US Rape & Sexual Violence Statistics

* Sex crimes against children : Down 53 percent between 1992 and 2006.
* Abortion : The abortion rate has dropped by about 25 percent since 1993.
* Teen pregnancy : In 2009, teen pregnancy hit its lowest rate in the 70 years that the federal government has been tracking the statistic.
* Divorce : The U.S. divorce rate is at its lowest level since 1970.
* Domestic violence : The rate of reported domestic violence in the U.S. dropped by more than half between 1993 and 2004.
* Rape : The
forcible rape [sic] rate in the U.S. has dropped from 41.1 per 100,000 people
in 1990 to 28.7 in 2009. That latter figure is also an all-time low.

The Dictionary Keeps on Giving

foo-ty adj. [F: foutu]
1. (chiefly dial.) INSIGNIFICANT, PALTRY
2. (chiefly dial.) Poorly kept: SHABBY

Saddled (notes)

He saddles up and rides at dawn a long trail between nettlebanks, idly considering the forager’s life. This early light pinning the cooled body of a roadkill rabbit or young hare, lurcher coursed, blood matted fur with darker flecks. The darker wild onion stalks now several feet high in places alongside the road and in the grit and glass spray of the verge abandoned gloves, pacifiers, condoms, detritus to be picked over or poached. Unwant, disuse. Fewer cars at this hour and sky flat dark in the east like the belly of a priapic mule. Spitting rain in lighter gusts and the neon whipping on his cuffs and back as if the flayed skin of a larger man had been hung around him as an afterthought.

Last evening the squawk of a roadbound tortoise – at a new extremity. Walked to tremulous safety by a passing and flat-footed motorist, the shield-beast at arms’ length he waddle-walked to the shoulder. Bushes herald the animal’s hurried retreat. Think of its meat, cooked in its shell on ribald coals, a smoked tinge (think of jerky strips) – every thing he sees with its underbelly, everything exposed, torrid, licentious.

Fogged (notes)

Crabs along the wider paves and slabs and half-cocks his leg making it to the hedged-in passage leading to the front door humming and hovering almost on toes and light-stepping in a precarious dance one foot the other as he reaches into one pocket and the side pocket in reach of the key and then slides it in, slips it in, forces it hard into the lock and he’s in now where he can be who he is and how and with back almost parodically against the door stands defeated and he knows defiled again by want or by his own flimsy useless will relents and gives it full bloom. That thing that thing that thing wanted and humbling and altogether wrong. Fantastic couplings for one wretched second. Panting like a bloody beast. Stamping and snorting. Stopstopstop. Stop.

Across the hall he can see that the table is laid. A glass of spring water holding particles swirling and he’s not yet convinced that the water is not in fact somehow contaminated, unclean – that it has not in fact eddied around the carcass of a bloat-felled lamb or some filthy cloven hoof before being sloshed into that glass which God knows may not be clean and will hold a memory, an infringement, some bacilli or curse that will clench his gut awake at early dawn and condemn him to hours spent wringing a gritty gruel from his remorseless insides. A flood that will wash away all the good along with all the bad and leave him hollowed in its wake.

Sounds of domesticity – of cutlery. Shirt’s yardage cooling at the placket’s tuck – gusset spotted and likely rank, reasty. Only seconds have passed since he swooped birdlike into this house and his head has yet to clear, fogged, turpid. The fluttering or clanging at his chest; the damp palms; the unmodulated and tremulous voice that startles as it deepens. She has really empowered herself, she is paler now.

Hounded (notes)

Hounded. Beef heart unpegged, cloistered. That furious chopping, yawing, yowling. Flung sputum flecks frothed in with tarblood, hands flapping and drooling. Meaty flews and a tear the length of a scrubby neck, logarithmic concerns for the dipping needle. What rends and what floods with bile, unconscious fears pulsing at the neck veins.

The first time he had to sew up an animal’s ruptured gut his own heaved and hollowed, the blood a call to some deeper resentment – a parasitic carnivore, hunkered in the maw. Spastic contractions of a valve, bitter tongue root plastered and swollen, blurting in the dry teeth. Waiting for redemption like all undue warriors, a pit of muscled luck and tools plundered or jerry-rigged; a bone-saw and stubbed needles sharpened regularly on a bike-mounted stone, flat-end tweezers to leverage tooth from bone, saps and clamps and sutures. Gloves. Knucklepads. Pliers for heavy lifting and a bag of filthy rags, poultices, tinctures. Chalk dust and clay marl.

The sound of it and the stench, pitbull with its yellowed fascia torn and steaming in the January air. Belling and coursing, each dank and pissedin corner hides the fixer’s stool, the saw bones, God’s lonely man brought in and brought low – an office, a calling, a decision. For it is not by our words but by our actions that we are made men .

