Friday Funny: Fundamentalists, don’t fuck with ‘Frisco

Merry pranksters holding silly signs and blasting Lady Gaga vastly outnumbered the sad Westboro Baptist Church demonstration in front of the Twitter office in San Francisco last week. Fuckhead Phelps and brood subsequently cancelled their scheduled protest of Fiddler on the Roof (ha! ha! ha!) at the Golden Gate Theater, but that didn’t stop the music - the counter-protesters turned up anyway with signs and rick rolls. Brilliant.

Photo by sandwichgirl at the theater.

Photo by Rubin Starset from the Twitter protest.

Quote of the Day

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken, and inconveniently willful?  “Keep her,” I replied.  The suffragettes refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.~ Anna Quildlen

Photo by Julia Margaret Cameron

This post was inspired by Maureen’s at IslandRoar.

Chat Noir

In protest of A Day Without Cats on the Internet, I bring you The Cat Piano. Which I might have done anyway, shocking ailurophobic campaign or no, but still. Watch it and know that the coolness of Cat can never be suppressed.

I heart the latest short film by The People’s Republic of Animation, narrated by Nick Cave.

The potshot heard round the world

Click the image to view the site, which was created - t-shirts and all - within 12 hours of McLame’s gaff. Gotta love teh intarwebs.

Technorati Tags: that one, Barack Obama, John McCain, asshats

“Congress shall make no law […] abridging the freedom of speech”

How Sexism Works

and why I am a feminist.

The classic by xkcd.

Free-baggers Unite: National GoTopless Protest Day

DECENT:

OBSCENE:

I’ve always thought the “man tits are fine, women’s are naughty” rule is one of the most blatantly gynophobic of all double standards. It sends a very clear message:

Ladies, your boobs exist solely for men’s sexual enjoyment and thus must be controlled, like everything else uniquely female and “sexual.” If you resist said control, it is obscene and you will be punished (though not before the guys at the station have had a good look).

If you want to support a woman’s right to free-bag but don’t want to get arrested alone, go to LA, NYC, Miami, Chicago, Honolulu, Austin, Berkeley, Santa Fe, Omaha or Bloomington, IN, where GoTopless.org has organized protests taking place today.

Sisters, set the girls free - but please, wear sunscreen.

Technorati Tags: GoToppless.org, sexual double standards

Unsubscribe me, Uncle Sam

They tell me to strip and put on a flimsy gown. They have me lie on my back on a slab with my head in a vice-like cradle. I am told I may not move a muscle. They stick me in a tube that blocks my vision, then assaults my ears with a series of unbelievably loud noises. Some are so loud the slab trembles.

As the seconds go by, the panic begins. My heart races; I can feel it pounding in my chest and my throat. I struggle to control my breathing. Bile rises in my throat and I fear I will vomit. Stars burst before my closed eyes. I fight fainting.

This goes on for twenty minutes. It is nearly unbearable and I almost squeeze the emergency alarm they gave me before the ordeal began.

To my insurance company, this was an MRI on my brain.¹ To my central nervous system, this was torture.

Coincidentally, a few days prior to this procedure, I heard a news article on NPR about the on-going debate in Washington (DC) about the use of torture by the military. To be precise, the newscaster said it is a discussion “about the use of torture, versus those interrogation methods that sometimes result in the death of the prisoner.”

Talk about nauseating spin. If the latter isn’t torture, what is it?

As I was lying in the MRI machine, hoping I wouldn’t throw up in my mouth, I remembered this broadcast. I thought to myself that anyone advocating the use of “enhanced” interrogation methods on prisoners should have said methods tested on themselves to help them decide whether or not they are torture.²

Well, I read today that journalist and Iraq war-supporter Christopher Hitchens literally took the plunge. He allowed himself to be “water-boarded,” the Bush Administration’s current interrogation method of choice at Guantanamo Bay. Unlike some of the Gitmo detainees, however, Hitchens lived to write about it.

His description of the experience sounds all to familiar to me, from the racing pulse to waves of nausea to near fainting. And guess what he concluded?

Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

So, enhanced interrogation supporters, let’s just stop the spinning, grow a pair, and call a spade a spade, shall we?

Righteous Ribs, in honor of our country’s birthday this year, I ask you to put your foot down and Unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe is a movement of people united against human rights abuses in the ‘war on terror’. The threat of terrorism is real, but trampling over human rights is not the answer. From Guantanamo Bay, rendition, torture and waterboarding – we unsubscribe.

Tell the government they cannot continue to torture people in your name.

“No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
—The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5 (1948)

1. Alright, alright. I’m having problems with muscle fatigue, and my doctor wants to rule out a lesion-inspired multiple sclerosis since there is a history of it in my family. To quote Ahnold in Kindergarten Cop: It’s not a tumor. [↩]
2. Not likely to happen in Washington, given politicians’ history of hypocrisy, such as getting handy deferments for themselves and their children from wars they start. [↩]

What do Laura Ingalls Wilder, Bram Stoker, and Sigmund Freud all have in common?

At Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, there’s a saucer on the counter by the register that holds “I Buy Banned Books” bracelets. Little ceramic squares with glazed photos of the jackets of several well-known banned books on them are strung together on heavy-duty elastic. They cost fifteen bucks.

I’ve been talking myself out of spending the money, but after seeing this list over at Fetch me my axe this morning, I’m gonna get me one.

And I’m going to try to read more of these damn books - I feel like an uncultured eejit.

Banned Book Project

Fellow bloggers, your mission, should you choose to accept it:

These are the 110 top banned books. Bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve read part of. Read more.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Little House on the Fucking Prairie? By Laura “Public Enemy #1″ Ingalls Wilder?

Technorati Tags: banned books, reading, freedom of speech

Bar Girls: An offer they can’t refuse

After 9/11, Kevin was deployed for a few months to Thailand.¹ He says one of the most disturbing things he saw there had nothing to do with the military operation.

It was the local watering hole and its female staff, young women known officially as “hostesses” and euphemistically as “bar girls.”

One look at Kevin’s uniform and these gals were on him like white on rice. When he demurred, they would always say, “Ah, you good man.” Which was immediately followed up with eyelash-batting and “I wish I had good man.”

Funny… until you realize that most of these girls were sold into their jobs by their own families, and that their nasty, brutish and short lives will most likely end with AIDs.

Human trafficking is very lucrative and thus epidemic in poor countries; Thailand is only one among many.

Most (70%) of the 600,000 to 820,000 people trafficked across international borders are women and children. Though they can be forced into everything from organ donation to religious cult membership, most are forced into prostitution. ²

And since most of the trafficking is done by organized crime, if the merchandise complains, they just make her an offer she can’t refuse.

But don’t go thinking this horror is all happening “over there.” An estimated 14,000 people are trafficked into the United States and 600-800 into Canada every year.³

I can’t believe that almost 150 years after Lincoln freed the slaves, people right here in my country are purchasing other human beings.

So every year, I donate to the Amnesty International campaign to end human trafficking, and today, I’m proud to join other bloggers as we Unite for Human Rights.

All of the non-governmental organizations below work to end the suffering. Act Uppity and donate. It may not seem like much, but I promise you — every little bit helps.

After all, if we don’t speak for the voiceless, who will?

• The American Anti-Slavery Group
• Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity
• Transitions Cambodia
• Ansar Burney Trust
• Anti-Slavery International
• Project to End Human Trafficking
• Free the Slaves
• The International Justice Mission
• HumanTrafficking.org
• Shared Hope International
• Not For Sale
• Stop the Traffik
• Love 146
• The Redlight Children Campaign
• The Red Light Movement
• The Salvation Army - Human Trafficking
• Project Rescue

Technorati Tags: human trafficking, Bloggers Unite for Human Rights

1. For those who don’t know, Kevin is an Air Force reservist. And yes, he does make me call him “Major.” [↩]
2. Source: Wikipedia. Because of the nature of trafficking, exact statistics are difficult to get. [↩]
3. Source: Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery - Canada [↩]