In the News – Page 3 – Sure, Why Not?

Culture Is No Excuse

May 12, 2011

I hereby decree…

Your cultural traditions are NO excuse for harming others!

In the New York Times today was a piece by Nick Kristof about female genital cutting, and after glancing at Feministing’s mention of it, found a piece from two years ago in American Prospect, Rights Versus Rites.

Rights Versus Rites is about the debate about female genital cutting. That’s right. Debate. As in there’s a side that’s all for it. Seriously, go read it. It’s long and horrifying, but read it.

Okay, seeing as the practice is still going throughout Africa, despite little victories here and there where small areas decided “meh, let’s not do this anymore, seems harmful”, of course it has supporters and lots of them. How do they defend it? Why, with the well-worn: “It’s our culture!”
Continue reading “Culture Is No Excuse”

No Sugar for Students

April 6, 2011

Dear Overzealous Anti-Sugar School Official,

Awww, isn’t that cute? You hear that sugar is evil and want to keep kids away from it. You’ll go to any ridiculous lengths to keep them from buying it themselves!

What’s this? You soooo badly don’t want students drinking anything other than water ever that you’ll bully stores into not selling anything to them? Stores that, I might add, have no connection to your school whatsoever? Oh, well, isn’t that just lovely. I mean, that’s totally justified seeing as the students aren’t people or anything and as their principal, I believe they are officially your own property! Goodness, why stop at dictating food and drink choices? But I digress.

Or, wait a minute. That’s not right. I’d say that students are PEOPLE. And as real individual people, they belong only to themselves. You aren’t even their parent. All you do is act as administrator of the place they’re forced to spend several hours of their day whether they like it or not. Does that make them constitute your property? And doesn’t the idea I even have to ask that question raise concerns over whether you should be teaching or even being near any children ever?

So sugar is just sooooo bad for children that it’s abuse if an adult were to allow a grain of it to touch the child’s lips. Is that what you believe? No, moron, I’ll tell you what’s abuse. The abuse here is dictating the living shit out of every little thing a child does, denying her the choice of what food and drink she consumes, and preventing her from exercising even the tiniest bit of economic autonomy just to buy a goddamn bottle of juice if she wants it!

In short, go die in a fire. Or at least stay away from kids. You’re a thousand times worse for them than sugar ever could be.

Wishing You Great Pain,

Katrina

Interference

December 29, 2010

Oh, my good God…

Mother Sues McDonald’s for ‘Interfering’ With Kids

Happy Meals just got a little more expensive for McDonald’s: the fast food chain has been sued by California mother Monet Parham for using toys to make her two young daughters want nutritionally unsound Happy Meals…

Parham, mother of a six-year-old and two-year-old, said in a CSPI press release that: “I object to the fact that McDonald’s is getting into my kids’ heads without my permission and actually changing what my kids want to eat… what kids see as a fun toy, I now realize is a sophisticated, high-tech marketing scheme that’s destined to put McDonald’s between me and my daughters… I want McDonald’s to stop interfering with my family.”

Owwwww! My head hurts! Soooo much concentrated stupid!

*clutches head*

*takes ibuprofen*

Sigh. Okay, feel a little better now.
Continue reading “Interference”

TSA Fail

December 27, 2009

So on Christmas Day, there was another terrorist attack attempt on some flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. As always when such occurs, TSA craps out some more passenger restrictions in its predictable kneejerk reaction. Here’s the article.

So, basically, some guy tried to blow up the plane but failed miserably. The passengers saw what he was trying to do, seeing how very close they were to a horrible fiery death, and leapt up and subdued him, stopping what could have been a horrible Christmas for a lot of people.

How does the TSA respond? By making it illegal for passengers to move around in the last hour of the flight. So in other words… what the heroic passengers did is now against the rules. Because how dare they move around during a flight, when they should have been good little people and… let the terrorist kill them all. *headdesk*

And because a fucking terrorist will totally obey these little rules, right?

Some other rules I heard of include not allowing passengers to know the flight path or what cities or landmarks they are near. Which pisses me the fuck off because I think this means that airlines that allow you to watch your flight path on the little screen in front of you, such as JetBlue and British Airways, will now no longer be allowed to have that feature, a feature I fucking LOVE! What the shit?! :doitnow:

That’s the TSA. It’s not important for them to actually stop terrorists when the most important part is to just LOOK like it.

This Makes Me Want to Crush Skulls

November 19, 2009

With other skulls.

Taser gun used on 10-year-old girl who ‘refused to take shower’

The officer had been called to the girl’s home in Ozark, Arkansas, by her mother because she was behaving in an unruly manner and refusing to take a shower.

In a report on the incident the officer, Dustin Bradshaw, said the mother gave him permission to use the Taser.

When he arrived, the girl was curled up on the floor, screaming, and resisting as her mother tried to get her in the shower before bed.

“Her mother told me to take her if I needed to,” the officer wrote.

The child was “violently kicking and verbally combative” when he tried to take her into custody and she kicked him in the groin.

