Archive for the ‘Culture – How not to do it’ Category

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Iran stoning sentence for adultery draws global outrage

Sunday, July 18th, 2010

LONDON – The case of an Iranian woman who faces death by stoning is drawing international outrage after her lawyer’s blog posts sparked a global campaign to save her life.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s face, framed in a black chador, stared from the front page of The Times of London yesterday, while The Guardian newspaper has carried an interview with Ashtiani’s children – 22-year-old Sajad and 17-year-old Farideh – who described the sentence as a nightmare. Protests are planned in front of the Iranian Embassy over the weekend.

Stoning is a “medieval punishment which has no role in the modern world,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague told reporters. “If the punishment is carried out, it will disgust and appal the watching world,” Hague said in a media conference with Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu in London.

He appealed to Tehran to halt the planned execution.

Celebrities including Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, and Robert Redford have already signed on to the campaign to push for her release, according to The Times, which also quoted US Senator John Kerry and Howard Berman, the chairman of the House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, as expressing their disgust at the sentence.

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Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Religion - The Wrong Way, The Perfect Storm, Women's Rights | No Comments »

Millions of cancer survivors putting off care because they cannot afford it

Monday, June 21st, 2010

– For me, the purpose of national governments should be to make the quality of life for their citizens of the highest quality possible consistent with not depriving future generations of those same benefits.

– And it should not be to allow Corporations the widest latitude of action in their monomaniacal pursuit of profits.

– Unfortunately, humanity in the large has not absorbed this lesson and we are all much the worse for it.

– Witness this story from the U.S. – home of unbridled Capitalism.

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(NATIONAL) — A new study suggests America’s challenged and stressed employer based health care/health insurance system has come home to roost for millions of cancer survivors who are putting off medical care they need because they can no longer afford it.

The results, released online Monday by an American Cancer Society medical journal, shows that millions of cancer survivors are forgoing needed medical care because of concerns about cost or because they can no longer afford the care.

The new study, led by a Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researcher, estimates that more than 2 million of 12 million U.S. adult cancer survivors – or about 8% of the total – did not get one or more needed medical services because of the costs involved.

And about 10 percent also said they had to forgo filling prescriptions.

The study is being called the first to estimate how often current and former patients have skipped getting care because of money worries.

Survey participants were asked if they had needed medical care in the previous year but didn’t get it because they couldn’t afford it. Cancer survivors younger than 65 were between 1.5 and 2 times more likely to have said yes to that question than those who hadn’t had cancer.

The study showed that among cancer survivors, the prevalence of forgoing care in the past year due to concerns about cost was 7.8 percent for medical care, 9.9 percent for prescription medications, 11.3 percent for dental care, and 2.7 percent for mental health care.

More… ➡

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Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Financial melt-down, Human Rights, The Perfect Storm | 1 Comment »

U.S. sits at #85 in 2010 Global Peace Index

Sunday, June 20th, 2010

Say it ain’t so.

While peace and stability aren’t easy to come by, this year the world fared slightly worse, partly due to the global recession, according to the fourth annual Global Peace Index.

The survey, which aims to objectively measure security and violence among nations while illustrating drivers of peace, ranked 149 countries this year.

Based on 23 factors, including military expenditures, participation in United Nations peacekeeping, social unrest and jail population, the U.S. placed somewhere in the middle, falling behind China (#80) and Cuba (#72).

Its mediocre spot is due to a combination of factors. While receiving low marks for its domestic murder rate, military expenses and role in international conflicts, it received a boost for respecting human rights and strengthening international relations.

Not surprisingly, Iraq was where it was last year — in the bottom spot.

And New Zealand snagged the top spot, earning the title of most peaceful nation in the world.

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Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, New Zealand, Politics - The Wrong Way, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Kiwi family stunned about expulsion

Friday, March 19th, 2010

– This is the sort of thing I’ve written about before.  See ➡ and ➡.  Western nations that think multiculturalism is good need to be a bit less naive.  If we cannot go to their countries and practice our beliefs, then why should we allow all of them to come to ours and setup ethnic enclaves within our cities?  Parity – not prejudice – is the concept here.

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A New Zealand family kicked out of Morocco for teaching Christianity to Muslim orphans are safe on their way to Spain, their family says.

Aucklanders Chris and Tina Broadbent and their two young children were given an hour and a half to pack and leave the orphanage run by the Village of Hope charity before being given an armed escort to the border.

They had been voluntarily working at the village for the last 18 months.

Mr Broadbent’s father, Dr Roland Broadbent, told NZPA Christian material had been found at the organisation.

In Morocco it was illegal to convert Muslims to Christianity, but as the group had been left alone for nearly two years, Dr Broadbent said it wasn’t clear why the orphanage workers were suddenly forced out of the property, leaving the 33 children with nowhere to go.

More… ➡

Posted in Culture - How not to do it, Fundamentalism, Religion - The Wrong Way | No Comments »

Pakistan: Backlash Rises against Bill on Sexual Harassment

Monday, March 15th, 2010

– Can you imagine?   A country with nuclear weapons and an ally of the U.S. and they still want to keep their women in the back of the bus.  What a world.

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As a bill against sexual harassment of women inches closer to becoming a law in Pakistan, it is drawing fire from male politicians and conservative groups that have called it anywhere from un-Islamic to one that would lead women astray.

