Month: January 2007

The Snoop Next Door

The Snoop Next Door – WSJ.com
The return of the Pilgrims’ Scarlet Letter via the On-line Community.

The embrace of the Web to expose trivial transgressions in part represents a return to shame as a check on social behavior, says Henry Jenkins, director of the comparative media studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some academics believe shame became less powerful as a control over everyday interactions with strangers in all but very small neighborhoods or social groups, as people moved to big cities or impersonal suburbs where they existed more anonymously. Continue reading “The Snoop Next Door”

Music as Torture?

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: On Using Happy Flowers Tunes to Interrogate Iraqi Prisoners

Listen to these songs and read how this GI uses it to get information from witnesses. Click on the CD Covers Art to hear 2 cuts. From Wkipedia The musical group, Happy Flowers, was formed in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1983 by John Beers (“Mr. Horribly Charred Infant”) and Charlie Kramer (“Mr. Anus”). The band is known for combining improvisational tuneless noise with wailing vocals and primal screams. Their humorous songs consist of rants about childhood traumas.

I_crush

Bb_gun For example; We came across a bomb in the road and while waiting for EOD to arrive to disarm it, I noticed a guy on the other side of a canal watching the area with binoculars. So we have a bomb, we have a triggerman… unfortunatly, by the time we can get around the canal he managed to escape. The triggerman was within 50 meters of a house. We go to the house and of course the gentleman living there has seen nothing. We had questioned this guy before and not gotten any information so this time, we put him in the Humvee, tell him we are taking him with us and start playing “Mom, I Gave the Cat Some Acid” over and over. Continue reading “Music as Torture?”

Pakistani men, women race free of Islamist threat

Pakistani men, women race free of Islamist threat | Reuters.com
Thousands of men and women took part in a long-distance run through Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore on Sunday without any trouble from Islamists who have tried to disrupt similar events in the past.

Lahore is regarded as Pakistan’s cultural capital, but Islamist activists, who deem mixed-sex gatherings in public as un-Islamic, have become bolder in recent years, challenging the city’s reputation for tolerance.

Two years ago, the government imposed a ban on a mixed-sex race to avoid a clash between Islamists and liberal activists, and on one occasion police baton-charged men and women who tried to run.

Last year, Islamists threatened to disrupt the race, but it passed off peacefully despite the participation of hundreds of women runners.

This year, the Islamists made no effort at all to stop the race, saying it was pointless as it did not have popular support.

‘The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans’

‘The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans’ | Iraq | Guardian Unlimited

As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country’s sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed.

This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.

Another insurgent commander told me: “At the beginning al-Qaida had the money and the organisation, and we had nothing.” But this alliance soon dragged the insurgents and then the whole Sunni community into confrontation with the Shia militias as al-Qaida and other extremists massacred thousands of Shia civilians. Insurgent commanders such as Abu Omar soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, fighting organised militias backed by the Shia-dominated security forces.

Parents Doubt Their Discipline of Kids Works

Parents Doubt Their Discipline of Kids Works: Study – Forbes.com
About 31 percent of the parents said they “never” or “sometimes” perceived that their discipline methods were effective, the study found. It also found that 38 percent of parents said they used the same methods of discipline as their own parents — an approach that was often considered ineffective.

“There was actually an inverse relationship between self-reports of yelling at children and perceived effectiveness of discipline,” said study author Dr. Shari Barkin, chief of the division of general pediatrics at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“But we strongly suspect that both yelling and spanking might be underreported, because we know when parents perceive their methods are not working, as a third reported, then emotion can quickly escalate,” The Nemours Foundation has advice about disciplining children by age group.

A nation in search of 30 million brides for 30 million bachelors

A nation in search of 30 million brides for 30 million bachelors – World – Times Online
China will be short of 30 million brides within 15 years, according to an official report into the country’s burgeoning population. About one in every ten men aged between 20 and 45 — equivalent to almost the entire population of Canada — will be unable to find a wife.

The Government is not yet ready to loosen its birth control policies and demonstrates pride in its achievement of preventing 400 million births through its one-child policy.

The authorities are instead promoting measures to curb the adoption of babies — almost all of whom are girls — by foreigners to ensure that they grow up in China.

The number of people of working age — between 15 and 64 — will increase from 860 million in 2000 to 1.01 billion in 2016, according to the report. That is more than the total in the world’s developed nations.

In the next 20 years, up to 300 million people will leave their farms and move to towns and cities. The report said: “Our country is currently experiencing the largest human movement and migration in history.”

China is having to cope with becoming the world’s first country to grow old before it grows rich. The number of people over 60 will jump from the current 143 million to 430 million by 2040.