Kara Jean

Farting in Public 2014 Calendar

Thank you to Kevin Kusatsu

Australian Asher Wolf's taken to the Guardian to explain why her family is spending Christmas petitioning for humane refugee treatment from the Australian government. Wolf enumerates the conditions under which Australia keeps refugees in its off-shore camps -- conditions that Amenesty considers to be torture, conditions where basic sanitation and health-care are denied to families fleeing war, torture and death threats. Deprived of the shoes, hearing aids, and medicine they managed to smuggle out of their own countries, these refugees, including children, are denied sufficient water, exposed to malaria and TB, and are brutalized into suicide attempts. Gay detainees are sent to camps in PNG, where homosexuality is illegal. Orphans get it even worse -- though the immigration minister Scott Morrison is their legal guardian, these children are left with no one to advocate for them.

According to the UN High Commission on Refugees, the Australian government is spending 1000% more torturing and detaining migrants than it would spend on "community processing" on the mainland. But wasting money on cruelty curries favour with racist voters, so it is the preferred option. For now. But, perhaps, not if Australians in great number write to the minister to explain that his cynical games with innocent human lives will cost him more votes than they win.

When these people arrive at Australian detention centres, they are left with severe sunburn and skin rashes, sitting in clothing drenched with faeces and urine while they await interrogation. Their shoes, glasses and hearing aids are taken away. Any medication they are carrying when they arrive is also confiscated – and often it is months before it is replaced.

Refugees at offshore detention centres sleep in cots on dirt floor, in 50 degree heat, with limited numbers of fans. Drinking water in some camps is being rationed to dangerously low levels – only 500ml per day. The US Centre for Disease Control states that it is possible to get typhoid in Nauru’s water. The detainees are constantly at risk of malaria – yet doctors recommend that children younger than five and pregnant women not take anti-malaria medicine, which is unsuitable for them.

Amnesty found that detainees on Manus Island “have fainted from heat stroke because they are forced to queue for hours in the sun for food.” When the Manus camp flooded, detainees found snakes in their rooms. The toilets are routinely broken or lacking in number, and the conditions in one dormitory were so bad that Amnesty International "considers the accommodation of asylum seekers there a violation of the prohibition on torture and other ill-treatment.”

Why I'm writing to Scott Morrison this Christmas – and why you should too

(Image: asacm3, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kareneliot's photostream)

"You're a 3 Decker sour kraut and toad stool sandwich / With arsenic sauce!"

The lyrics really are quite fantastic. (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

You're a mean one Mr Grinch
You really are a heel
You're as cuddly as a cactus
You're as charming as an eel
Mr. Grinch
You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel

You're a monster Mr. Grinch
Your Hearts an empty hole
Your brain is full of spiders
You've got garlic in your soul Mr. Grinch
I wouldn't touch you with a
39 and a half Foot pole

You're a vile one Mr. Grinch
You have termites in your smile
You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile
Mr. Grinch
Given the choice between the two of you
I'd take the a seasick crocodile

You're a foul one Mr. Grinch
You're a nasty wasty skunk
Your heart is full of unwashed socks,
Your soul is full of gunk
Mr. Grinch

The 3 words that best describe you, are as follows, and I quote
Stink, Stank, Stonk

You're a rotter Mr. Grinch
You're the king of sinful sots
Your hearts a dead tomato splotched with moldy purple spots
Mr. Grinch

Your soul is an appalling dump heap
Overflowing with the most disgraceful
Assortment of deplorable rubbish
Imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots

You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch
With a nauseous super naus
You're a crooked jerky jockey and,
you drive a crooked horse
Mr. Grinch

You're a 3 Decker sour kraut and toad stool sandwich
With arsenic sauce!

Oh Fuck These Lighthouses 2014 Calendar (sample pages 1, 2)

Turns out, it was the Greeks. Χριστος is how you write "Christ" in Greek and writers (including people who transcribed the Bible) have been using "X" as a convenient abbreviation of that since at least the 3rd and 4th centuries.

Paintings by Akihito Takuma Title: Greg Egan Atley

The British Library has uploaded one million public domain scans from 17th-19th century books to Flickr! They're embarking on an ambitious programme to crowdsource novel uses and navigation tools for the huge corpus. Already, the manifest of image descriptions is available through Github. This is a remarkable, public spirited, archival project, and the British Library is to be loudly applauded for it!

We plan to launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year, to help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the content. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open licence.

The manifests of images, with descriptions of the works that they were taken from, are available on github and are also released under a public-domain 'licence'. This set of metadata being on github should indicate that we fully intend people to work with it, to adapt it, and to push back improvements that should help others work with this release.

There are very few datasets of this nature free for any use and by putting it online we hope to stimulate and support research concerning printed illustrations, maps and other material not currently studied. Given that the images are derived from just 65,000 volumes and that the library holds many millions of items.

