June 25, 2011 archive

Due to playing in the mud (don’t ask, trust me it’s messy), the Evening Edition this week will be an Abbreviated Evening Edition by c’est moi.

Our regular featured content-

• 6 In The Morning by mishima
• On This Day In History June 25 by TheMomCat
• Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat
• Abbreviated Evening Edition by TheMomCat

These weekly features-

• Popular Culture (Humor) 20110624: The Firesign Theatre by Translator
• Health and Fitness News by TheMomCat
• Random Japan by mishima

This featured article-

• Obama: Chump or Fraud? by ek hornbeck

Join us at 8 AM EDT for our Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is an Open Thread

Before the George W. Bush administration came to power America was know as a defender of Human Rights not a violator.   Following the September 11 attacks everything changed and not for the better instead veering towards the authoritarian as they sought justification for the abuses which occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan thanks to the likes of John Yoo and Jay Bybee who wrote the legal justification for the torture of prisoners at Anu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Bagram airbase  in Afghanistan. Yet minorities in America have been abused since the Europeans arrived.

One of the methods used to justify this violation of peoples Civil Rights was Eugenics an ideology that saw and portrayed non-whites as less the human this was especially popular in the Southern United States beginning in the late 19 century. The results of which led to forced sterilizations of thousands of African Americans.    

Nearly 7,600 men, women and children as young as 10 were sterilized under North Carolina’s eugenics laws. While other state sterilization laws focused mainly on criminals and people in mental institutions, North Carolina was one of the few to expand its reach to women who were poor.

Sterilization was seen as a way to limit the public cost of welfare. Social workers would coerce women to have the operation under threat of losing their public assistance.[…]

The North Carolina Eugenics Board was created in 1933 and operated for decades with little public scrutiny. It used rudimentary IQ tests and gossip from neighbors to justify sterilization of young girls from poor families who hung around the wrong crowd or didn’t do well in school. Girls like 13-year-old LeLa Dunston, who had just had a baby. Dunston is now 63.

North Carolina the U.S. state where these hearings took place is  considering Paying Forced Sterilization Victims.

Somehow considering  paying the victims of this state sponsored abuse and torture doesn’t quite cut-it. If others can be brought before the International criminal Court for human rights abuses why not Americans?

Inside the secret world of the geeks with the power to unleash anarchy  

Jerome Taylor tracked down one of Britain’s most feared hackers to find out what motivates this new criminal underworld

Saturday, 25 June 2011

They move within a shadowy underworld using skills most of us could never acquire.

Some see themselves as crime fighters, battling injustice, corruption and oppression. Others are pranksters – the kind of people who set light to bridges just to watch them burn. Plenty more do it simply to steal and get rich.

Hacking is as old as computers, but the current wave of high-profile assaults across the globe has led to unprecedented interest in who hackers are and why they do what they do.

The Independent tracked down one prolific British hacker who is engaged in a personal cyber war against LulzSec, the collective behind a string of attacks on websites as diverse as the CIA’s homepage, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Fox TV and – most recently – the Arizona Police Department.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Herr Doktor Professor–

Republicans are deeply, deeply concerned about the budget deficit; they believe that our nation’s future is at stake.

But they’re willing to sacrifice that future, not to mention risk the good faith and credit of the federal government, rather than accept so much as a single penny of tax increases as part of a deal.

…

(T)he GOP never cared about the deficit – not a bit. It has always been nothing but a club with which to beat down opposition to an ideological goal, namely the dissolution of the welfare state. They’re not interested, at all, in a genuine deficit-reduction deal if it does not serve that goal.

And everyone who has preached bipartisanship, who has called for a meeting of minds on the subject, is either a fraud or a chump.

SAY WHAT?

Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa from the London School of Economics’ management department took a lot of heat-as one might expect-for claiming in an article he wrote for Psychology Today that black women were “far less attractive” than women of other races. Guess he won’t be getting much action in Africa.

A disgruntled job-seeker in Nagoya was arrested after he hit the emergency button at a railway crossing. “My search for a job wasn’t going well, and I was irritated,” police quoted the 24-year-old as saying.

Former Yomiuri Giants pitcher Masumi Kuwata finished dead last in a low-level pro golf tournament he entered. His scorecard included a 93 and an 87. Ouch!

Despite ending up 36 over par for the tourney, Kuwata did not three-putt any holes. Go figure.

Another chucker, ex-MLB pitcher Chan-ho Park, was sent to the minor leagues by the Orix Buffaloes and was told to “stop fooling around” and get serious. The 37-year-old South Korean is in his first-and likely last-season here.