And now for some more negative portrayal of Muslims in the media

The news quote of the day:
"Police say an upstate New York man concerned about the negative portrayal of Muslims in the media beheaded his wife after she filed for divorce."

Piracy, a faster choice?

I am back and still alive!

I don't generally download my music illegally from the Net. Obviously, I wouldn't admit it here if I did and somebody asked me, but since I brought it up myself, I really don't.

I almost never buy it, either. The occasional albums that my friends want me to try I usually copy from said friends, and in the rare cases when I actually know I want something, I buy it. Happens almost every year.

Last week happened to be the week. I wanted to buy an album. I found it on the Net, on the artist's own page, sold as mp3s for a very reasonable price. As payment, they accepted credit cards, through a fairly reputable Russian payment service.

I fought with the reputable Russian payment service for 10 minutes, but completely failed to get it even to display the text field where I could feed it the number of my credit card. No wonder they are not known for misusing people's credit card numbers.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to find out how easy it is to get by torrenting it from somewhere. Took less than a minute to find it, would have taken less than five minutes to torrent it. Hmmm.

Since the purpose of the exercise was to transfer the money from me to the artist, I tried again. He has a link to a store selling his CDs inside the US, and I figured I'd buy one and send it to my parents as a gift. That store is not using the reputable Russian payment service, but some normal American ones. At least I assume they do. I never got to the payment service as such, because they were out of stock.

Not that this is a problem for me. I will find a way to get this content, and I will find a way to pay the guy, and I am quite determined to do both. Wouldn't it, however, be a bright idea to make buying as easy as torrenting?

This is why all the intelligent zoophiles prefer sheep:

A Russian man decided to make sweet love to a raccoon. Animal rights types usually say that poor innocent animals can't express consent or lack thereof, but this particular raccoon expressed his lack of consent quite efficiently by biting half of the man's penis off.

The raccoon choked on the penis and expired, or was killed by the man. The doctors did not manage to reattach the semidigested organ.

The Russian news sources describe the event in more detail, and feature a scan of the man's written explanation, a very amused veterinarian who was invited to the hospital to extract the penis from the raccoon, and the doctors' advice that the patient needs to have his head checked, along with whatever is left from the penis.

One detail that I really want to know: did the man try to have oral sex with the raccoon to begin with, or did the oral element happen by accident? And if he did it on purpose, did he see those teeth?

From Wikipedia: "Sexually mature raccoons often show aggressive natural behaviors such as biting during the mating season."

Life? Don't talk to me about life. And memory. And webcams.

I've been a bit tired lately, partly because my life has been very hectic, partly because I am still paying my sleep debts after a recent flu. Anyway, too tired for any hobbies except reading and occasionally seeing some friends.

Anyway, when I am somewhat stressed and tired I usually buy more memory to cheer myself up. It's cheap nowadays, too.

Problem is, I don't remember running out of memory in recent past. Looks like I don't need more than the 4G I have. Wow, I didn't think I'd live to see the day.

How is a girl supposed to cheer herself up by shopping if she doesn't need more memory and doesn't have physical space for one more hard drive in her computer? An external hard drive would be an obvious answer, but I already have two.

Which brings me to the question: can anyone recommend a webcam that works with Linux? I can find tons of them by googling, but the problem is that by the time they are mentioned on the Net in this context, they are usually out of stock in stores.

Gives a whole new dimension to table manners...

Art Price Jr. from Belleview, Ohio has been sentenced to 6 months in prison for having sex with a metal picnic table. His own table, mind you.

Part of the problem was that his home was located close to a school, which made it "disseminating harmful material to juveniles", even though it is not known if any juvenile has actually seen him in the act at any point.

The police got the tip from a person who recorded three DVDs of Price screwing the table on four separate occasions.

My first thought: damn, doesn't it hurt? He was doing it in winter, when licking a metal table outside sure would've hurt, so wouldn't sex hurt too?

My second thought: now that we know all about the villain, I wanna see the hero. Come on, man (or woman), show your face! I really wanna see what kind of person videotapes the neighbors during their tender moments with the garden furniture.

Maybe Mr. Price should move to Eastern Finland - he'd surely get in less trouble for doing it there, even with a human. On the other hand, considering how cold it gets in winter, maybe better not.

Area politics for ministers?

