The Blog of Record

From here.

In March, Italy will open the first prison designed exclusively for transgender inmates. Interesting tidbit: most of the 30 transgender criminals were convicted for prostitution or drug-related offences. Victimless crimes – if you don’t count the taxpayers, who are left with the bill for building the prisons and keeping the prisoners in.

The reason why the divorce rate is down: no one can afford to keep the house?

A recession is a bad time to get divorced — especially if your home has sunk in value along with the rest of the housing market.

Last year, the divorce rate in the U.S. fell 4% after rising 7% in 2007, according to a report released recently by the National Marriage Project. Although the news might cheer family advocates, it suggests something else to project director W. Bradford Wilcox: that couples with depreciated home values might be waiting to split until the market rebounds.

Hmm, I wonder if their religion has anything to do with it:

Pashtun men commonly have sex with other men, admire other men physically, have sexual relationships with boys and shun women both socially and sexually — yet they completely reject the label of “homosexual.” . . .

The U.S. army medic also told members of the research unit that she and her colleagues had to explain to a local man how to get his wife pregnant. 

The report said: “When it was explained to him what was necessary, he reacted with disgust and asked, ‘How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean, when one could be with a man, who is clean? Surely this must be wrong.’” 

The Pashtun populations are concentrated in the southern and eastern parts of the country. The Human Terrain Team that conducted the research is part of a military effort to learn more about local populations. 

The report also detailed a disturbing practice in which older “men of status” keep young boys on hand for sexual relationships. One of the country’s favorite sayings, the report said, is “women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” 

The report concluded that the widespread homosexual behavior stems from several factors, including the “severe segregation” of women in the society and the “prohibitive” cost of marriage.

Yeah, you could say that homosexual behavior is widespread in Afghanistan when even the Taliban is flamin’ gay:

No, really. Climate scientists say so. Must be true.

They look like a bunch of happy folks.

No, not a joke:

When it comes to hiring staff, there are plenty of legal pitfalls employers need to watch out for these days.

So recruitment agency boss Nicole Mamo was especially careful to ensure her advert for hospital workers did not offend on grounds of race, age or sexual orientation.

However, she hadn’t reckoned on discriminating against a wholly different section of the community – the completely useless.

When she ran the ad past a job centre, she was told she couldn’t ask for ‘reliable’ and ‘hard-working’ applicants because it could be offensive to unreliable people.

Mrs Mamo, a divorced mother of two, added: ‘I had to battle to have “must speak English”, which they also said was discriminatory.

You never hear about ridiculous PC tyranny like this in any of the new democracies in Eastern Europe, nor in some third-world hell hole like Russia or Yemen. No, it’s always a declining Western country that, by habit, calls itself a democracy. Usually Britain.

Government-provided health care: cancer sufferers are denied treatment because it’s deemed too expensive, but their taxes are used to pay for a 16-year-old’s sex-change operation.

“Health care was supposed to be done by August, now it drags on forever, like Stalingrad!”

Homeopathic A&E – a sketch from the fourth episode of series three of “That Mitchell and Webb Look”, a British television sketch show.

Field of Dreams in Italian: If you won’t come, we’ll take it apart:

It’s all in the name, as one blogger realized all the way back in August:

As the Democrats in Congress are struggling to get the rest of America on board with their proposed health plan, I can’t help but wonder if a better name wouldn’t help. Take a page from the Republican playbook. They give bills names that are loaded with meaning and are difficult to vote against without looking bad. Who would vote no on something called No Child Left Behind? Who wouldn’t support the USA Patriot act? So I propose that the Senate rename their bill the American Legislative Insurance For Everyone act, a.k.a. the American LIFE act.

Who could vote against the American LIFE act? What Senator wants to be up for reelection and hear their opponent ask “Why did you vote against American LIFE, Senator?”

I bet they wouldn’t be praying for a miracle in Massachusetts today had they heeded this advice.

Oh, wait:

I floated the idea on Twitter and while many people thought it was a good idea, others rightly pointed out that the word “For” is often omitted from acronyms, so Republicans could just call it the American LIE act.

Those pesky Republicans, always getting in the way of a good lie.

Haiti six days after the quake: looters in knife fights with other looters, piles of bodies being dumped into mass graves, doctors amputating legs with hacksaws, and looters stealing bags from other looters killed by police. And a man renting cell-phone chargers by the hour:

Haiti earthquake victims in a field hospital, many in critical condition and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses leave them to die Friday night because the United Nations had ordered the medics’ evacuation out of security concerns. They even took most of the medical supplies with them:

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN)– Earthquake victims, writhing in pain and grasping at life, watched doctors and nurses walk away from a field hospital Friday night after United Nations officials ordered a medical team to evacuate the area out of security concerns, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta reported.

