Segacs’s World I Know

Here, we prefer our police and firefighters drunk on beer.

And for those people who aren’t like the couple below… Canada has decided to allow the “morning-after pill” to be sold over the counter. This just over a week after a similar move was blocked in the U.S. due to lobbying by the pro-life groups who like to slander any kind of birth control besides abstinence.

I’m in favour of the Canadian move. Yes, better birth control education is essential. But there’s got to be something wrong with taking away options for women who are raped, or people whose method of birth control doesn’t work (e.g. a condom breaking), or simply for people who are too stupid to be having kids anyway. A fifteen-year-old who can’t figure out how to use a condom should not be having a child. The medical evidence says that this pill is safe enough to be sold OTC, so the politics should recognize that and not put up unnecessary roadblocks.

How to know when sex ed is severely lacking in some people’s educations…

London – A German couple who went to a fertility clinic after eight years of marriage have found out why they are still childless – they weren’t having sex.

[ . . . ]

A clinic spokesperson said: “When we asked them how often they had had sex, they looked blank, and said: “What do you mean?”.

“We are not talking retarded people here, but a couple who were brought up in a religious environment who were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate.”

(Hat tip: West Coast Hippie)

This one’s floating around the blogosphere for good reason: For anyone who claims the security fence has no purpose, here’s visual proof of its effectiveness.

CP slobbers over Michael Moore‘s film Fahrenheit 9/11, a “documentary” (and I use that term loosely) that seeks to blame the Bush family for September 11th:

As promised, Michael Moore lit a powder keg Monday at the Cannes Film Festival: His incendiary Fahrenheit 9/11 riled and disturbed audiences with a relentless critique of the Bush administration in the post-Sept. 11 world.

If Moore can get the movie into U.S. theatres this summer as planned, the title Fahrenheit 9/11 could become a rallying cry in the fall election for voters hoping to see Democratic challenger John Kerry defeat President George W. Bush.

The article goes on to basically worship Moore and buy all of his lies hook line and sinker, including the whopper about Disney blocking its distribution. It also pays little heed to Moore’s critics:

Yet Moore – the provocateur behind the Academy Award-winning Bowling for Columbine, which dissected American gun culture – packages his anti-Bush message in a way that provokes both laughs and gasps.

[ . . . ]

Even those skeptical of Moore, who has drawn criticism that he skews the truth to fit his arguments, were impressed.

“I have a problematic relationship with some of Michael Moore’s work,” said James Rocchi, film critic for DVD rental company Netflix, saying he found Moore too smug and stunt-driven in the past. “There’s no such job as a standup journalist.”

Yet in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore presents powerful segments about losses on both sides of the Iraq war and the grief of American and Iraqi families, Rocchi said.

“This film is at its best when it is most direct and speaks from the heart, when it shows lives torn apart,” Rocchi said.

Oh, spare me.

As a current resident of the former limits of the city of Montreal, my signature on the register this week will probably be pointless. But if you’re living in the former municipalities of DDO, Côte Saint-Luc, Hampstead, Pointe-Claire, TMR, Westmount, Montreal-West, Kirkland, Beaconsfield, Baie d’Urfé, or any other municipality that was forcibly merged into the Montreal megacity disaster, then this is your one and only chance to right the wrong and restore democratic principles.

I’ve ranted about the mergers before. I know the deck is stacked against the demerger. Biased studies making it seem like the demerger will be more costly are funded by the supposedly-neutral referendum committeee. The lists for each municipality include names of people who have been dead for ten years. The lack of door-to-door registration means that people who are immobile can’t come out and sign. The 10% requirement is going to be a tough nut. Though early reports are encouraging for some municipalities, others are still missing a lot of signatures before a referendum will even be able to be held.

But I think that people are angry enough, and committed enough, that they may just pull it off despite all that. So if you’re reading this and you are eligible, make it your business to sign the register in your local city hall or designated location by Thursday. It’s a small action but it could mean a lot.

The Nicholas Berg story has been getting so much coverage by the rest of the blogosphere, it seems redundant for me to say much. See Allison on how the Iraqis knew Berg was Jewish and Meryl on what the mainstream media won’t cover. And of course, LGF has been all over the story.

