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Izzat recently said something about some UN sicko going around Africa taking pictures of himself raping women. He even labeled the pictures as rape. Then she said something to make the article humorous, that she thought the UN was one of the last bastions of democracy and humanity. HA! After laughing my ass off, I remembered what the article was about. UN sicko. She said something to the effect that there needs to be equality between men and women. That struck me. She said she was waiting for it. When will it happen? Better question: Can it happen?

Exactly at what point are men and women “equal”? Under the law, they’re equal. In fact, there’s a slight bias in the courts when it comes to custody and marriage law, at least in the US. In the rest of the world, they negotiate from a slightly weaker stance, especially so in developing nations. Yeah, the US is pretty much where they have it best. And despite some misstatements (“women only make 79 cents where men make a dollar”) and outright lies (“hundreds of thousands of women die each year from anorexia”) I’d say they’re treated equally in the US. There are issues such as pornography and sexism but I think the sexist tide is starting to turn. Pornography’s not going away anytime soon. We need to be careful about playing the victim game here, but you could make legitimate arguments about the general sexual predatory nature of men and how that can make women uncomfortable or end up with them being harassed (“Hey baby, nice rack!”). Of course I’d argue the sex drive thing is programmed in. And women definitely have it too. Sex just doesn’t sell as much for them, so there’s less advertising. Their ads are more like, “Do you have heavy flow?” whereas male ads are “Buy this, and hot blondes will sleep with you!”

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All the newsmagazines this week are busy copying each other’s articles about the nativity. The shocking new evidence is that it’s all one big lie, Jesus was never in Bethlehem, wasn’t born in a manger, no angels, no three kings, and Mary wasn’t a virgin. The unwritten line? No God.

It’s funny. We have so many educated people in this country who are completely unable to turn their thought processes on themselves. They’ll hear about a book that has withstood several centuries but refuse to consider why they feel compelled to treat it in such a manner. So you prove that the Bible doesn’t necessarily contain facts. NO SHIT. I sincerely doubt that God helped Jeremeiah blow a horn seven times and some evil city fell. Didn’t happen. God doesn’t do that stuff. But I submit, for your approval, that the motive and the unwritten thesis of this kind of journalistic investigation is the belief that there is no God. And I believe the primary motive for that is that these people are threatened by God. They associate God with a man in a big hat telling them how they’ve sinned. And both have lost the message. God isn’t interested in punishment. If you controlled all of creation, would you worry about bossing little people around? Well, you might do it at first, as shown in the game “Black&White”, but you’d get sick of it after a while. So maybe God did oppress us for a little while… that would explain why he was such a dick in the Old Testament. Anyway, Sin isn’t about arbitrary rules imposed on you by God, but by other men trying to control you. Read the rest of this entry »

What a day to be a conservative. Bush wins re-election, uncontested, with more popular votes than any president since Reagan. The Republicans strengthen their positions in the House and Senate. I didn’t check state legislatures. And Yasser Arafat is ill and is not doing well. I hope Death is waiting outside his hospital room in Paris.

And yet I can’t help feeling…kinda bad. It’s like when you play a game of basketball with a younger sibling and you feel bad when you win 10-0. Not that democrats are younger siblings, I’m just not thinking of a better analogy right now. Something involving competition. So I gotta wonder, *how did this happen*?

Part of why I feel bad is that this wasn’t supposed to happen. It was supposed to be close. There were supposed to more democrats than republicans. There were supposed to be millions of passionate liberal young new voters. Where were they? Too lazy to vote. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted some great rant yesterday (or thought I did) and then forgot to click submit, and now I’m too lazy to write it again. But here’s this short and sweet bit. This Sinclair organization, a fairly large media group owning stations in several states, including battleground states, and reaching an estimated 25% of the country, has anounced that it will be airing a program with Vietnam POW’s who claim that they were personally harmed by statements made by a younger Kerry before Congress in which he claimed that US soldiers committed atrocities on a widespread scale. This is pretty normal for a liberal, to take out their dissatisfaction with themselves on their society and their country and to whine about how much they wish that the US was like the rest of the world. But they don’t leave because they know how good they have it here and how much better the US is than any other country on this planet.

Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, after this anouncement, the DNC filed suit with the FCC and the federal elections commission. The complaint with the FCC is improper use of public airwaves, and the compaint with the FEC is an illegal campaign contribution in the form of this program.

Sinclair defends itself by saying it’s not some slanted program. They were approached by these POW’s who wanted to get their story out. They reviewed the POW’s story for several weeks, making sure, as one of their representatives stated, that there were no “forged documents”, and now they’re anouncing this program to air in a week or so. The program has not been made yet, all they’re doing is using the POW documentary as base material and they’ve invited Senator Kerry to come on. They also say that this is just news, and it’s ridiculous to claim that news is a campaign contribution just because it’s harmful to either candidate. When car bombs go off in Iraq it hurts Bush, but is that claimed by the RNC as an illegal campaign contribution? Nope.

