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Women judged on their looks? Objectification? It just does not happen in our society. Really.
*sigh*
Thank you to Sociological Images for the find.
Debating people with that have a little to much faith and not enough regard for history one often runs into this particular meme that Hitler was an atheist and it was his Atheism was the prime motivation for all the horrible acts he perpetrated on humanity. Of course it is complete bollocks that Hitler was an atheist and atheistic values are responsible for his warped view of reality. Warped views of reality are religions speciality and thanks to Non-Stamp Collector we can see how wrong the religiously deluded are, thanks again NSC. :)
The LHC continues to push the envelope in physics and cosmology.
What happens when you put Lead in the LHC and go Boom!
“A miniature Big Bang was created at the Large Hadron Collider this week as the world’s most powerful atom-smasher successfully entered a new phase of exploration.”
Creating the conditions that existed some 14 billion years ago is another new plateau for science and our understanding of our universe.
“These experiments[ attempting to find the Higgs Boson a.k.a the God Particle] were shut down last week, to allow the collider to run with lead ions — atoms from which an electron has been removed — to study different aspects of physics.
The lead ion collisions will allow the collider to create a superheated mixture of subatomic particles called quark-gluon plasma, which pervaded the Universe immediately after the Big Bang.”
“This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees. At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as quark-gluon plasma.”
Mmmm, yummy warm quark-gluon soup. We shall have to wait while the results are analyzed, stay tuned for further LHC updates.
Celebrate rationality, skepticism, critical thought, and the joyous wonder they can bring.
It is a “meh” week, and I’m still not feeling the blogging love. I repost what Harper’s sends me every week for your viewing pleasure.
Weekly Review:
Republicans took control of the House after picking up
60 seats in midterm elections, the largest gain in the
House since 1948. Democrats maintained control of the
Senate (though they lost six seats), and Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid did not lose to Tea Party candidate
Sharron Angle. “Harry Reid isn’t just Dracula. He isn’t
just Lazarus; he’s our leader,” said Senator John
Kerry. “Our whole caucus is thrilled that he’s
unbreakable and unbeatable.” Three Iowa Supreme Court
judges who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage were
voted out of office, and exit polls suggested that 31
percent of self-identified homosexuals and bisexuals
voted Republican. MSNBC suspended Keith Olbermann
without pay for contributing $2,400 to the campaigns of
three Democrats; the Republican National Committee
showed its support for Nancy Pelosi’s bid to become the
Minority Leader by hanging above their entrance a “Hire
Pelosi” banner; and on election night in Long Island, a
retired New York policeman and his sons beat a
38-year-old Turkish immigrant with American flags,
telling the recently naturalized man to “get out of my
country.” “It would be hard to argue that we’re going
backwards,” said President Barack Obama after the
elections. “I think what you can argue is we’re stuck in
neutral.”
U.S. unemployment remained at 9.6 percent, despite the
addition of 151,000 jobs in October. Obama and First
Lady Michelle began a 10-day tour of Asia (with stops in
India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan), touted as an
“economic mission” to convince foreign markets to import
American goods. In India, the couple checked into the
Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, the primary site of
terrorist attacks two years ago, and staff at Bombay’s
Ghandi museum took precautions to keep Obama safe on his
visit. “We told the authorities to remove the dry
coconuts from trees near the building,” said the
museum’s executive director Meghsyam Ajgaonkar. “Why
take a chance?” The Eighth Sex Culture Festival, in
Guangzhou, China, featured a blow-up doll screen-printed
with Obama’s face. Mount Merapi, a volcano on the border
between Java and Indonesia, erupted, killing at least 64
people, forcing airlines to ground their planes,
requiring some 75,000 to relocate, and inspiring
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to
announce that if farmers from affected villages promised
not to go home, the government would buy all of their
cattle. Irish citizens, faced with high unemployment,
were upset by the announcement that their government
would give away chunks of cheese to the poor. “It’s
about how they’re going to tell their children or
grandchildren that Santa has very little money,” said
one Irish man in response to the plan. “What are they
going to tell their children and grandchildren: that
Santa has cheese instead?” A McDonald’s Happy Meal
photographed every day for six months showed no signs of
decomposing.
