BadMormon

on the Madoff Issue

you know I don’t care what you do, you CAN NOT spend 650 BILLION – that’s right, 650 BILLION dollars. There are swiss bank accounts full of madoff ill got gains and we ALL know it.

Women: Still Oppressed!

Women are raped and blamed for their rape and shown to be worthless in the eyes of the world over and over. The below links to a post full of news articles illustrating it from Catholicism to Islam to our back yard.  I can’t say it better than Melissa. Go read all that she wrote, it is a brilliant summation of a whole bunch of horrible articles about women in the world.

Shakesville: Good Morning The World Sucks..

“Here’s the point, in case anyone hasn’t cottoned on by now: It doesn’t matter if you’re a raped little girl facing imminent death, or an elderly woman just being brought a bit of bread, or a woman who asserts her independence, or a woman who plays by the pornifying rules of the patriarchy, or a woman who looks good, or a woman who looks bad, or a woman who flirts, or a woman who turns a man away, or any kind of woman at all, really: No matter what happens to you, its your fucking fault and you fucking deserved it, you dirty whore.”
Shakesville: Good Morning The World Sucks..

As long as you’ve got a working uterus you have a place in Italy!

Pharyngula: She is “in the condition to have babies” – one of my other favorite blogs on the internet I don’t read often enough.

So this braindead woman in Italy was just about to have the plug pulled:

“He claims to be “rescuing” Englaro — not true, since she was effectively dead 17 years ago — and in what has to be the most tasteless and disgusting excuse made yet for the actions of these villains of the right, has further justified it by saying that physically she is “in the condition to have babies”. So, what is Berlusconi going to do next in his bizarro Prince Charming act? Fertilize her eggs?

It’s nice to know that the Catholic Church’s criteria for the value of a woman’s life focus on the functionality of her ovaries rather than the existence of her mind.”

Pharyngula: She is “in the condition to have babies”

Is anyone else thinking of the axlotl tanks in the Dune series?

Abstinence Only Education Promotes Rape.

Rochelle tells how she drove her drunken friend Jason home after the party, and then is raped by him. Jason denies that the rape happened, saying their sex was consensual. Monica and Tanner observe that Jason was being a drunken idiot the entire night, with Monica Jason’s ex adding her opinion that Rochelle has a reputation for “putting out” and being a “slut”.

The site then asks the question: “Based on all accounts, whose story sounds the least credible?”

Guess who is the “correct” answer? Rochelle.

Feministe » Abstinence-Only Ed Sez, “You can’t rape a slut”.

How is This STILL GOING ON!!!!! How can we let it get worse?

Rape as a Weapon of War Increases in Congo

Rebels raped more than 80 women in two days in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A United Nations refugee agency estimates that rebel groups have killed as many as 500 Congolese civilians in the northeastern region in the past month and displaced over 40,000, New Vision reported. 

According to the Agence France Presse, rape is a common tactic used in conflicts in central Africa. This attack came shortly after thousands of Congolese women marched in Kinshasa last month to protest rape as a weapon of war. 

Since the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo began in 1998, tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped in sexual violence widely viewed to be a war tactic. Dozens have been raped in recent weeks by combatants.

Feminist Daily News 1/13/2009: Rape as a Weapon of War Increases in Congo.

Another Post on how women are treated, rape or not…

My internal monologue was interrupted by the defense attorney taking the floor. He pointed out his client from the photos lining the wall, and calmly explained how his client was present in the apartment, but left before the attack began. He built his case, explaining that his client was generally a good kid, but outnumbered, and that his client opted to leave the area instead of participate in any wrongdoing. He then turned to the jury and said:

You will also hear that —– wasn’t such a good girl after all. You will hear that she skipped school. You will hear that she smoked marijuana. You will hear that she willingly skipped school to go smoke marijuana with two boys she had just met.

My mouth fell open out of shock. There wasn’t even a question of consent in this case – the damage to the girl’s face attested to that. And yet, here was this defense attorney trying to assassinate the victim’s character. For what? Why was what she was doing that day even relevant in the context of what she experienced?

Original Essay: The Not Rape Epidemic at Racialicious – the intersection of race and pop culture.

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It’s amazing essay on all the Not-Rape that has happened to this woman and her friends. It echos my stories and my friends, stories of touching, and exposure, and manipulations for sexual favors.  All the ways in which a female is sexually abused and it is considered ok.

For those who want to pretend Racism is over.

Katrina gave a lot of racist white guys and excuse to shoot black guys and call it “protecting ourselves.”  It’s a story white people in the United States want to pretend is over, racial violence, but it just keeps repeating itself.  
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During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored-car driver for the Brink’s company and living in a rented duplex about a mile from Algiers Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out windows, pitching a hefty pine tree limb through the roof and dumping rain on Herrington’s possessions. On the day of the shooting, Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape the stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point ferry terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.

Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, “We got you niggers! We got you niggers!” He continues, “They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer…. I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth.”

Apparently thinking they’d caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they’d be allowed to live.

Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. “I was bleeding pretty bad from my neck area,” he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup truck, he begged them for help. “I said, Help me, help me–I’m shot,” Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, “Get away from this truck, nigger. We’re not gonna help you. We’re liable to kill you ourselves.” My God, thought Herrington, what’s going on out here?

He managed to stumble back to a neighbor’s house, collapsing on the front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where, medical records show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays found “metallic buckshot” scattered throughout his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as “at least seven [pellets] in the right neck.” Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery.

“It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun,” says Charles Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. “If he hadn’t gotten to the hospital, he wouldn’t have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it.”
Katrina’s Hidden Race War (Page 3).

Immigration

But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

On Tuesday, with an autopsy by the Rhode Island medical examiner under way, his lawyers demanded a criminal investigation in a letter to federal and state prosecutors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the detention system.

Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands – NYTimes.com

More Insanity from the Global Patriarchy

Two Iranian women have been sentenced to death in the past week, one by stoning. According to a Women’s Forum Against Fundamentalism in Iran (WFAFI) press release in Iran 14 women currently face execution by stoning in Iran, a punishment faced only by those accused of adultery.

According to Agence France Presse, Afsaneh R. and a man called Reza have been charged with adultery and with murder in the death of Afsaneh’s husband. Afsaneh was sentenced to death under Iranian law, but since Reza is married, he was pardoned from execution and instead received 15 years in prison for murder and 100 lashes for adultery, according to the Associated Press.

The second death sentence involves a pregnant woman and her husband who have both been sentenced to execution under charges of drug trafficking. According to WFAFI, the couple has no criminal record, come from underprivileged backgrounds and do not have legal counsel. Though a judge claims that the couple has confessed to drug trafficking, no evidence that supports the charges has been presented.

Feminist Daily News 12/4/2008: Two Women Sentenced to Death in Iran

Gay Rights Needs to Remember Equality!

The backlash is upon us, and it's going to get uglier unless our organizations step forward and say something. The desire to scapegoat blacks for Prop 8's defeat has exposed the now not-so-latent racism in our movement.  
I have already blogged a lot about why the lack of effective communication (and I'm not even talking about outreach on gay issues to socially conservative blacks) between white people in general and people of color. That dearth of understanding and mutual respect for difference, and lack of desire to seek common ground through personal relationships ultimately leads to what we are seeing here.

Pam’s House Blend:: The N-bomb is dropped on black passersby at Prop 8 protests

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