Orifice, sphincter, puncture; slop of something’s sudden dead innards as its bowels gush loss and failed will, a useless thing with no hope, no use, no power. Or its whining and keening, haggard and pissrolled, flung aside and despised, booted, a vomited caucus of better intent. Gutterdog.

I got a new (old) dictionary

se·rot·i·nous

adj. Botany

Late in developing or blooming.

[Latin s r tinus, coming late, from sr, at a late hour, from srus, late.]

leading to Serotinal defined in Webster's 1981 as "of or relating to the latter and usually drier part of summer"


Meiosis

Modern Latin, from Ancient Greek (meioō, "I lessen") μείων & (meiōn, "less")

1. rhetoric (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rhetoric) a figure of speech whereby something is made to seem smaller or less important than it is.

Slavoj Žižek - Screening Thought: The Media's Philosophical Problem

Continental philospher Slavoj Žižek and Paul A. Taylor (author of Žižek and The Media) explore the difficulty of conveying philosophical ideas within today's media.

Increasingly, intelligence is only tolerated in pre-approved and reassuringly non-challenging forms - deprecatory humour (Stephen Fry), decaffeinated reasoning (Alain de Botton), or suspiciously grand narratives (Simon Schama). Žižek himself is constantly pigeonholed by such media clichés as 'the Elvis of cultural theory' and 'the Marx Brother'. This event sets out to question 'what can be done?' by serious thought in a culture of sound bites. Is the best that media philosophers can hope for to 'Try again, fail again, fail better'?

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/05/slavoj-zizek-screening-thought-the-medias-philosophical-problem/

Another cure for nettles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malva

Cultivation and uses

Several species are widely grown as garden flowers, while some are invasive weeds, particularly in the Americas where they are not native.

Many species are edible as leaf vegetables. Known as ebegümeci in Turkish, it is used as vegetable in Turkey in various forms such as stuffing the leaves with bulgur or rice or using the boiled leaves as side dish. Malva verticillata (Chinese: 冬寒菜; pinyin: dōngháncài, Korean: 동규자」is grown on a limited commercial scale in China; when made as a herbal infusion, it is used for its colon cleansing properties and as a weight loss supplement.

Very easily grown, short-lived perennials often grown as ornamental plants. Mild tasting young mallow leaves can be a substitute for lettuce, whereas older leaves are better cooked as a leafy green vegetable. The buds and flowers can be used in salads.

Cultivation is by sowing the seeds directly outdoors in early spring. The seed is easy to collect, and they will often spread themselves by seed.

In Catalonia (Southern Europe) they use the leaves to cure stinging nettles sting.

Chestnut Flour

While chestnut flour is still considered a high glycemic index food (the
source I consulted rated it a ~65 on the index; a food must be 50-55 or
lower to be considered 'low'), it is still considerably lower on the GI
scale than typical flours used for baking, glutinous and gluten-free
alike, such as white rice flour (GI=~95), potato starch (GI=~95),
Arrowroot starch (GI=~85) and white (wheat) flour (GI=~85)**. To be
sure, it's considerably more expensive (and hard to find), but for those
of you looking for lower GI, GF substitutes for the white rice flour in
your recipes, chestnut flour could be a good option... so long as you're
not allergic to tree nuts, that is.

http://www.tamaraduker.com/2009/09/discovering-chestnut-flour/

Thousands of Burmese 'enslaved' in Thai fishing industry

http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/world-asia-pacific-13189103

A BBC investigation has found that thousands of workers are illegally
trafficked from Burma to work in Thailand's fishing industry - on Thai
ships, or in factories.

Some are enslaved at sea for years without ever coming onshore, forced
to work long hours for little or no pay, or are imprisoned on land
between voyages.

Some of those who have escaped have described torture and killings by
their Thai captains.

victim of sex trafficking to be paid substantial damages

The woman, who cannot be named because she and her family are still at
risk of retribution by her traffickers, was kidnapped at the age of 14
and then continually trafficked and re-trafficked for forced
prostitution in Italy, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Israel and Britain
until she was 21.

Her solicitor said she was repeatedly beaten, raped and threatened with
death, and was treated as a slave. She was arrested by police and
immigration officers in a brothel in London in 2003, but instead of
rescuing her they charged her with possessing false documents, which had
been provided by her traffickers.