U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said Saturday that the world body’s mission in Haiti did not order any medical team to leave the Port-au-Prince field hospital. If the team left, it was at the request of their own organizations, he told CNN.

Gupta assessed the needs of the 25 patients, but there was little he could do without supplies. And more people, some in critical condition, were trickling in.

Gupta monitored patients’ vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition.

“I’ve never been in a situation like this. This is quite ridiculous,” Gupta said.

He reported that the doctors and nurses began returning Saturday morning.

With a dearth of medical facilities in Haiti’s capital, ambulances had no where else to take patients, some who had suffered severe trauma — amputations and head injuries — under the rubble. Others had suffered a great deal of blood loss, but there were no blood supplies left at the clinic.

Gupta feared that some would not survive the night.

He and his television crew stayed with the injured all night, long after the medical team had left, long after the generators gave out and the tents turned pitch black.

Gupta said the Belgian doctors did not want to leave their patients behind but were ordered out by the United Nations, which sent buses to transport them.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, said the evacuation of the clinic’s medical staff was unforgivable.

“We can’t be leaning so much toward security that we allow people to die,” he said Saturday.

“Search and rescue must trump security,” Honoré said Friday night. “I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. They need to man up and get back in there.”

Honoré drew parallels between the tragedy in New Orleans and in Port-au-Prince. But even in the chaos of Katrina, he said, he had never seen medical staff walk away.

“I find this astonishing these doctors left,” he said. “People are scared of the poor.”

If those contemptible U.N. bureaucrats were so concerned about the doctors’ security amid reports of looting – why didn’t they send some of these armed “peacekeepers” you see in the video to protect them while they tried to save lives? And what kind of doctors leave their patients to die, even if ordered by a bunch of U.N. scum? What would have the “peacekeepers” done if they had refused to leave – shot them?

If you are surprised by the U.N.’s appalling inhumanity, remember the 2004 Asian tsunami when these world-government wannabes announced they’d be moving in with aid – but not before building a town for U.N. staff complete with all the comforts and conveniences they were used to, including a movie theater. The U.S. military, meanwhile, was bringing aid on Navy ships and helicoptering it ashore.

UPDATE: The CNN article has been updated and now says that the Belgian medics’ chief coordinator said it was his decision to evacuate them. He says the U.N. declined his request to provide security personnel for the night and told him the “peacekeepers” would only be able to evacuate the team. Why does the U.N. keep armed men in Haiti if they are not available to protect doctors trying to save people who are bleeding to death?

Goel Ratzon, 60, is alleged to have kept the women and children as slaves in squalid apartments around Tel Aviv, and suspected of fathering children with some of his own daughters. How did he manage to get so many women? He picked Orthodox Jews and told them he was the messiah.

If you want your life back from Facebook, Twitter and the rest, this Web site will help you delete all your social-networking profiles and kill all your virtual friends in one go. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn are currently covered.

“Tesla, in short, is cool”, while “Edison is so 20th century”:

Decades after he died penniless, Nikola Tesla is elbowing aside his old adversary Thomas Edison in the pantheon of geek gods.

When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors, they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was a scientist and inventor who achieved fame and fortune in the 1880s for figuring out how to make alternating current work on a grand scale, electrifying the world. He created the first major hydroelectric dam, at Niagara Falls. He thrilled packed theaters with presentations in which he ran high voltage through his body to illuminate a fluorescent light in his hand. His inventions helped Guglielmo Marconi develop radio.

And his rivalry with Edison—called the Battle of the Currents because Edison had bet on direct current—was legendary. Tesla won the contest, when his AC equipment powered an unprecedented display of electric light at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Fifty years later, the 86-year-old Serbian emigré died in obscurity at a New York hotel, unmarried, childless and bereft of friends. Meanwhile, Edison was lionized for generations as one of America’s greatest inventors.

But Tesla has been rediscovered by technophiles, including Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page, who frequently cites him as an early inspiration. And Teslamania is going increasingly mainstream.

An early hint was “Tesla Girls,” a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film “The Prestige,” alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as “more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way.”

Well, Edison’s name is synonymous with capitalism, and capitalism is way unhip these days:

“I can’t imagine writing a song about Edison…too boringly rich, entrepreneurial and successful!” said Andy McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, in an email. He calls Tesla “a romantic ‘failure’ figure.”

When my kids grow up, do I want them to be entrepreneurial, rich and successful, or do I want them to be approved of by Andy McCluskey, a founder of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark? Hoooo boy, do I have a tough decision to make.

A doctor describes several examples of vitamin D’s miraculous effects on health he’s observed in his practice. They range from making one immune to viral infections to reversing severe aortic valve insufficiency and even curing claustrophobia.

Some interesting stories in the comments, too.

Compare this:

and this:

Well, Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, not “Don’t be a coward”.

(From here and here.)