three of which, as I learned later, were parliament members of the Golden Dawn party.
The air smelled of tear gas and my eyes stung, but generally there was relative calm. I approached the officers and said that I wanted to enter the theater.
“Go away, ma’m. Please, go away”
“Has the play been cancelled?”
“We don’t know. Please step back.”I
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