For a nice change, the essay deadline is for handing marked essays back, rather than handing one in. Still. Deadline. Essay. Need to not be posting stories. Expect more and expect it more regularly after this. (Employment permitting, mashallah!)
In the meantime, this week’s Have I Got News For You was amazing. Bob Crow decided to… well, it’s not clear if he had a plan or not…..
BBC News – Rape complaint woman reaches settlement with police.
A manic depressive with bi-polar is raped during a psychotic episode. She’s then sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Two months later she reports the rape to the police… who do nothing. Literally, nothing.
Her rapist took her to a cash point and made her withdraw £200, which was caught on film. She alleges a police officer told her the cameras were dummy cameras. When she finds out much later from a cashier at the bank that they’re not, she takes the police to court. They pay £3,500 and get some bad press.
Since when is £3,500 the price to make a rape go away?
Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight | Underwire | Wired.com.
Ha ha ha. Love Wire, dislike vampires.
And so, with an insincere “love is forever,” we begin.
- If a boy is aloof, stand-offish, ignores you or is just plain rude, it is because he is secretly in love with you — and you are the point of his existence.
- Secrets are good — especially life-threatening ones.
- It’s OK for a potential romantic interest to be dimwitted, violent and vengeful — as long as he hasgreat abs.
- If a boy tells you to stay away from him because he is dangerous and may even kill you, he must be the love of your life. You should stay with him since he will keep you safe forever.
- If a boy leaves you, especially suddenly (while telling you he will never see you again), it is because he loves you so much he will suffer just to keep you safe.
- When a boy leaves you, going into shock, losing all your friends and enduring night terrors are completely acceptable occurrences — as long as you keep your grades up.
- It is extremely romantic to put yourself in dangerous situations in order to see your ex-boyfriend again. It’s even more romantic to remember the sound of his voice when he yelled at you.
- Boys who leave you always come back.
- Because they come back, you should hold out, waiting for them for months, even when completely acceptable and less-abusive alternative males present themselves.
- Even though you have no intention of dating an alternative male who expresses interest in you, it is fine to string the young man along for months. Also, you should use him to fix things for you. Maybe he’ll even buy you something.
- You should use said male to fix things because girls are incapable of anything mechanical or technical.
- Lying to your parents is fine. Lying to your parents while you run away to save your suicidal boyfriend is an extremely good idea that shows your strength and maturity. Also, it is what you must do.
- Car theft in the service of love is acceptable.
- If the boy you are in love with causes you (even indirectly) to be so badly beaten you end up in the hospital, you should tell the doctors and your family that you “fell down the steps” because you are such a silly, clumsy girl. That false explanation always works well for abused women.
- Men can be changed for the better if you sacrifice everything you are and devote yourself to their need for change.
- Young women should make no effort to improve their social skills or emotional state. Instead, they should seek out potential mates that share their morose deficiencies and emotional illnesses.
- Girls shouldn’t always read a book series just because everyone else has.
- When writing a book series, it’s acceptable to lift seminal source material and bastardize it with tired, overwrought teenage angst.
- When making or watching a major feature film, you should gleefully embrace the 20 minutes of plot it provides in between extended segments of vacant-eyed silence and self-indulgent, moaning banter.
- Vampires — once among the great villains of literature and motion pictures — are no longer scary. In fact, they’re every bit as whiny, self-absorbed and impotent as any human being.
Quite.
Hurrah, hurrah! Lady marries lady, and then lady tries to put wife on insurance, they say ‘hmmmm’ and the judge says ‘do it’. They do it, then the Executive Branch goes ‘wait a minute… don’t do that’ and then the judge says ‘DO IT.’ Now waiting on the next move from the Exec… that’s you, Obama! Get on it!
Obama Administration lawyers are likely still scratching their heads over how to respond to an extraordinary ruling in San Francisco. Last week, the chief judge of one of America’s most prominent federal courts ordered an Executive Branch agency to stop interfering with a court employee’s efforts to secure health insurance coverage for her wife. "The Office of Personnel Management shall cease at once its interference with the jurisdiction of this tribunal," wrote Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. He gave the Administration 30 days to permit Karen Golinski, a lawyer employed by the Ninth Circuit, to include the woman she married under California law last year on her family health-insurance plan.