The National Agency for Medicines is being moved from Helsinki to Kuopio, which is a city of a bit under 100 000 people about 400 km away.

That's about 200 people who either need to leave their homes, families and friends, arrange for moving their families to Kuopio, or look for another job in Helsinki. In most Finnish families both adults work, which makes moving because of one person's work somewhat difficult.

The Minister of Social Affairs and Health Liisa Hyssälä says it's not a big deal even if all the employees in Helsinki quit. Who cares? Probably makes them all feel really valued, too.

I have a better idea: why don't we move the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health to Kuopio? Hyssälä will surely be overjoyed, at least as a Keskusta politician who supports moving big state workplaces somewhere far away, and it's not a big deal if some minister quits because of the move.

A break in blogging

Blogging will be very light for the next 2-3 weeks. The so-called Real Life is distracting me. Lots of stuff to do and very behind on my sleep.

This is kind of too bad, because there is a lot of interesting stuff to blog about right now.

Uusi Suomi and their command of English

In Uusi Suomi:

"Tanskassa 27-vuotiaan tanskalaisen uskotaan saaneen kaksi israelilaista asemiestä kimppuunsa mahdollisesti Gazan kriisin takia. Loukkaantuneen tanskalaisen vanhemmat ovat palestiinalaisia."

In the Yahoo article to which they link:

"In Denmark, a 27-year-old Dane born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents is alleged to have injured two young Israelis last week in a shooting police suspect could be linked to the Gaza crisis."

(For those who don't speak Finnish: Uusi Suomi is saying that the Israelis attacked the Lebanon-born Dane and not the other way around.)

News of the really weird

Omar Bakri Muhammed, the imam who praised 9/11 and 7/7 bombers in the UK and was subsequently encouraged to stay in Lebanon, from where he preaches through a website, has outdone himself.

He has encouraged his followers to preach Islam to aliens and spread it through the galaxy, and he said "We are obliged as Muslims to make the whole galaxy subservient to almighty Allah. Allah has created all living beings to obey him and worship him."

Oh dear... I don't know what the man is smoking, but I sure don't want any of it. On the other hand, if we could send him and his followers to the moon to preach to whatever aliens they might find out there, it might be well worth the price tag.

One could think that a guy who has an arrest warrant issued on him by Lebanese security forces would have more immediate things to worry about than conversion of aliens all over the galaxy.

A note for the really weird: if you have been persecuted for Islamic extremism in Saudi Arabia, kicked out of the UK for supporting terrorism, are being wanted by Hezbollah for terrorist activities, and you are still concerned with converting E.T. and Chewbacca to Islam, maybe you need to take a long hard look at your life, check whether the tobacco you are smoking is in fact tobacco, and schedule an appointment with your friendly local psychiatrist.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

No, no new year resolutions here.

Here we go again...

Israel has run out of patience and is striking Gaza. Not surprising really. People do get a bit miffed after about 100 mortar shells and Qassam rockets fall on their country. (No, that's not during 2007 and 2008. That's during the Christmas Eve and Christmas day.)

As always in such moments, I am wondering what a normal country would do about something like that. For example, if Qassam rockets were continuously being shot into Finland from Estonia (yeah, I know they don't really have the range), at which point Vanhanen would stop apologizing and start doing simple electoral math, for example figuring out that most voters are located on this side of the border?

The Great Infidel Holiday is upon us again

Merry Christmas!

Happy Global Orgasm Day!

Happy Global Orgasm Day!

And happy Hanukka!

The dicks and the League for Human Rights

Ihmisoikeusliitto (Finnish League for Human Rights) wants a law permitting boys' circumcision and making it available through the public health care system.

This is the League for Human Rights, not against them. Right? Let me check again. Right.

I would have thought that on the general scale of human rights the right to keep one's own body parts would rate fairly high, and the right to cut off somebody else's comparatively low, but I guess the League for Human Rights thinks otherwise. Silly me.

But first a bit about the facts:

1. The circumcision debates list all kinds of benefits and drawbacks to the procedure, but if you start to look at the studies you can see that they are all pretty inconclusive either way. The bottom line is, in the words of the American Medical Association, that "virtually all current policy statements from specialty societies and medical organizations do not recommend routine neonatal circumcision". I don't think the case should be argued on any medical merits.

