Like It Is

And, bringing up the rear, scraping the bottom of the barrel - the Media. In this case the Daily Telegraph. The UK’s Daily Telegraph headlines are rather misleading, but who cares when it sells papers? I guess we can tell where they’re coming from:

Humiliation of BP Chief over gay affair

There has been much made over Lord Browne’s resignation. Most broadsheet headlines both in the UK and in Canada imply that he resigned because he had a gay lover or his “gay affair”. Why? because they know that as much as we claim to “tolerate” gay relationships, many really only pay lip service. Otherwise, why is it still fodder for selling papers? Think, if this was a woman would the headlines have been quite as enticing? I wonder.

In fact, what really nailed Lord Browne wasn’t the fact he had a gay boyfriend – a relationship that had lasted over four years, until the boyfriend (Gawd, he’s Canadian!) apparently began making moves tantamount to blackmail. Read the rest of this entry »

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There are going to be some particularly nervous people in Washington in the coming weeks. Having kittens might be a tame description. Slow death might be closer. Or how about “best served cold” as in revenge. Or as in subpoena.

Deborah Jean Palfrey threatens to name and shame Washington’s elite

It’s one thing to have the police checking up and calling you in the middle of work, or worse, in the middle of dinner – to ask you if you’ve been a naughty boy. It’s quite another if a news/media network calls you up to ask if er… you have been a client of a certain “Madam”. But that looks like what’s shaping up in Washington, as the Deborah Jean Palfrey show gets on the road, leaving certain mayhem in its wake.

Tsk, tsk. Scandal, hypocrisy, comeuppance, sex and power. Not necessarily in that order.

Read the rest of this entry »

That HIV/AIDS is a plague that is ravaging the African continent should be the biggest story in the world. Fellow human beings are dying not by the tens or the thousands, but by the millions. Whole families, entire generations. Yet it barely even makes the front page of the media.

33 teenagers were killed in a senseless shooting last week. A totally murderous tragedy. Everyone is shocked at such a loss of life. But people are dying EVERY DAY from HIV/AIDS – millions. There is no such shock and little interest. Considering that the disease is wrecking countries on the African continent. On the human tragedy scale, I’d say it ranks pretty high. But (with a few notable exceptions) it barely makes the news these days and where it does it is a struggle to keep it there. How can that be? AIDS is preventable in the West. Why aren’t we ensuring antiretroviral drugs get to these sufferers?

Journalist Stephanie Nolan’s book 28 - Stories of Aids in Africa has just been published and caught my attention today. This is a part excerpt from the Globe and Mail: Read the rest of this entry »

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I found this very interesting article on the BBC News website. The aftermath of the recent (and senseless) killings at Virginia Tech has generated, yet again, a heated debate about guns and gun ownership in the US.

Everybody has a view. On one hand, some think there are no gun controls at all (actually there are some) and many  feel there are simply too many guns in circulation in the US. There are also, rather chillingly, those who feel that far from being too many guns, there aren’t nearly enough.

Like Larry Pratt:

“All the school shootings that have ended abruptly in the last 10 years were stopped because a law-abiding citizen - a potential victim - had a gun,” said Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America. “The latest school shooting at Virginia Tech demands an immediate end to the gun-free zone law which leaves the nation’s schools at the mercy of madmen.”

More guns.That’ll stop the shootings. Right.

The article does address some interesting facts. Check it out and see what you think.

For example: Read the rest of this entry »

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Tits, blood and tragedy sells.

I call it the Sun Factor (or American Idol, or Canadian Idol or Pop Idol – it’s all the same thing). Be it the Sun in the UK, any Sun in Canada, or the New York Post in the US - tits, blood and tragedy invariably sell more newspapers and gets more viewers than anything else. And it never, ever fails. It can’t fail. Why? Because people are sensation junkies. And the more they have the more they want. Read the rest of this entry »

Another shooting. Another tragedy. Another shocking, grief filled day. Another shooter goes on the rampage just shooting school kids, but apparently with purpose. Is it me or is there a sense of deja vu here? Haven’t we been here before? Recently?

The chorus of the song “I Don’t Like Mondays” based on killer Brenda Spencer, 17 (who, with a shrug, back in 1979, gave it as her reason for turning a gun on her classmates at her San Diego school) has been going round and round in my head since I heard of today’s shooting, the largest body count in a US school shooting to date.

We’ll never really know why of course, since the shooter also popped himself.

But unfortunately we can now almost predict how events will unfold from here: Read the rest of this entry »

Or, It Da Innanet Innit, What Made Me Do It! Wasn’t me, Mam!

I have to say when I read Police Arrest MySpace girl for party disaster, at first I thought – Just another MySpace story. Then I read on and couldn’t believe what I was reading. The gist of it is that Rachel Bell, who is 17, hosted a “let’s trash my house” party, inviting people to her parent’s house through her MySpace site. The resulting damage is hovering around £20,000. It also resulted in the police, coming to the house, trying to contain the disturbance. And criminal damage. Rachel’s lame attempt at trying to blame hackers for doctoring her site is almost amusing. Almost.

Actually, she blames her school friends for taking over her site to tempt those interested in a night of sex and drink at “Rachel’s place”. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hurrah! Common sense has prevailed! All the papers are predictably full of the news, because, well it is headline news and a landmark decision.

Here’s my interpretation:

Waaah! Waaaah!!! I can’t get my baby!! I want my OWN baby! And he, Mr Johnson is a BAD MEAN MAN, for not letting me have my OWN WAY. He won’t let me have what I want! No, stupid, of course I don’t want to adopt. How DARE he exercise his right to be or not to be a father?!? What does he mean he wants to choose when or if he wants to become a parent? I want to be a MOTHER!! A baby is my RIGHT. Stuff his rights! I want him to change his mind. I’ve asked him to change his mind… but he just won’t do it. He said he wanted babies back then and now he doesn’t. He just changed his mind! And now I can’t have a baby. It’s not right.”

Here’s what Natalie Evans said: Read the rest of this entry »

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My earlier article titled Fertility Treatment To Be Rationed touched on the changes the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) wants to make to IVF. I mentioned that some quarters are none to pleased at the changes. They see it as taking away their choice.

To summarise, the HFEA is proposing to limit the number of embryos a woman can have implanted to reduce the risks to the mother and, more importantly, the risk to the children. The regulator in particular wants to cut down the unacceptably high number of IVF-assisted multiple births, that occur because of assisted conception.

The more I read about fertility treatments – or rather the quest for them, the harder I find it to understand why women will go to these lengths to have a baby. It can’t possibly be because they are so desperate to bring another worker bee into the world to support them in their old age, or to keep the economy moving or even to keep the human race in existence. Can it? Even though these are the reasons (sorry, bingoes) routinely trotted out for why childfree women have no business being so, and should be pursuing IVF if it’s even remotely possible. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has announced new restrictions on what form of treatment infertile couples can receive and the types of procedures that doctors are allowed to perform to help women have babies. The Observer article of April 1 states:

“The HFEA will unveil a series of measures based on an approach called ’single embryo transfer’ under which women normally receive only one embryo, except for a minority - including older women - whose medical condition means they need two embryos to stand a realistic chance of conceiving.”

The regulator wants to cut down on the unacceptably high number of IVF-assisted multiple births that are a result of women or their doctors choosing how many embryos to implant. Read the rest of this entry »

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