Brains of Rage and Progress!

[elfs]

Rage

American Academy of Pediatrics Recommends U.S. Pediatricians Perform "Token" Female Genital Mutilation

File this under "WTF?" The AAP has issued a statement advocating that physicians preform a ritual token "nicking" of an baby girl's clitoris to satify the religious or cultural needs of their parents. That's disgusting and outrageous, and it'll be a cold day in Hell before I let that kind of destructive behavior go on in my country.

Some things about our culture are non-negotiable. Our culture is not simply different from those that perform genital mutilation, it is better. Having our kids reach adulthood with as many body parts as they were born with is not negotiable.

Video of SWAT Raid on Missouri Family

Watch the video. It's NSFW, but really, watch it when you can. This is what the rhetoric of "drug war" comes down to: A group of guys with better armor than most Iraqi soldiers barge down a door in an apartment complex, shoot two dogs in front of small children, and terrorize a neighborhood to find a small amount of marijuana and a bong.

This is what cops do now. I'm sure they think of themselves as good people, but this is terror and violence directed against Americans for the sake of terror and violence, by our own government officials. Von says it better than I do.

Giggity!

Christian leader caught with male escort

Giggity! Pastor George Rekers, a co-founder of Focus on the Family and an activist in the anti-gay, ex-gay movement, has been busted hiring a male prostitute to accompany him on a ten-day, all-expenses-paid trip across southern Europe.

His excuse? "I had back surgery recently and needed someone to carry my luggage." Steven Colbert's version: "He wanted a cute boy to hoist his sack."

And hoist he did. The young man, identified as "Lucien," describes himself in his on-line profile as having "a smooth, sweet, tight ass... a perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)."

Rekers is especially noteworthy for years of state and federal testimony he gave in which he identified himself as as expert on gay and lesbian psychology and stated of children adopted by homosexual couples "their welfare comes dead last in the homosexual lifestyle, it is oriented toward grooming them for traumatic early sexualization and exploitation by adults."

Isn't all of that special?

GTD

Mind Mapping

Mind-Mapping is one of those techniques that I sometimes try, and often get mixed results. I'd like to get better at it, but it never seems to click for me quite the way I'd like it to. Still, this article mentions a number of different things I haven't tried before.

Food

Screaming Orgasm Recipe

1 oz vodka
1 1/2 oz Bailey's Irish cream
1/2 oz Kahlua

Pour first vodka, then Bailey's, then Kahlua into a cocktail glass over crushed ice. Stir.

For Sushi at Home, skip the Fish

Mark Bittman with sushi recipes using good sushi rice and, er, not raw fish. A good sushi rice recipe is included. I recommend rice vinegar.

How to make the Perfect Risotto

I'm not sure I buy this, but it looks like a delicious experiment. He recommends using a much lighter oil than I do (I make risottos with meat, and my fat of choice is rendered bacon grease) and a slightly smaller rice grain called carnaroli.

Inspiration

Beautiful Contact Forms

Creative examples of Single Page Design

Tapp Gala

Awesome smartphone interfaces. It seems to me that the small scale of the smartphone screen encouranges heavy graphics use, and it's nice to see. I'd like that brilliance applied to more and larger websites.

Modern CSS Layouts

Smashing Magazine on how to do good layouts with CSS: Grids, Liquid Layouts, living with IE. Don't miss the previous article, about degrading gracefully without sacrificing performance.

Shrill

The Euro Crisis

Der Spiegel has an article on how most nation-states in the Western world have built welfare states and funded infrastructure prices without taxing their citizens appropriately to pay for it all, and how the bill is coming due and now we need to pony up for the things we and our parents bought for all of ourselves.

Here's the thing though: unlike most Americans (and their contemptible representatives), I understand that we've overspent. Not myself, personally, but my government. How we restructure to live within our means is a topic for a lot more discussion.

President urges all Americans to appeal to Invisible Man in the Sky for bailouts, ponies

What is it with our government saying it shall not honor an establishment of religion, then going on to honor any establishment so long as it is not "no establishment?" Can't it just let religious people go about their business? Do Americans really need to be reminded to pray?

Man who spotted Times Square bomb a Muslim, media yawns

The man who spotted the popping and smoking car and reported it to authorities is a Muslim. For all that the right wing wackos worry that we're not calling Shahzad a "Muslim terrorist," maybe the phrase "Good American Muslim citizen" doesn't sit well on their tongues.

Eric Cantor says Obama is not a domestic enemy. Audience at Heritage Foundation boos him.

Porn (Everything here in NSFW)

Turning the Backdoor Corner

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Actually, it is the practice of all mohels working in Israel do it

Not surprised -- the haredim seem to have a deathgrip on all aspects of religious practice there, especially anything that requires licensing/accreditation. :(

...most of the orthdox rabbis (in Israel, at least) would consider it to be invalid...

Correct -- a small part of a much larger problem of Conservative/Reform/Reconstructionist practice being officially considered "not Jewish enough" for the purposes of Israel's orthodox community. (Who, unlike their American brethren, are in a position to implement their objections as law.)