2. In Finland there is no law concerning circumcision, and for a long time there was no legal precedent, either. Circumcision has been tolerated for as long as there has been a Jewish and a Muslim community, who traditionally did it among themselves without demanding anything from the public health care system, and circumcision became the subject of public discussion with the current Muslim immigration. The new immigrants understandably consider it their right to do what the established minorities have been doing for about 150 years, but often can't afford it on their own.

In 2008 the Supreme Court decided that religious circumcision is not a crime as long as it's done in a proper medical way.

But the court of course decides what the law is, not what it should be.

3. Most importantly, no country in the civilized world bans male circumcision, and our brave leaders don't want to be the first.

Back to Finnish League for Human Rights' statement.

The arguments for a law permitting and funding circumcision are ridiculous. The League for Human Rights says they don't believe that there would be any fewer circumcisions if the procedure is forbidden than there is now, and expresses concern that if circumcision is forbidden the people will turn to medically unsafe practitioners.

As a Jew, I find the implications very insulting. We are fairly law-abiding people, fairly well aware of various human rights concerns, and for the most part not very fanatically religious. Moreover, while I am most decidedly not a fan of Islam, I - unlike, apparently, the Finnish League for Human Rights - don't think that they are all criminal fanatics, either.

There is a precedent: circumcision wasn't outright forbidden in the ex-USSR, but it was made quite difficult. And guess what: most Jews there didn't do it.

For those who would circumcise their sons no matter what there are other ways to discourage dangerous methods without permitting the procedure. First of all, there is such thing as medically necessary circumcision, and I think at least some of those people will find a sympathetic doctor. Second, one way of dealing with it would be to make medically sound non-medical circumcision a fairly minor crime (battery, for example, or even minor battery) and make a medically unsound circumcision an aggravated battery, for which parents can actually go to prison.

Banning circumcision won't get rid of it completely. But if people who want to circumcise their sons will need to find a sympathetic doctor, or a sympathetic country, and possibly get a fine and/or a suspended sentence when caught, at least everyone who is in doubt or who is just doing it because it's a tradition will stop doing it. It's worth a try.

As to being the first: there used to be a time when it was legal almost everywhere to rape one's wife or to beat one's children. Finland wasn't the first country to ban those either, but doesn't it wish it were?

May he who has never done anything stupid throw the first shoe

Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi has thrown both his shoes at George Bush, for which he was beaten up by security guards, and is facing up to seven years in jail for "offending the head of a foreign state."

Damn. Hope they don't give the same sentence for verbal offenses, or else the whole country is soon in jail.

All I can say is that if you start throwing shoes at idiots you'll run out of shoes a lot faster than you'll run out of idiots.

"The evildoers shat in my pants!"

There was a joke in Russia: a general comes home from a party complaining about some lieutenant: "lieutenant X stole my slice of cake, broke my chair, took away the lady with whom I was talking..."

After the general has undressed his servant points out: "Sir, that bastard lieutenant X has also shat in your pants".

Accusing other people figuratively of shitting into one's own pants is a fairly common rhetorical device among politicians, but only Honorary Doctor of Laws (Moscow University, and many others) Robert Mugabe has managed to do it almost literally.

According to his information minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe is "genocidal onslaught on the people of Zimbabwe by the British" and "a calculated, racist, terrorist attack on Zimbabwe".

In an unprecedented move Zimbabwean government even decided to start paying salary to doctors and nurses, even in hard currency, but they have rejected the lucrative offer of $200 and $60 a month respectively.

Life

Haven't been writing much. Had a lot of work at work lately, and a lot of social life, been to a huge student organization party, a group birthday party and an Independence day party in a row. Also have totally forgotten what sleep is, and still have a bit of a flu.

Been playing with immigration-related statistics, too, and thinking too much on the current immigration topics. Probably will write on them soon though it would be fun to write about something else for a change.

Happy Independence Day, Finland!

Good thing you got out of Russia when you did. Russia sucks.

Has anyone seen 130000 tits?

Via Megan McArdle:

More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.

Statistics

The conversation about immigration is everywhere nowadays, and a lot of people are yelling at each other without bothering to check the facts. I decided that some kind of a page that lists statistics sources would be in order, and started one. It's in Finnish, but some of the links it lists have an English version.

If anybody wants to build a bigger and better one, or put this in some sort of wiki, feel free. If anybody wants me to add something to it, feel free to email me, but I am not promising that it will happen fast.