If you need help or would like to collaborate with us, please contact us on email, or twitter (or me personally, on any technical aspects)

A million first steps

Congratulations, Michigan Right To Lifers! You pushed through a very important law that will encourage women to keep their babies by banning insurance companies from covering abortion, unless policyholders purchase a separate rider. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder had already vetoed a previous version of the bill, but it was reintroduced through a citizens’ petition, which allows the bill to become law without the governor’s signature, a nice little end-run that allows terrible but popular ideas to become law. Opponents of the legislation note that since the rider cannot be purchased once a woman becomes pregnant — even if by rape or incest — it requires women who want the option of abortion following a rape to plan ahead, leading some to call the law a “rape insurance” act.

State Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer called the law “one of the most misogynistic proposals I’ve ever seen in the Michigan Legislature,” and said during a hearing Wednesday that the law

“tells women who are raped … that they should have thought ahead and bought special insurance for it.”

“The fact that rape insurance is even being discussed by this body is repulsive,” she added.

Whitmer went on to tell the story of her own rape, 20 years ago while she was in college, saying she was thankful it hadn’t resulted in a pregnancy:

“Because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker,” she said. Whitmer continued, “If this were law then and I had become pregnant, I would not be able to have coverage because of this. How extreme does this measure need to be? I’m not the only woman in our state that has faced that horrible circumstance…. I think you need to see the face of the women you are impacting by this vote today.

On the other hand, you had compelling pro-Freedom ideas like this, from state Rep. Nancy Jenkins:

“I don’t think elective abortion should be a part of insurance … This doesn’t affect access to abortion. It will still be legal when this law takes effect. Who should be required to pay? Not Michigan taxpayers.”

That’s a pretty nice little dance from “policyholders” to “taxpayers,” Ms. Jenkins — well played!

With the passage of the new measure, Michigan is now the ninth state to restrict private insurance from covering abortion services. Because the only thing more important than the free market is making sure that slutty women don’t take advantage of it to escape the consequences of their slutty sexing.

[Detroit Free Press / MSNBC]

death-by-lulz:

 

beesandbombs: clock

spyrofrancisco: ”stomach prince”

scrotumcoat: gifak-net: Crab CLIMBS OUT OF HIS OLD SHELL

nancyishappy:

Why are we posting this? BECAUSE SLOTHS

scottpatrick:

Great Protector of Christmas Bill O’Reilly has these tidings of comfort and joy for you, America: Yeah, sure, Jesus fed the poor and he wants people to feed the poor. But is that any reason to feed the poor? In a spirited chat with yes-man priest Fr. Gerald Murray (with easily dismissed contributions from token liberal pastor Joshua DuBois), O’Reilly questioned how far good Christians need to take this whole “feed the poor” shtick anyway:

“The problem I have, as I stated is that you’re helping one group by hurting another group and a bigger group, and so I don’t know if Jesus is going to be down with that.”

DuBois thought maybe Jesus might be down with that, seeing as how private charity only makes up about 10% of what’s needed to feed everyone. Father Murray thought it was RIDICULOSE to think that Jesus would support Big Government, because that’s just silly. “We take care of the poor for spiritual motives,” he said, which presumably means that if government does food stamps, that’s like taking away people’s chance to be all spiritual somehow.

In answer to O’Reilly’s setup, asking whether there’s any Christian duty to provide the poor with health insurance, Murray cheerfully rejected the very premise, insisting “In comparison to other countries of the world, we’ve done pretty well,” which is true if you don’t include any of the industrialized democracies. Suck it, Ghana!

Besides, said O’Reilly, DuBois makes a huge mistake in thinking that “need” actually includes all hungry families:

“You’re making a powerful argument, but there is one huge mistake in it,” O’Reilly opined. “And that is that some of the people who don’t have enough to eat, it’s their fault they don’t have enough to eat. Particularly with their children.”

He continued: “If you’re an alcoholic or heroin addict or a drug addict and you can’t hold a job, alright, and you can’t support your children — and that’s a circumstance of millions and millions of people, not most, but a lot, a substantial minority — then it’s your fault, you’re bringing the havoc, that you’re asking people who may be struggling themselves to put food on the table to give their tax money to you. And then you’re not even going to buy food with it, you’re going to buy booze and drugs with it.”

(Commenters, before you start shouting a bunch of actual “facts,” do know that the nice lib in the segment actually manages to get most of them in there without even having his mic cut, wha???)

Because Billo knows his Bible, and is very familiar with Matthew 25:42-43a (Revised GOP Edition), where Jesus says

“For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 43a But I had been using drugs and I caused all my own problems, so you totally get a pass. Here, have a tax cut”

[RawStory / Crooks & Liars