She was imprisoned for three months before being sent back to Moldova
through a fast-track immigration process. Her trafficker was neither
investigated nor arrested but was allowed to visit her in Holloway
prison and Oakington detention centre, where he posed as her boyfriend,
in order to intimidate her.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/apr/11/sex-trafficking-home-office-dam
ages

Too Late

In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/

Fkrs

Israeli tanks, helicopters and planes have struck Gaza after an
anti-tank missile fired from the Palestinian territory hit a school bus
in Israel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13002846

Wake Up Wake Up Wake Up

For those of you furious and fearful about Fukushima: Why aren't you
furious about the chemical pollution already poisoning our food supply?
Why aren't you as furious about the chicken, beef and eggs consistently
contaminated with some of the most virulent and drug-resistant bacteria
on the planet? Are you aware that US agribusiness has been arguing for
years-knowing their filthy industrial farms and slaughterhouses are
epidemiological disasters-that Americans would be safer if they were
allowed to intentionally irradiate the hell out of their shit
contaminated products. Why doesn't this enrage you, and cause you to
refuse to buy this crap?

Source
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/04/07/fukushima-in-the-food

Zizek lamenta que la energía de la izquierda ha pasado a la extrema derecha

Bilbao, 7 abr (EFE).- El filósofo, psicoanalista y activista marxista esloveno Slavoj Zizek ha lamentado hoy que "la energía crítica que tenía la izquierda hace 40 o 50 años, ha pasado ahora a manos de la extrema derecha, que es la única que habla de revolverse contra el sistema político establecido".

El filósofo hegeliano ha cargado también contra el llamado Plan Bolonia, la reforma de los estudios universitarios en Europa, que ha calificado de "un claro ataque a lo que suponen los centros independientes de pensamiento europeo".

Para el agitador intelectual esloveno, el objetivo del Plan Bolonia es "convertir las universidades en fábricas de formar especialistas que luego puedan reparar los problemas sociales de las sociedades modernas".

Zizek ha considerado que en el panorama actual de crisis económica y globalización falta una pieza fundamental: el discurso de la izquierda.

Ha abogado, por último, por la creación de una nueva izquierda porque sino "el futuro que nos espera es Berlusconi; es decir, líderes que aunque se pongan en ridículo, ejercen el poder de forma autoritaria".

Source http://www.abc.es/agencias/noticia.asp?noticia=770905

Spare the Rod (Harpers)

From an October 14 ruling of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, in Regina v. D.J.W. The accused, whose identity was concealed to protect his son, was found guilty of criminal negligence. His son, DJ, was four years old at the time of the events described. Richard Hoskins is a white supremacist who claims Anglo-Saxons are descended from the Israelites, God's chosen race.

As a result of communications over the Internet, the accused became aware of books written by Richard Hoskins. He understood that Hoskins had a biblical answer to all of the problems in society, including the number of abortions and homosexuals, and the national debt. The accused said that Hoskins's books changed his worldview, and he came to understand the great utility in keeping the laws of Moses. He decided that he had to be circumcised and that he would do it himself.

In preparation, the accused read everything he could find on the Internet about circumcision. There he saw horrible pictures of what could go wrong. The accused also researched the various tools available to assist in the circumcision. On the day he circumcised himself, the accused placed a Zhenxi Ring, a little clear plastic ring, around his penis. He understood that the purpose of the Zhenxi Ring was to act as an anesthetic and to kill the foreskin. He felt some discomfort but left the ring on for a few hours. He saw the skin turning black and concluded that he had stopped the blood flow. He took a razor blade and started cutting his flesh. He wondered how to stop the blood and found that very difficult to do with the ring device on. After forty-five minutes, he called an ambulance. Before that, he also phoned his mother to tell her he was a heretic and would never go back to her church. She told him to call 911 and hung up. She has not talked to him since.

The accused conducted additional research before circumcising his son, DJ. He discovered that in the Jewish Orthodox faith, circumcisions are performed by mohels who use their long jagged fingernails to cut off the foreskin; they then suck on the end of the penis to cleanse the wound. He decided that he did not want a mohel to circumcise his son. The accused asked his family doctor to circumcise DJ. When the doctor declined, the accused told him that he planned to do it himself, and the doctor told him it was not a good idea.

The accused made contact with Troy M. and his wife, Bethany M., dog breeders in the United States. The accused mentioned circumcision, to which Troy M. responded that he had circumcised his thirteen-year-old son and had a whole website dedicated to the subject. Troy M. told him that, part way through the circumcision, he could not stop the bleeding, so he had called his wife, who gave him Blood Stop powder. Troy M. told him that Blood Stop is used by veterinarians to control bleeding in animals.

The accused tried to find Blood Stop, but it cost $30, which he considered too expensive. He was told that Wonder Dust was the equivalent and much cheaper. The accused understood that Wonder Dust was made to a sufficiently high standard to use on a million-dollar racehorse. The label cautions that it is "not for human use. For veterinary use only." The accused had a high degree of confidence in the Wonder Dust. He thought the admonition against human use was simply for the manufacturer's liability protection.