…Kozinski’s unusual and bluntly worded Golinski order comes 10 months after the judge, acting in his capacity as administrator in an employee dispute resolution, determined that the federal Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts had erred in rejecting Golinski’s inclusion of her wife on her insurance election form. Sidestepping constitutional questions about equal treatment for gays under the law, he agreed that the Defense of Marriage Act forbids the government from recognizing gay marriages. But Kozinski’s argument centers on the Federal Health Benefits Act, which says that coverage must be provided for an employee’s family, including a spouse and children under the age of 21. While the Administration interpreted that as meaning the coverage could only be provided for couples whose marriages are recognized under federal law, Kozinski reasoned that the law should be seen as setting a minimum standard for coverage, and that policies could include grandparents living at home, children until they are 25 or, as in Golinski’s case, a woman with whom she is raising a child and is married to under state law.
More: Gay Rights: How a California Judge Is Challenging Obama – TIME.
This is especially complicated because gays are unholy gays are all terrible people and should be treated as second class citizens America doesn’t have a nice clear document that enshrines the rights of its citizens
Ok, you got me, America. Why is this complicated?
The above is an interesting article that suggests Cheney on a ticket for 2012 would give America the chance to debate serious issues and make up its collective mind. Unsold and cowering. The man…. leaves me speechless. Let’s come back to Cheney. One day. One day, in the far, distant future, not in 2012 and never in the context that he might be allowed in the White House again. Please no.
Kate Moss: ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ – Telegraph.
From the Telegraph:
The 35-year-old shocked campaigners fighting to abolish the cult of stick-thin models with the disclosure to the fashion news website WWD.
When asked in an interview if she had any mottos, she replied: “There are loads of mottos. There’s ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. That’s one of them.”
She added: “You try and remember, but it never works.”
Sweet jebus. You sort of have to hope it’s bad reporting and that she didn’t really mean to say that/it’s been taken out of context.
But high five for providing depressed teenagers who are already on the road to starvation with a role model. Famine victims weren’t quite glamorous. Down with food! Up with stupidity! Hurrah!
I stopped subscribing to Vogue many years ago, because it was pretty much wasted on me. But I read the interwebs and vaguely know what fashion is. Since when has it been cool to wear things that draw attention to your va-GI-joe? There’s another dress that scared the crap out of me the other day that I’ll post later.
If you were to go to a big geek convention, I imagine this would fulfil many/all of their fantasies in one go. Especially once that involve weird intergalactic space stations docking or something. Urgh.
But, ladies. Seriously. The Pankhursts and their friends did not go to all that trouble so you could advertise your freedom with a massive cosmic starburst over your crotch. Please. Don’t.
BBC News : Labour denies expenses omission.
And why not? I mean, why legislate against stealing taxpayer’s money when you’ve sort of said sorry for doing it previously? Obviously, you’ve proven that you’re trustworthy and that should be enough. Besides, it’s not like the British public are feeling disenfranchised and mutinous. Oh.. Wait………
And blah to the rest of your stupid laws. We know you wrote them in a rush, based on polling and yes-men, rather than on what we want and need.
(The BBC has updated their reporting of the story, which is how things works, so whatever. Newsniffer says they’ve updated twelve times, and has a wonderful thing where we can see all versions! We’re working from version seven, which you can read here.)
Long(ish) story short, the BBC said last night that Gordon
…plans to host talks in the new year to discuss timing for handing over the campaign in Afghanistan to the Afghan government.
The prime minister said he wanted the Nato meeting to "set a timetable" for transfer starting in 2010.
He called for a "district by district" process of passing the responsibility for security to Afghan forces.
I’m not on the bandwagon of Gordon-haters, he seems like a lovely chap. But on the war in Afghanistan, bad, bad, bad!!! What is going on in Westminster???
It took quite a while for the domestic leadership of ISAF nations to wake up to the fact that this isn’t a conventional war, it’s a nasty, tricksy insurgency. The Taliban aren’t popular, very few people support them. Which makes complete sense, given that they are nasty, tricksy insurgents, using the cloak of “oh, gosh, look, we’re just like a band of Afghan Robin Hoods, robbing those nasty oppressors and saving all you wonderful folk.” It’s a cloak because they raise a fair amount of their money through extortion of the locals – if you don’t pay you rushr , chances are you won’t wake up to a job in the morning, if you wake up at all.
