September 9th, 2006
A Little Fun First
- Thursday Thirteen #2 — ribbiticus @ Pond Perspective offers some gems of advice. Here are my favorites:
5. It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
10. Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
11. We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names, and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.
12. A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.
13. Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.
More
Tags: Thursday Thirteen, Crayons, terrorism, Logan Airport, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Congress, wiretapping, Osama bin Laden, Mother Jones, liberals, 9/11, religion, aetheists, women, virginity, Journal of Sex Research Western soceity, involuntary virgins, economy, America
June 16th, 2006
Here are a few posts written elsewhere that I thought worth passing on:
- Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat) — Dark Wraith is one of those Veterans who received a letter from the Veterans Administration about last month’s Fubar with the laptop and all of that personal data that might or might not have gotten hijacked. He’s not just upset about the Fubar; he’s upset that that they were able to find him at all after he spent ages carefully not alerting them to address changes…
This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they’ve concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they’ve got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn’t theirs—our privacy—and they can’t have the decency to ensure even that they’re the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they’ve expropriated.
To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.
To everyone else, I say this: if you’re not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.
Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they’ll find you when they want to, anyway. It’s all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.
More
Tags: Veterans Administration, Identity Theft, Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, insurgents, American soldiers, amnesty, Florida, voter fraud, Voting Irregularities, Greg Palast, sexual harrassment, inhumanity, humanity
May 10th, 2006
How does this happen? Where do children even get the idea to do this this sort of thing? WTF are people teaching their kids today?
ST. LOUIS, Missouri (AP) — Twelve boys in the first and second grade at a St. Louis elementary school are accused of sexually assaulting a second-grade girl during recess, authorities said Tuesday.
One teacher who was supposed to be supervising the recess has been fired, and another suspended with pay, school superintendent Creg Williams said. Ten of the boys, ages 6 to 8, were suspended for the rest of the school year, and the other two received five-day, in-school suspensions.
No names were released.
The girl, who is 8, was unharmed physically but will not return for the rest of the school year. “We don’t know what type of emotional scars it will have on the young lady,” Williams said. [“Officials: 1rst and 2nd-grade boys sexually assualt girl” (CNN.com)]
Thank God I’m never having kids.
Tags: sexual assault, children
March 24th, 2006
Everyone seems to have an opinion about abortion and child support and who has control over what and when and where and what our children should or shouldn’t be taught about what goes on down “there”. Some folks think we shouldn’t teach sex education at all because that’ll give kids ideas and other folks think if we don’t teach sex education, that’s what leads to curiousity down “there” and silly misinformation like “you can’t get pregnant the first time” or “if you love me.”
Of course, the President’s big program is abstinence, which is the religious-right’s big program. The thing is that they don’t want to teach any kind of back up if abstinence doesn’t work out.
Strangely, I feel like I’m one of the few people with the right to actually ask this question these days. I wonder how many of these people who are going around preaching abstinence and not wanting to teach other forms of birth control at all practiced what they preached when they were that age. I just find it a bit hard to believe that so many of these people practiced what they preach.
More
Tags: abstinence, sex
March 8th, 2006
Every two and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted.
One in six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape, and 10% of sexual assault victims are men.
In 2003-2004, there were an average annual 204,370 victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. In 2004 alone, there were 209,880 victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assaults according to the 2004 National Crime Victimization Survey (pdf). Of the average annual 204,370 victims in 2003-2004, about 65,510 were victims of completed rape, 43,440 were victims of attempted rape, and 95,420 were victims of sexual assault.
About 44% of rape victims are under age 18, and 80% are under age 30.
Since 1993, rape/sexual assault has fallen by over 64%.
Because of the methodology of the National Crime Victimization Survey, these figures do not include victims 12 or younger. While there are no reliable annual surveys of sexual assaults on children, (pdf) the Justice Department has estimated that one of six victims are under age 12.
In 2002, according to the 2002 National Crime Victimization Study, 86,290 women were raped. According to medical reports, the incidence of pregnancy for one-time unprotected sexual intercourse is 5%. By applying the 5% pregnancy rate to 86,290 women, RAINN estimates that there were up to 4,315 pregnancies as a result of rape.
Source: Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network
National Sexual Assault Hotline • 1.800.656.HOPE • Free. Confidential. 24/7.
One in six women? How many women do you know in your social circle? In your family? I know of two people in my life who’ve confided to me that they’ve been raped, but I certainly know more than 12 women. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
5% might get pregnant as a result of such an attack — I pray to God none of them live in South Dakota…
More
Tags: rape, sexual assault, Women's Rights, incest
March 2nd, 2006
A recent study suggests that safe sex leads to less unintended pregnancies which leads to less abortions. (Duh.) It also suggests that when the government reduces funding for family planning or birth control to poor women and teenagers, unintended pregnancies and therefore abortions go up. Huh.
At a time when policymakers have made reducing unintended pregnancies a national priority, 33 states have made it more difficult or more expensive for poor women and teenagers to obtain contraceptives and related medical services, according to an analysis released yesterday by the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute.
From 1994 to 2001, many states cut funds for family planning, enacted laws restricting access to birth control and placed tight controls on sex education, said the institute…
[…]
“The most powerful and least divisive way to decrease abortion is to reduce unintended pregnancy,” said Sarah Brown, director of the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. “If we can make progress reducing unintended pregnancy, we can make enormous progress reducing abortion.”
More
Tags: safe sex, abortion, family planning, birth control