These groups are having last-minute jitters given that the first part of these legal measures to counter sexual harassment — Criminal Law Amendment Act 2010 — was signed into law by President Asif Ali Zardari on Jan. 29. This amendment, the result of two years of unswerving struggle by civil society, especially women activists, is aimed at protecting both men and women against harassment at workplace.

But the backlash from critics is rising now that the second part of the amendment — a specific law on the protection against harassment of women at the workplace — has been approved by the lower House of Parliament and is awaiting passage in the Senate.

‘It is against shariah (Islamic law)’ is how Sen. Gul Naseeb Khan of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Fazlur Rehman Group) views this second part of the bill. He was also the sole voice of dissent in the Senate when the first part of the sexual harassment bill was being debated.

In a television talk show, he said the bill protecting women from sexual harassment would only lead to the spread of vulgarity. ‘There is no need for women to seek employment because the responsibility for their upkeep lies on the shoulder of men,’ he said.

The only two professions women can take up, he argued, are teaching and medicine — and those are only if it is absolutely necessary.

Jamshed Dasti, a parliamentarian belonging to the ruling Pakistan People’s Party that tabled the twin bill, went against his party’s line to oppose their passage and vowed to put forward a bill that would protect men’s rights. He also termed the sexual harassment bills an insult to Islamic society.

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Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Religion - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm, Women's Rights | 1 Comment »

South Dakota legislators tell schools to teach ‘astrological’ explanation for global warming

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

– Mmmmmmm.  Walk tall, Americans, and be proud of yourselves intellectually.   I know I sure am.

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Last week, the South Dakota House of Representatives passed a resolution to “urge” public schools to teach astrology.  Brad Johnson has the amazing story in this Think Progress repost.

By a 36-30 vote, the legislators passed House Concurrent Resolution 1009, “Calling for balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota.” After repeating long–debunked denier myths and calling carbon dioxide “the gas of life,” the resolution concludes that public schools should teach that “global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact”:

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the House of Representatives of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the Senate concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature urges that instruction in the public schools relating to global warming include the following:

(1) That global warming is a scientific theory rather than a proven fact;
(2) That there are a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological, and ecological dynamics that can effect [sic] world weather phenomena and that the significance and interrelativity of these factors is largely speculative; and
(3) That the debate on global warming has subsumed political and philosophical viewpoints which have complicated and prejudiced the scientific investigation of global warming phenomena; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Legislature urges that all instruction on the theory of global warming be appropriate to the age and academic development of the student and to the prevailing classroom circumstances.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Mental Irrationality, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

China faces growing gender imbalance

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

– No single drop thinks it’s responsible for the flood.

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More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses by 2020, says the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The gender imbalance among newborns is the most serious demographic problem for the country’s population of 1.3 billion, says the academy.

It cites sex-specific abortions as a major factor, due to China’s traditional bias towards male children.

The academy says gender selection abortions are “extremely common”.

This is especially true in rural areas, and ultra-sound scans, first introduced in the late 1980s, have increased the practice.

More… ➡

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Turkish girl ‘buried alive for talking to boys’

Friday, February 12th, 2010

– Turkey wants into the European Union, Right?  Yeah, sure.

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A 16-year-old Turkish girl was buried alive by relatives as a punishment for talking to boys, the Hurriyet newspaper reported on Thursday.

Police discovered the body of the girl, identified only as M.M., in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-meter-deep hole dug under a chicken pen outside her house in Kahta in the southeastern province of Adiyaman, the Turkish daily reported on its website.

The body was found in December, around 40 days after M.M. went missing. Police have arrested and charged the girl’s father and grandfather over the murder. The father reportedly said in his testimony that the family was unhappy his daughter had male friends. Her mother was also arrested but later released.

A postmortem examination revealed a significant amount of soil in her lungs and stomach, indicating that she was buried alive and conscious, forensic experts told the Anatolia news agency.

More… ➡

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, The Perfect Storm, Women's Rights | No Comments »

There’s something to look forward to…

Monday, February 1st, 2010

From this morning’s Council on Foreign Relations Daily Brief:

The budget will be accompanied by a congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense review, which asks the Pentagon to focus more on wars in which enemy forces hide among the populace, predicting a future dominated by “hybrid” wars where traditional states fight more like guerrillas.

Damn, now there’s a happy future that I hadn’t realized I should be looking forward to yet.

Posted in CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Corporations Are Citizens – What Are We?

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

– A few days ago, the U.S. Supreme Court made a terrible 5 to 4 decision granting corporations the same rights as individual human beings to make contributions to political candidates.

– The excessive power of corporations in America and their solely profit-centric reason for existing has been a topic I’ve written a lot on.

– At core, human beings are going to have to make some hard decisions about what the purpose of their governments should be.  Should they exist to serve the interests of the people who live under them by maximizing the happiness, health and freedoms of those people?  Or, should they be the minions of those who are all about profit and power and the rest of us are just left to just be the folder for them?

– I know where my vote is.  But most of the world hasn’t realized realized yet that there’s a question that needs to be decided in play.  And in the U.S., the corporations have largely won the day – while the citizens sleep in front of their TVs.

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This week’s Supreme Court ruling that corporations are protected by “free speech” rights and can contribute enormous sums of money to influence elections is a de jure endorsement of the de facto dominance of corporations over our lives. Indeed, corporations are the new citizens of this country, and ordinary Americans, who used to be known as “citizens,” now fall into three categories: consumers, warriors and prisoners.

More… ➡

Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Culture - How not to do it, Human Rights, Mental Irrationality, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

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