“More girls have been killed in the last FIFTY years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in ALL the battles of the 20th century. More girls are killed in this routine gendercide in any ONE decade, than people were slaughtered in ALL the genocides of the 20th century.”—
Nicholas Kristof, Half the Sky
Read that AGAIN.
"To movement, then, everything will be restored, and into movement everything will be resolved."
- Henri Bergson
April 22, 2013
June 22, 2012
It is practically impossible to look at any news stand without encountering what is loosely described as “soft porn”: pictures of semi-naked women, pouting and posing seductively. The covers are often works of art, using careful colour contrasting, eye-catching visual stimuli and enticing headlines, promising riches of sexual fantasy within, to make men buy them.
But when they offer up as their main picture an image of a woman who is everywhere – on TV, online and in print – and who is followed and watched by millions of fascinated girls, a lightbulb comes on and it shines a harsh
light on where we have arrived: a heavily sexualised society where fantasy and reality mix unhealthily, and where generations of girls and young
women feel insecure and unhappy about their bodies and themselves.It is not just the “glamour” of the photograph of Kim Kardashian on the cover of Zoo magazine’s 26 May edition that draws the reader in: the expensive lacy red and black lingerie (colours woven into the rest of the cover), the artfully pseudo-natural hair and the heavy makeup. She presents herself in a sexually provocative way: breasts thrust forward, head pointing submissively downwards, thumbs resting inside her underwear, and legs stretched apart as she kneels on what is intended to look like bed sheets. The dominant image on the page is accompanied by three other pictures of semi-naked women, so that the entire cover consists of tantalising glimpses.
More here.
February 29, 2012
Top 5 Stratfor Revelations
Up to 12 Pakistani active-duty and retired officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency knew that Usama Bin Laden was in Abbottabad and were in regular contact with him. The Pakistani chief of staff is denying the report.
Dow Chemicals hired Stratfor to spy on activists in Agra who continue to protest over the Bhopal environmental disaster that blinded many workers and destroyed their health. I.e., Stratfor was not just doing analysis but was involved in private intelligence operations against civil society groups that had a right to protest.
Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton, a former State Department official involved in counter-terrorism, lamented that in the old days the US would simply have assassinated Venezuelan leftist leader Hugo Chavez and Bolivian leftist leader Evo Morales. The internal emails also suggest that Stratfor had placed a female asset in Venezuela, who was having sex with an officer and pumping him for information. The officer was said also to be “working with Israel.” Chavez is known for his criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
Russia sold weapons to Iran but turned around and gave their security codes to Israel.
The fifth revelation is that often Stratfor analysts did not know what they were talking about and had an extreme rightwing bias. For instance, this memo on the revolution in Egypt attempts to argue that the officer corps was behind the revolution against Hosni Mubarak and that the masses were insufficiently mobilized to account for it. It is alleged that only 750,000 people came out in Tahrir Square, a small number for a country of 82 million. But in fact that was only in Tahrir. People demonstrated elsewhere in Cairo. And they were in the streets in Alexandria, Suez, Asyut and other cities. Even small towns saw burnings of police stations and HQs of the National Democratic Party. This memo makes a grassroots revolution that shook Egypt from Alexandria to Aswan into an officers’ putsch. While the officers tacked with the wind and did end up siding with the demonstrators against Mubarak, they were clearly playing political catch-up. It was revolutionary groups like April 6 that made the revolution in the cities, and the Muslim Brotherhood in the rural areas. The memo is frankly obtuse and if this is what Booz Allen was paying $20,000 a year for, they should demand their money back.
(Source: azspot)
January 17, 2012
From Israel’s ‘national suicide’ by Mark LeVine
Simply put, the threat of a Palestinian “demographic bomb”, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has called it, is little more than a contrivance to justify the further exclusion of Palestinians from full citizenship rights within Israel.
But accurate or not, the average Jewish Israeli is likely not spending much time parsing the logic or statistical foundations of the High Court’s decision - because they understand the deeper meaning of the argument underlying the decision’s title: to extend full human rights to Palestinians will lead inevitably to the “national” - that is, political - suicide of Israel as a Jewish state.
Why?Because to recognise that Jews and Palestinians can become one in the most intimate way possible - through love, sex and children - is to open Israeli Jews to the possibility that there is nothing essential that separates them from Palestinians, that as human beings with deep roots in this land, Palestinians have the same human rights as Israeli (or diaspora) Jews.
November 1, 2011
centerforinvestigativereporting:
Since the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of people from the former Soviet bloc migrated abroad with the hope for a better future. These waves of migration breathed life into one of the oldest yet darkest criminal enterprises—the trafficking of human beings into sexual slavery.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of women from Eastern Europe have been sold into prostitution against their will. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, a Bulgarian who immigrated to the U.S. during that period, investigates this rarely documented journey of trafficking in the documentary The Price of Sex.
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