Glenn Little, better known as Frosty the Clown, one of
only four Ringling Brothers clowns to be deemed a
“master clown,” died at the age of 84. A teenage belly
dancer who was given a diamond bracelet and more than
$19,000 by Silvio Berlusconi revealed that the Italian
prime minister has a marble statue of himself as
Superman, and two years after hiring a waste-disposal
company to search through 12,000 gallons of sewage, a
British woman was reunited with the diamond ring she had
flushed down the toilet. “Two of the smaller diamonds
had fallen out,” said company employee Jule French, “but
apart from that, it was just in need of a good clean.”
Polish coffin makers Lindner released a 2011 calendar
featuring caskets alongside sexy models dressed in
lingerie, and a West Virginia woman was charged with
assault for brandishing a knife at her former husband
and his friend after they refused to perform oral sex on
her. The friend told police that he had originally
agreed but declined after being “overwhelmed” by her
“horrible vaginal odor.” A Zimbabwean man on safari was
eaten by a pride of lions while showering, a caged bear
in Azerbaijan died after being forced to sit in its own
excrement, drink cola, and eat leftover sandwiches, and
a female boa constrictor had multiple virgin births,
producing 22 baby snakes with no father. Artist Jiri
Boudnik, who was born in the Czech Republic but lived
for decades in the United States, returned to his birth
country to perform his art show: painting Czech flags on
women’s crotches while listening to a string quartet
perform patriotic music. “This, I hope, will answer many
questions for people about where they come from,” said
Boudnik. “They come from that space between the legs
that was home to us all.”
— Claire Gutierrez
Busy weekend folks, blogging was low on the list of priorities. Therefore I steal the Media Lens Email alert and repost it for your viewing pleasure. It is a meaty one, many links and a nice take down of the corporate media.
MEDIA ALERT: WIKILEAKS – THE SMEAR AND THE DENIAL
PART 1 – THE SMEAR
“Journalists don’t like WikiLeaks”, Hugo Rifkind notes in The Times, but “the people who comment online under articles do… Maybe you’ve noticed, and been wondering why. I certainly have.” (Hugo Rifkind Notebook, ‘Remind me. It’s the red one I mustn’t press, right?,’ The Times, October 26, 2010)
Rifkind is right. The internet has revealed a chasm separating the corporate media from readers and viewers. Previously, the divide was hidden by the simple fact that Rifkind’s journalists – described accurately by Peter Wilby as the “unskilled middle class” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/dec/10/comment.pressandpublishing) – monopolised the means of mass communication. Dissent was restricted to a few lonely lines on the letter’s page, if that. Readers were free to vote with their notes and coins, of course. But in reality, when it comes to the mainstream media, the public has always been free to choose any colour it likes, so long as it’s corporate ‘black’. The internet is beginning to offer some brighter colours.
If Rifkind is confused, answers can be found between the lines of his own analysis:
“With WikiLeaks, with the internet at large, power is democratised, but responsibility remains the preserve of professionals.”
This echoes Lord Castlereagh’s insistence that “persons exercising the power of the press” should be “men of some respectability and property”. (Quoted, James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility – The Press And Broadcasting in Britain, Routledge, 1991, p.13)
And it is with exactly this version of “responsibility” that non-corporate commentators are utterly fed up. We are, for example, tired of the way even the most courageous individuals challenging even the most appalling crimes of state are smeared as “irresponsible”.
Thus, Rifkind describes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as “a frighteningly amoral figure”. In truth, journalists find Assange a frighteningly +moral+ figure. Someone willing to make an enemy of the world’s leading rogue state in order to expose the truth about the horrors it has inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq is frightening to the compromised, semi-autonomous employees of corporate power. Assange’s courage is the antidote to their poison.