The angles are many. The fact that Berg was Jewish and the fact that the mainstream media is burying that. The media’s fascination with gore and the almost exclusive focus on one man’s death while major horror stories are ignored. The reaction in the street and press of the Arab world, and the reaction in our own press and street. But I think the most significant part of this story was how Berg’s family rushed to blame Bush for his death, and how the wingnuts like Indymedia immediately jumped on the story:

The Chomsky types, perhaps feeling a nagging sense of latent guilt, could not wait to make it clear to everyone how horrified they were by the whole scene. However, their hatred is not motivated by a disgust of the hideous practice, nor the brutality of our Islamist enemy; it stems from the fact that the terrorists’ action makes it harder for the Left to place the blame for Berg’s death “where it belongs”: on the United States of America.

It can’t be too difficult to understand why a grieving family might lash out. For them I have little else other than sympathy. But for the conspiracy theorists who tried to make it seem as though the American administration, and not sadistic terrorists, were responsible for this gory act, my sympathy doesn’t extend quite that far. I have a very different reaction to them… one more characterized by contempt than by sympathy of any kind. It’s not such a stretch to see why the whole world thinks that “Bush is worse than Saddam”, with this kind of moral-equivalency nonsense floating around.

Update: As usual, Damian Penny put my thoughts into much better words than I could.

Lynn B. is taking a break of unknown duration, to try to sort things out:

When I started this blog, it was in the hope that it would help me to make some sense out of the bloodbath being perpetrated against Israel and the inexplicable indifference and even approval with which most of the rest of the world was responding. It’s not working. In fact, my attempts to keep on top of events and to interpret their implications are only turning me into a bigger bundle of nerves than I was before.

[ . . . ]

At any rate, this is a roundabout way of saying that I’m taking a mental health break of uncertain duration. I’m hopefully going to be spending more time in the garden and actually talking face-to-face with people and less time in front of this box. Maybe that will help. We’ll see.

Lynn’s commentary is some of the most sensible on the web. And I for one will miss her.

But as for trying to explain the inexplicable, well, I sympathize. Sometimes the world just seems so nuts and upside-down, it’s challenging to my sanity to even blog about it. So I take breaks. I focus on work. I hang out with friends, see stupid movies, read paperbacks, travel, go out, visit family, and do other normal everyday events of my life.

Somehow, though, I keep coming back. The world isn’t going to make any more sense than it did before, but maybe it’s about the small triumphs, the accomplishments that in some tiny way do help to make sense of even one sliver of the world. Or maybe it’s just an addiction. In any case, I have a sneaking suspicion (and a hope) that Lynn will be back soon.

There’s a certain category of people – mostly women – who seem to be inexplicably attracted to the scummiest of bottom-feeding scum. And nowhere is that truer than among relationships between prisoners (often murderers on death row, or sadistic serial killers, for example) and the people who love and even marry them.

So it doesn’t surprise me too much that Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzchak Rabin, is engaged.

But now he’s asking permission to have kids through artificial insemination:

Yigal Amir, assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, plans to ask the Tel Aviv District Court on Monday to allow him and his fianc e, Larisa Trimbobler, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and a divorced mother of four, to have children through artificial insemination if the court forbids them from holding conjugal visits, Channel 2 reported.

Amir is serving a life sentence for assassinating Rabin in 1995, while his brother, Hagai, is serving a 16-year jail term for complicity in the murder.

Amir’s attorney Shmuel Kasper said his client will ask the court to be permitted to marry and to hold conjugal visits, but if his requests are denied he will ask to be allowed to undergo artificial insemination, a request the prosecution will have difficulty arguing against since there is no apparent security risk in donating sperm.

In fact, it would seem an odd request, if one didn’t know that Amir is an ultra-religious wingnut who believed that killing Rabin was the “will of G-d”. Words fail me to describe the level of contempt in which I hold pond scum like him. But at any rate, his twisted religious mind somehow had a foundation in Jewish law, which dictates that he should “be fruitful and multiply”. And I guess this poor idiotic woman is willing to help him out.

In my opinion, he shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. But I don’t see how the courts would realistically deny him this right. That’s democracy for you… you can assassinate a Prime Minister and still get married and have children. Sometimes things just seem backwards.