DJ told him he was ready to be circumcised. The accused had spoken to DJ about circumcision and emphasized that it was a way of unifying the family. He also told DJ that he could have all the ice cream he wanted afterward and pick the movies for a week.

The accused had purchased some rocks or flints with sharp jagged edges. He said he decided he would use the flints if he had a vision from God to use them that day, but he had no such vision. At trial, the accused said he wished he had known about the use of ice to numb the area, but then mused, "How would the Israelites have obtained ice?" The accused put the flint stones and razor blades in a pot of boiling water, and gave DJ some honey wine that he had made. He then went to Home Depot so that he could look at hardware and relax. He was tense about performing the circumcision. When he got home, he found the water in the pot had boiled away.

The accused laid DJ on clean garbage bags on the kitchen floor and put a clean towel or diaper under him. He talked to DJ like an adult, explaining what he thought would happen, giving him a choice. DJ told him he was ready. The accused said that the cutting of DJ's foreskin probably took no more than two seconds. He then applied the Wonder Dust. DJ said "ouch," and cried a little. While DJ was still on the floor, the accused gave him some ice cream. DJ then fell asleep.

A few days later, Richard Edwards, a social worker, received information that the accused had circumcised his son. Edwards and his supervisor decided that the report raised child-protection concerns. He went to the accused's home with two police officers. Edwards told the accused that they wanted to take DJ to the Children's Hospital to confirm that he was all right. The accused thought that it would benefit everyone to confirm that DJ had been properly circumcised.

At the Children's Hospital, DJ was examined by Dr. Colbourne, a pediatric emergency physician. She observed a shell of hardened ash, like a beehive, on his penis. She tried to soak it off in a sitz bath without success, and asked the urology team to examine him. Dr. Afshar, a pediatric urologist, could not remove the ash-like material with gentle methods of washing. DJ was given a general anesthetic, and Dr. Afshar removed the very adherent ash-like material with scissors.

Dr. Afshar observed an incomplete semi-circumferential incision on the proximal part of the foreskin. He thought that the circumcision had been started but stopped halfway through. He did not think that any of the foreskin had actually been removed. Dr. Afshar completed the circumcision. He said that if he had not completed the circumcision, DJ's penis would have had a very abnormal appearance, as the flap of foreskin stuck out on two sides like two arms. Dr. Afshar applied a dressing and admitted DJ to the hospital for observation. He later observed DJ's penis in the clinic, noting that it had healed nicely.

Alain Badiou vs. Jean-Luc Nancy - Libya

Yes, dear Jean-Luc, the position you adopt in favour of 'Western'
intervention in Libya was indeed a sorry surprise for me.

Didn't you notice right from the start the palpable difference between
what is happening in Libya and what is happening elsewhere? How in both
Tunisia and Egypt we really did see massive popular gatherings, whereas
in Libya there is nothing of the kind? An Arabist friend of mind has
concentrated in the last few weeks on translating the placards, banners,
posters and flags that were such a feature of the Tunisian and Egyptian
demonstrations: he couldn't find a single example of these in Libya, not
even in Benghazi. One very striking fact about the Libyan 'rebels',
which I'm surprised you didn't note, is that you don't see a single
woman, whereas in Tunisia and Egypt women are very visible. Didn't you
know that the French and British secret services have been organising
the fall of Gaddafi since last autumn? Aren't you amazed that, in
contrast to all the other Arab uprisings, weapons of unknown origin
emerged in Libya? That bands of young people immediately began firing
volleys in the air, something inconceivable elsewhere? Weren't you
struck by the emergence of a supposed 'revolutionary council' led by a
former accomplice of Gaddafi, whereas nowhere else was there any
question of the masses who had risen up appointing some people as a
replacement government?

Source:
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/04/05/french-philosophy-a
nd-the-war-in-libya

FK the POPE

Sexually active after receiving Holy Orders

• Pope Julius II (1503–1513) had at least one illegitimate daughter, Felice della Rovere (born in 1483, twenty years before his election). Some sources indicate that he had two additional illegitimate daughters, who died in their childhood.^[18] Furthermore, some (possibly libellous) reports of his time accused him of sodomy. According to the schismatic Council of Pisa in 1511, he was a "sodomite covered with shameful ulcers."^[19]
• Pope Paul III (1534–1549) held off ordination^[20] in order to continue his promiscuous lifestyle, fathering four illegitimate children (three sons and one daughter) by his mistress Silvia Ruffini. He broke his relations with her ca. 1513. There is no evidence of sexual activity during his papacy.^[21] He made his illegitimate son Pier Luigi Farnese the first Duke of Parma.^[22][23]
• Pope Pius IV (1559–1565) had three illegitimate children before his election to the papacy.^[24]