A separate Times editorial comments:
“Nowhere in WikiLeaks’s self-serving self publicity is there a judgment of what the organisation is achieving for the Iraqi nation, and what it hopes to achieve… Its personnel are partisans intervening in the security affairs of Western democracies and their allies, with a culpable heedlessness of human life.” (Leader, ‘Exercise in Sanctimony; The release of military files by WikiLeaks is partisan and irresponsible,’ The Times, October 25, 2010)
Again, the truth is reversed – it is The Times, together with virtually the entire mass media, that is notable for its “heedlessness of human life”, for its endorsement of the West’s perennial policy: attack, bomb, invade, torture, kill based on any crass pretext that can be got past the public. As WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson politely told the WSWS website this week:
“The media is getting much too close to the military industry. They are not following the changing moods of the general public who are increasingly opposed to the wars.” (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/wiki-n02.shtml)
In the Daily Mail, Edward Heathcoat-Amory’s article raised the important question:
“Paranoid, anarchic. Is WikiLeaks boss a force for good or chaos?”
After all, “The Wikileaks supremo lives a bizarre peripatetic life, with no house and few belongings…” He also has “disciples” whom “he ruthlessly manipulates”. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1297917/Is-Wikileaks-boss-Julian-Assange-force-good-chaos.html)
As for Assange’s motivation: “His critics says he’s motivated by a desire for personal publicity.”
Like Rifkind, Heathcoat-Amory is appalled by Assange’s lack of “ethical judgments”, his “cult of secrecy, with no accountability to anyone”. Lack of accountability can indeed be a problem. Heathcoat-Amory, it should be mentioned, is of the Heathcoat-Amory Baronetcy, whose humble “family seat” was at Knightshayes Court in Tiverton, Devon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightshayes_Court
In The Times, passionately pro-Iraq war commentator David Aaronovitch recalls the main theme of his questions to Assange: “from where did WikiLeaks derive its authority and to whom was it accountable”. And from where exactly does The Times derive its authority? To whom is +it+ responsible? Its advertisers? Rupert Murdoch? Aaronovitch continued:
“And this is where something strange happened. Questioners wanted to know from Assange just how he and his team decided which documents to publish, which to redact, which to leave unpublished… Not only would Assange not answer these questions, it was almost as though he regarded them as illegitimate… I could tell that the overwhelming reaction was surprise at Assange’s refusal to engage in any discussion about himself as anything other than an uncaped crusader.” (Aaronovitch, ‘Enigmatic WikiLeaks chief keeps his guard up,’ The Times, October 2, 2010)
Strange indeed, because in fact Assange has addressed these questions numerous times (See here for a recent example: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/26/wikileaks_founder_julian_assange_on_iraq). Aaronovitch focused on Assange’s jacket, his shirt, his shoes – “incredibly long and pointy black winkle pickers”. The very fact of the focus suggested something was not quite right. The unsubtle implication: Assange was unsavoury, strange, sinister.
A Daily Mail reporter described Assange as “somewhat bizarre-looking”.
An Independent news report referred to the “sometimes erratic behaviour of Wikileaks’ founder”. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/online/secret-war-at-the-heart-of-wikileaks-2115637.html)
In an interview with ABC News (Australia), the Independent’s Robert Fisk derided Assange as “some strange code-breaker from Australia”. (http://is.gd/gzdKc)
Dan Jones wrote in the Evening Standard: “Assange is slippery. He is a master of the moral non sequitur… Do we really want the definition of what constitutes the public interest resting in the hands of a highly politicised neo-anarchist like Assange?” (Jones, ’There are limits to the freedom of the internet,’ Evening Standard, August 2, 2010)
Again, the level of self-awareness hovered around zero.
The Daily Telegraph observed: “the publication of classified documents risks endangering the lives of both soldiers and those who collaborate with them.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/8084891/Wikileaks-A-very-leaky-argument.html)
+Failure+ to publish the documents risks the lives of the inevitable next target of the US-UK killing machine in Iran, or Yemen, or Syria, or Venezuela. At this point, the only people capable of stopping the “coalition” is the public they are supposed to represent.
The New York Times’ Hit Piece Read the rest of this entry »
A new discovery on Youtube brings yet another strong voice for rationality and reason to add to the secular chorus of enlightenment.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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