When asked about this, senior Kerry campaign advisor Chad Clinton stated, “They better hope we don’t win,” referring to the Sinclair media group.

And yet Bush is called a Nazi?

I was driving through (deleted) today, exploring the suburbs, especially the west side since I’m more familiar with the east. I didn’t find much. But on my way back, I drove through the skeletal remains of (deleted). Humongous buildings, now partially rented out to little manufacturing companies and mostly empty. And these buildings are cool. I drove by a theater at (deleted), whether for displaying moving film or for the entertainment of the employees, I don’t know. Then I drove south through a depressed neighborhood full of beautiful mansions that are now subdivided into apartments and falling apart. And I thought of the age of manufacturing, and how it’s dead now.

Manufacturing drove this country and its wants and needs for three centuries. And now we’re left with abandoned industrial parks and products stamped with “Made in China”. You can’t blame the Chinese, they’re people who want to work and feed their kids too. You can’t blame the companies; contrary to popular belief among drugged-out long-haired white twenty-somethings, most companies are not run by soulless bastards. It’s just simply cheaper to produce things in China. Granted, it hurts the community here, and sometimes (though increasingly less so) quality suffers. But if they don’t find cheaper labor, a competitor will go to China and you’ll start buying the competitor’s products and then *everyone* at the first company is out of a job.try and its wants and needs for three centuries. And now we’re left with abandoned industrial parks and products stamped with “Made in China”. You can’t blame the Chinese, they’re people who want to work and feed their kids too. You can’t blame the companies; contrary to popular belief among drugged-out long-haired white twenty-somethings, most companies are not run by soulless bastards. It’s just simply cheaper to produce things in China. Granted, it hurts the community here, and sometimes (though increasingly less so) quality suffers. But if they don’t find cheaper labor, a competitor will go to China and you’ll start buying the competitor’s products and then EVERYONE at the first company is out of a job. Read the rest of this entry »

America’s Most Wanted has got some seriously skewed priorities. I don’t know how they decide to do the stories that they do. Assuming they’re not total morons. I’m guessing that it’s probably the more interesting the story is, the more airtime it gets. So when they have a story full of details and witnesses and something to say, they’ll run that, regardless of the severity of the crime. Now, I’m going to preface my rant by saying that I don’t necessarily blame them, because they have mouths to feed and bills to pay just like anyone else. More likely over there in Hollywood though, they have addictions to feed and mouths to pay, as Jewel tells us.

However, last night hit a new low, even for them. See, they have a bad habit of running a certain story for, say 20-30 minutes. Then later on in the show, you’ll get little crime blips. They’ll show a picture and say “This man killed 3 people. CALL!” Now, when you’ve just watched 30 minutes of them talking to the guy married to Carmen Electra and how upsetting the murder of his mother was, and it happened TEN YEARS AGO, you gotta ask yourself, “WTF?”. You’d FIGURE that it should be the more severe crimes or more dangerous criminals get more air time. But no. This brings us to last night, where they spent 20 minutes talking about a guy who robbed a couple Burger Kings and then escaped from jail. Then later in the show they come up with pictures of two men and say, “These men raped a teenager and then burned her alive. Call if you have information.” Now you look back at the 20 minutes spent on the Burger King guy. Then you look at the 20 seconds spent on the rapists/murderers. Then your brain skips a beat, and you probably either blink, laugh, or scream (laughter occurs when your brain can’t reason through something, I heard that somewhere. The screaming is more natural in this case). So you start comparing the nature of the crimes. And you wonder what would happen if our moral codes were completely reversed. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know where Darfur is, or why it has its own name. I’ve just seen a map highlighting the western part of Sudan. What I do know is that this isn’t being given enough attention. Between Darfur and Deslam (the school in Russia), I really gotta ask *wtf* is with our news coverage, and the priorites of our leaders. Why did Bush only mention either one a few times? Why is Colin Powell the only one in the freaking world talking about Darfur and calling it genocide? Where’s Kerry, calling on Bush to go in there and save these people?

This is going on now. These people, the ethnic Africans, are being systematically slaughtered by Arab militants. The government of Sudan is letting the militias do whatever they want, because the militias help the government maintain power. When first confronted by Powell, our great and noble European leaders, the wonderful French and Belgese and the rest of them *wouldn’t call it genocide*. They said that was too harsh, they needed to look into it. England at least went there and did an investigation, though that’s all they did. The UN? The security council? That wonderful security council? You remember how we were supposed to get the Security Council’s approval to invade Iraq, because it was the noble institution of cooperation with our wonderful allies? *They refused to sanction Sudan*. *Refused*. REFUSED. *REFUSED*. I’m typing in caps because this is insane and I am pissed off. Read the rest of this entry »

Deleted out of fear based on what happened to that Delta Airlines stewardess. If companies can deny us our blogs, what else can they do?