Iraqi Women's Bodies are Battlefields

The United States' so-called "liberation" of Iraqi women has made them less free than they were under the Baathist regime, with abduction, rape, and "honor" killings now a daily reality.

Here is the full article. How would someone have the heart to strangle someone with wire, drag them to a football field, and use their dead body for target practice? It makes my tongue feel like a weight in my mouth and my stomach catch in my throat. It kills me to hear of these "honor" killings and how, yet, we're "liberating" the Iraqis. Why are we even still in Iraq? Shouldn't we be worried about freeing people in our own country?

No Child Left Behind

Really, I do think No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a great idea overall, but you can't list all of the problems. I just read an article about how a woman can't teach because 40% of her class doesn't have books, and the students that do have books have books that are rotting and/or falling apart. Mind you, these books are provided by the school. Here are the problems I have with NCLB, written in a nice summary. These points are from the article mentioned above.

NCLB misdiagnoses the causes of poor educational development, blaming teachers and students for problems over which they have no control.

NCLB uses pseudo-science to justify policies and programs that are damaging public education-including diverting taxes away from communities into corporate coffers.

NCLB rates and ranks public schools using procedures that will gradually label them all "failures" by creating unrealistic Adequate Yearly Progress goals, which set schools up to be "saved" by vouchers, charters, or privatization.

Maybe when there's a "No Child Living in Poverty", "No Child Without Food", "No Child in an Abusive Home", "No Child Without Healthcare", No Child Left Behind might be considered.

Fox Reporter: Girls are Nasty

Oh dear Goddess. Fox25 from Boston made this segment about Harvard possibly having gender-neutral housing. If you don't want to click on the link, here's some of the great comments from the commentator, Doug V.B. Goudie.

One of the anchors was saying how a male and female student had the same study times, sleeping patterns, etc.
Goudie: Are they going to have that time of the month together too, because what guy would sign up for this other than one that has that issue?
What the fuck? So only a guy with a vagina would be near a girl?

Goudie: I went to Hamilton where we had coed bathrooms which by the way weren’t so groovy either for the ladies. Why not up the ante? Oh hey Gene, I’m Stacey, I’ll be your roommate, I’ll put up some lilac curtains and I have some potpourri over here...are you kidding me? Life’s tough enough once you get into the real world.

Anchor: What does she (Stacey) look like?

Goudie: Harvard... she’s smart...so how good can she look?

Oh, that is... that is really classy. Really classy guy we have here.

World Vision Online Donations: Ways to Give

I was going to wait until tomorrow to post again, but this site inspired me so much that I couldn't wait. You can help a child in need for sixteen to one hundred dollars a month and be sent pictures and letters about that child. I would much rather get a card that says, "You sponsored this child in South Africa" during the holidays than some gift that I don't even need.

Please, think about this as Christmas is coming up. Children all over the world need help and you have the choice: you can buy gifts or you can buy a child food. This program is a step in the right direction, people. You can help.

"Nobody is safe."

Today I read the article "No Safety for Women in Iraq" and I almost threw up. It's so disgusting, how American soldiers treat women. I really can't believe someone would have the heart to threaten anyone like this.

"I was taken by Americans for three days recently," Um Ahmed said in Baghdad. "They told me they would rape me if I didn't tell them where my husband was, but I really didn't know."

She said that she was turned over to the Iraqi National Guard "who were even worse than the Americans."

Her husband eventually surrendered to the U.S. military, but she continued to be held "to apply pressure on him to confess things he never did," she said. "They told him they would rape me right in front of him if he did not confess he was a terrorist. They forced me to watch them beat him hard until he told them what they wanted to hear."

The number of kidnapping have increased drastically since the two kidnappings in 2004. Many women that are kidnapped are raped, beheaded, or never seen again. There is a piece of the article that is a woman's 20-year-old son saying that he wished she had never been released because he found her body torn to pieces later in the year.

Disgusting.

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