Truly Equal

Now I don’t know why a newspaper publishes certain articles - maybe the chief editor was on vacation, or truly nothing else was happening in the world (yeah right) - but yesterday’s article in the Washington Post, From Thong to Thesis, Monica Lewinsky Flashes her Intellect, is one of the biggest pieces of trash ever published.

Take this small bit of sheer journalistic genius:

There are moments that make you question your fundamental assumptions about the world. One of them took place a few days ago, when news emerged that Monica Lewinsky had just graduated from the London School of Economics.

She did not!!

Lewinsky, 33, is known more for her audacious coquetry than for her intellectual heft, and the notion of her earning a master of science degree in social psychology at the prestigious London university is jarring, akin to finding a rip in the time-space continuum, or discovering that Kim Jong Il is a natural blond.

The emphasis above is NOT mine, it actually appeared that way in the article. Read the rest of the article to grasp the level to which the Washington Post, and the U.S. media, has fallen (basically, people who are “dumb” but are actually “smart”, in all of its immature glory). I never understood why the media focused so much on Monica Lewinsky - oh yes, I remember now, she had an intimate relationship with the president of the United States. The rabid right-wing was so obsessed that a woman had a blowjob. She was not dumb or stupid, but young and immature. She screwed up, so what? Dubya screws up all the fucking time with consequences U.S. soldiers take to the grave, and nobody says anything to him.

This article provides us with 2 Christmas thoughts we can take home. Number one is, of course, that the journalistic bar was set so low that the fact that she was EVER news reflects very poorly on the Washington Post judgment, and again on the U.S. media as a whole. The fact that she is covered NOW is amazing at all. Is it not true that president Bush’s actions are far more serious than any of president Clinton’s misdeamenors?

Which reminds me, when the hell are we going to have an “impeachment watch” on the front of every American newspaper? Do the media think we are stupid? Are we supposed to weigh more heavily some sexual escapades than the current administration lies that led us to an illegal war, more than 600,000 innocent Iraqi dead, nearly 3,000 American soldiers and more than 20,000 injured? Give me a break! Now that the impeachment bar has been set so low, why don’t the media live up to it and carry it out to its logical conclusion?

The second thought is that a women can’t seem to be smart and have sex at the same time. Either she is a sexual object or she is an intellectual. Wow, a girl that had a blowjob can’t graduate from college? That a women can’t be pretty and smart as well? Look conservative wingnuts, she interned for the president. Whatever she did afterwards in said position, one has to be quite smart to get into that position in the first place. Many, if not all, of White House interns graduate with advanced degrees and get high-paying jobs. I graduated with honors from college and go to medical school, which is not easy, so the notion that a White House intern, much less a woman, somehow was able to graduate with an advanced degree is so stupid that it could only come from a right-wing idiot.

Expect plenty of Monica-bashing as the 2008 presidential elections come close.

How bad is climate change? Even the bears have stopped hibernating.

Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is affecting the natural world.

I wonder what could have provoked that behavior in the bears?

The behaviour change suggests that global warming is responsible for this revolution in ursine behaviour, says Juan Carlos García Cordón, a professor of geography at Santander’s Cantabria University, and a climatology specialist.

[…]We cannot prove that non-hibernation is caused by global warming, but everything points in that direction.”

Hey doc, if you don’t find the answers you are looking for, you might want to ask Sen. James M. Inhofe, conservative idiot from Oklahoma, whose own state has established records in wildfires and drought

Oh well, screw the bears. We’ll just show the kids old Coca-Cola ads instead.

How many studies and news articles do we need to have lined up in order to convince ignorant politicians (Senator Inhofe, bonafide conservative idiot) and industry fat-cats that global warming is here?

Add one more to the list:

Global carbon emissions rose nearly 3 percent in 2005, up more than a quarter from 1990 levels despite many governments’ pledges of cuts to fight global warming, a scientist who provides data for the US Department of Energy said.

“The rate of acceleration is quite phenomenal,” said Gregg Marland, senior staff scientist at the US Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), which supplies emissions data to governments, researchers and NGOs worldwide.

“Half of all emissions have been since 1980. I think people lose track of the rate of acceleration. You tend to think of (this as) something that’s been going on — it’s not,” he told Reuters late on Thursday.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 58 years old today, which is International Human Rights Day.

Never in the history of mankind have men - or women and children for that matter - have had any rights, written on paper and backed up by the power of government, so I can see why some folks in the U.S. still have the primitive, caveman, Bush-like mentality that upholding established, international human rights agreements like the Geneva Conventions or the Convention on the Rights of the Child is somehow against the interest of the United States. For example, here is one of the stated reasons of why the Bush administration - along with the usual conservative idiots in the U.S. Senate - won’t ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child:

“The Convention on the Rights of the Child may be a positive tool for promoting child welfare for those countries that have adopted it. But we believe the text goes too far when it asserts entitlements based on economic, social and cultural rights. … The human rights-based approach … poses significant problems as used in this text.”

Very enlightening, ain’t it?

Posted below is a great article called Bringing Human Rights Home, from TomPaine.com.

Read the rest of this entry »