It’s the same old story of paramilitary groups bullying and exploiting the local people, using a nice, press-friendly narrative to mask it. In the beginning, there may have been some basis to the argument that the Taliban were very devout and wanted to restore Afghanistan after the decades of all out and utterly brutal war. Gretchen Peters, in this excellent piece on Taliban funding, argues that way-
Many who encountered the Taliban at their outset say aspects of the tale were true: the early Taliban were well intentioned, even if their methods were medieval. According to people who witnessed the movement from its inception, they even initially made a commitment (which they acted on a handful of times) to stamp out the opium trade. This commitment was swiftly dropped as political realities and a need for funds overcame their original objectives. Despite their efforts at myth making, the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan had little to do with the grace of Allah as they claimed. From its inception, the movement appeared to rely on the financial backing of an unholy alliance of drug smugglers, traders, and trucking groups.
This is definitely not the subtle dissection and examination of the big T and little t Taliban, the decline into thuggery, or their relationship with Al Qaeda and any other group that we may or may not demonise using inflammatory language. It’s not even going to mention all the ways corruption and the Taliban are destroying the local population, and the accompanying dangers of Western thinking (we tend to get all ‘Empire’ and think like old white men). These discussions will all come soon.
However, this is about the information aspect of the war, the all important, success-defining aspect that that keeps being overlooked by Westminster. It may be that they haven’t overlooked this at all (we live in hope!), but having read their coverage of the war and listened to people who know far more than me about the situation, not holding out much hope. The Taliban are very good at getting a story out. They have a turn around of a couple of hours, whereas ISAF take a lot longer (up to and usually over 24 hours). The Taliban also have time on their side, and the eternally popular story of standing up against a bullying oppressor who has no place to be bullying or oppressing.
The issue isn’t with Britain wanting or needing to withdraw. Obviously, we cannot sit in Kabul until Doomsday. Bloody stupid idea. But the danger comes when we say “ok, this is when we start to do this” and fix a date. The Taliban have already proven many times before that they’re more than happy to sit this one out and keep punching the West until we lose the will to fight. They have worked out that we honour our war dead, that no one enjoys seeing the streets of Wooten Basset lined with mourners, and that this is very effective leverage over our Government. It’s the Dover Effect* and it’s nothing new. It worked just as well in Rwanda, where the Hutu extremists who planned and neatly executed the genocide, factored the Dover Effect into their diabolical plans. Romeo Dallaire was told in advance that the Hutu Power had set a trap that was
“intended to kill some ten Belgians. The leadership of the Hutu Power had determined that Belgium had no stomach for taking casualties in their old colony, and if Belgian soldiers were killed, the nation would withdraw from UNAMIR.** [The informant] said that the extremists knew the Belgians had the best contingent in UNAMIR, and they assumed that if the Belgians left, the mission would collapse.”
(Shake Hands with the Devil, 143-144)
Their calculation proved right and the genocide ensued as the UNAMIR troops were forced to watch 800,000 people were brutally hacked to death by their neighbours.
This is not to draw parallels between Rwanda and Afghanistan on any level, other than that at which our enemy knows our weakness. Gordon, please! The Taliban have cased us pretty well. Sure, at some point talking to them will be a good idea, and yes, anyone with half a brain recognises we need to hand over. But don’t go giving them dates! They’ll just sit it out and do nothing. Have you not read your State Building Strategy 101? I know some smart students who could teach you a thing or two…….
*The Dover Effect is used to describe the impact that coverage of war dead has on the government’s will to continue the fight. It harks back to the days of Vietnam, one of the first wars to be broadcast nightly into people’s homes, and the coverage of the US war dead arriving at Dover Airbase.
** UNAMIR – United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda
Sierra Leone and its diamonds: Digging in the dumps | The Economist
From: Sierra Leone and its diamonds: Digging in the dumps | The Economist.
The joys of globalisation meant that when the leaders of the Western nations crashed our economy into a wall, the rest of the world is in the nasty pile up that follows…
Not cool. Especially when you consider Collier’s work on development traps and then the link between natural resources (diamonds) and conflict…
But, the Economist ends with a cheery note. War is unlikely because the rebels would find it hard to shift the diamonds, cutting chance of armament-funding-revenue. Additionally, many miners are going back to farming, which should help ease food prices. Here’s hopin.