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Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Wow

 
 

Sent to you by Brent via Google Reader:

 
 

via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza on 4/18/12

Swedish culture minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth cut into an unusual cake at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm this Saturday, and found herself at the center of a controversy some might say could have been predicted.

The remarkable cake design--featuring a edible black torso and the artist's head screaming as guests tucked in--was intended to draw attention to female genital mutilation in Africa.

Campaigners, however, say it is itself an unacceptable caricature. From Sweden's The Local:

"In our view, this simply adds to the mockery of racism in Sweden," [said] Kitimbwa Sabuni, spokesperson for the National Afro-Swedish Association."This was a racist spectacle."

... the culture minister began cutting a large cake shaped like a black woman, symbolically starting at the clitoris. Makode Aj Linde, the artist who created the installation and whose head is part of the cake cut by the minister, wrote about the "genital mutilation cake" on his Facebook page.

"Before cutting me up she whispered, 'Your life will be better after this' in my ear," he wrote in a caption next to the partially eaten cake.

Minister in 'racist circumcision outrage' [The Local]


 
 

Things you can do from here:

 
 

Friday, April 13, 2012

Yes, yes it is. So are impure thoughts, genitals, breathing.

Is Kissing a "Gateway Drug" to "Sex Addiction?" | RH Reality Check
When American Life League put out an ad a few months ago declaring that Planned Parenthood turns kids into �sex addicts� through the use of �gateway drugs� like masturbation, progressives collectively howled with laughter through the video and passed it along so that our friends could howl along, as well. �Who thinks this stuff up?," we thought, figuring it must be some weirdo fringe right-wing characters.
 
br3nth3rr@gmail.com sent this using ShareThis.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Seems like a trustworthy source.




 
 

via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin on 4/3/12

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, aka "Curveball", an Iraqi defector who falsified testimony about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, confirms that he made the whole thing up in an interview airing this week on the BBC2 TV series, "Modern Spies." The former chemical engineer's "confidence trick" was used by the Bush administration to justify going to war with Iraq in 2003.

Snip from The Independent:

But Mr Janabi, speaking in a two-part series, Modern Spies, starting tomorrow on BBC2, says none of it was true. When it is put to him "we went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie", he simply replies: "Yes."

US officials "sexed up" Mr Janabi's drawings of mobile biological weapons labs to make them more presentable, admits Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, General Powell's former chief of staff. "I brought the White House team in to do the graphics," he says, adding how "intelligence was being worked to fit around the policy".

You can watch the episode in entirety here, for a limited time—but alas, only if the BBC's web servers can be convinced that you're in the UK.

(via Doctrine Man).




 
 

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--
B Herr

Monday, April 2, 2012

I think it's time to re-read Slaughterhouse.





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Kurt Vonnegut's response to book burning

Kurt Vonnegut is just the bee's knees, isn't he? Here's a letter he wrote in 1973 to the head of the school board at Drake High School in North Dakota after the school burned all of its copies of Slaughterhouse-Five in the school's furnace.



If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don't damage children much. They didn't damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.

Tags: books   Kurt Vonnegut   Slaughterhouse-Five


B Herr