He then delivered “a very brief drive stun to her back,” the report said.

The girl’s father, Anthony Medlock, who is divorced from her mother, said the girl showed signs of emotional problems but did not deserve to be “treated like an animal”.

He said: “Ten years old and they shot electricity through her body, and I want to know how the heck in God’s green earth can they get away with this.

“If you can’t pick the kid up and take her to your car, handcuff her, then I don’t think you need to be an officer. She doesn’t deserve to be treated like a dog. She’s not a tiger.” Local Mayor Vernon McDaniel said the FBI should investigate.

He said: “People here feel like that he made a mistake in using a Taser, and maybe he did, but we will not know until we get an impartial investigation.” The local Police Chief Jim Noggle said no disciplinary action was taken against Bradshaw.

“We didn’t use the Taser to punish the child, just to bring the child under control so she wouldn’t hurt herself or somebody else,” he said.

He said if the officer tried to forcefully put the girl in handcuffs, he could have accidentally broken her arm or leg.

Mr Noggle said the girl will face disorderly conduct charges as a juvenile.

A little girl was violently electrocuted by a police officer, at her idiot mother’s consent, because she didn’t want to take a shower and was upset at being forced to.
Continue reading “This Makes Me Want to Crush Skulls”

Smile! You’re Speeding

December 6, 2008

Ah, speed cameras. Not a problem if you’re like me and know to watch for them. Then I slow way the hell down to a crawl while passing them, with cars behind me surely getting angry but, well, I’m doing this for their own good.

Except I did get caught by one earlier this year because it was hidden in a parked car. So I received a lovely photo of the back of my car and was out $40. Meh.

Anyway, the other day, saw this article come over NYRA’s youth rights news wire.
Continue reading “Smile! You’re Speeding”

Self-Defense

December 1, 2008

I hate to kick off the December montage of entries with something so disgusting, in a time of year that is supposed to be happy and joyful, but, well, there are a lot of things I hate. This is pretty high up on the list.

Girl Punched Dad During Spanking

CRESTVIEW, Fla. — A 16-year-old Florida girl who hit her father when he tried to spank her has been charged with misdemeanor domestic battery.

An Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office report said the father told a deputy that he was attempting to spank the girl when she turned around and struck him in the face with her fist.

The report said she tried to hit him several more times before leaving with friends.

Both father and daughter said the argument started over an item that had been broken. She acknowledged that when he went to spank her, she punched him, the report said.

….

Do I even need to point out everything that is very WRONG with this scenario?
Continue reading “Self-Defense”

Red-iculousness

October 23, 2008

So I was reading the Economist today when I came across an article about how Obama’s campaign is kicking the living ass out of, well, everything, setting us up for anything from a landslide to another Dewey Defeats Truman. But that’s not what I mean to talk about here today. In the article, it begins describing the lopsided attention being given to the Republican and Democratic booths at some North Carolina fair. And then I saw this little gem.

[Some redneck]’s backing John McCain because the Arizona senator “thinks murdering little babies is not a good idea”.

Ah, we saw this four years ago. And eight years ago. And so on. Many Republicans’ persistent belief that if an anti-abortion president takes office, abortion will become illegal and never be done again. You know, I wonder what life is like to live in such a strong delusion, for these people seem to completely ignore that even though we’ve had anti-abortion president George W. Bush in office for the past eight years, abortion is still legal. I’ve got news for you. John McCain is not going to make abortion illegal. He and Sarah Palin may talk all the time about how bad it is, but the fact is, it won’t be made illegal even if they are elected. So you Republicans thinking the McCain-Palin team is going to be the saving grace of embryos and fetuses from women making an excruciatingly difficult decision, and you Democrats thinking the McCain-Palin team will take away a woman’s inalienable right to kill her unborn child, you’re living in a serious fantasy world.
Continue reading “Red-iculousness”

Obama Is Keyst-owned

April 23, 2008

Ugh, here I am talking about current political stuff. What is this, a blog?

Anyway, so we all know Hillary Clinton just won the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. Kind of expected. In any case, Barack Obama, as some suggest, pretty much screwed himself in a comment he made about small town Pennsylvanians. Here’s a quote from the Lexington column in the Economist:

He told a group of fat cats in San Francisco that the reason why he is finding it hard to appeal to blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania is because they are “bitter”. They have suffered from so many broken promises that they prefer to “cling” to God, guns and xenophobia rather than reaching out for a helping hand from the government.

Continue reading “Obama Is Keyst-owned”

The Humiliated Teen

January 10, 2008

First, have a look at this news story.

It was early last month when Jane Hambleton of Fort Dodge found the bottle under the front seat of her 19-year-old son’s pride and joy.

Her next move was a call to The Des Moines Register’s classified advertising department:

OLDS 1999 Intrigue

“Totally uncool parents who obviously don’t love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for 3 weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet.”

The son soon found himself on foot. And the meanest mom on the planet became the target of accolades from across Iowa and beyond.

Continue reading “The Humiliated Teen”