Women of the World, rest easy! The United Nations has chosen the next country to join the Women Rights Council to defend your rights: Iran. That’s right, the nation that beats women in the street, allows the raping of women in custody (here), raids human rights organizations (here), stones women to death (here), arrests women for “satanic” clothing styles (here), bans makeup on television (here), enforces segregation based on gender (here), searches for women with tans to punish (here), and blames women for earthquakes (here) will now sit on the United Nations Women Rights Council.
After putting Libya on the Human Rights Council and makes Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann the United Nations General Assembly President (here) seems to have an bottomless capacity for irony. Next it will make North Korea a member on a political rights commission.
The Commission on the Status of Women'(CSW ) is dedicated “exclusively to promote gender equality and advancement of women.” What is incredible is that Iran was elected without a single voice heard in dissent.
For the story, click here.
Elaine,
In Re: Hope for the World (Laughing Buddha Remix Mash Up)
“Everything is transitory. Enjoy that sandwich.”
(Vocal samples from Siddhartha Gautama and Warren Zevon. Musical samples from Marilyn Manson, Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, Slim Whitman, Sly and the Family Stone featuring Debbie Gibson on vocals and vibraphone.)
On the serious side, I think Siddhartha would likely offer this practical advice: One cannot hope for a better world tomorrow without working for a better world today. With enough hands pushing that rock, it gets to the top of the hill called justice. However, it will always fall again. Then those of good conscience will either band together and push toward a just society again or they will leave the stone be as they are bedeviled by bad actors and thus anarchy and barbarism are born anew. By seeking the compassionate in one’s self and then fostering the compassionate in others, one seeks to place as many hands on the stone as possible to make sure that rock, no matter how many times it falls, always makes it back up that hill.
mespo & Byron–
Here’s an interesting article I read this morning;
From The Boston Globe (May 1, 2010)
Wall Street’s game of risk with Greece
by Richard Parker
Excerpt:
THIS WEEK the US Senate finally started getting around to changing the rules that led to Wall Street’s disastrous meltdown two years ago. But debate over the so-called Dodd bill is gridlocked, even though no one thinks the bill is strong enough to stop Goldman Sachs and company from doing again what got us to where we are today.
Meanwhile, as Washington bickers, Europe is starting to burn. A once-small budget crisis in Greece is metastasizing so quickly that it’s now threatening to plunge not just Europe but America and the world back toward the global fiasco we faced two years ago.
Six months ago, Greece discovered a big budget problem — the deficit its outgoing conservative government handed over last fall was going to be more than 12 percent of its gross domestic product. The new government immediately announced massive wage, pension, and spending cuts, painful tax hikes, and deadly serious tax enforcement. It pledged to cut the deficit to 3 percent in two years — guaranteeing a draconian hangover that will produce a painful and protracted recession.
Until last week, Greece had scrambled to borrow enough money to cover its deficit, while swiftly bringing that deficit down. The rates Athens paid were painful, but with promise of European and International Monetary Fund aid earlier this month, there was light at the end of the tunnel.
Enter Wall Street. After two years of nearly unlimited government bailouts but no government reregulation, briefly sobered Wall Street speculators were ready to start partying again. Last year, amid 10 percent unemployment and millions of home foreclosures, banks and hedge funds booked record profits and paid out record bonuses. And they made such fortunes by doing, it turns out, the same sort of trading-floor gambling that nearly destroyed them and us in 2008.
Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2010/05/01/wall_streets_game_of_risk_with_greece/
Elaine M.:
“In addition, I doubt that free market capitalism can turn evil, hard-hearted, greedy sociopaths into generous and kind individuals who care about others.”
******************
Who do you think perverted Adam Smith’s idea of free markets? Smith just forgot what Hobbes told us in Leviathan:
…in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
“Man gives indifferent names to one and the same thing from the difference of their own passions; as they that approve a private opinion call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy: and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
(…)
During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.
To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.
No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
Free market capitalism freed from the restraints of thoughtful men is simply economic warfare. One should feign no surprise when all manner of incivility and excess is excused with the plea, “It’s just business.”
Byron–
I asked: “I ask you: Is there any hope for our world?”
You answered: “yes, it is called free market capitalism and the rule of law.”
Not quite sure how that would help women who are subjugated in Muslim countries that live by the rule of law…Sharia law.
In addition, I doubt that free market capitalism can turn evil, hard-hearted, greedy sociopaths into generous and kind individuals who care about others.
🙂
Forgot 🙂
I am afraid to go outside, because pigs must be flying!
or leaving comments on Turley’s blog. See above
Elaine:
“I ask you: Is there any hope for our world?”
yes, it is called free market capitalism and the rule of law. 🙂
WTF? I don’t know what else to say. How in God’s green earth did Iran get on anything related to women’s rights? I am afraid to go outside, because pigs must be flying!
FFLeo:
Ah, my favorite country song:
It aint easy being easy
Oh no
You are the one who took my heart & my soul
You walk away & left me out of control
It aint easy being easy
Oh no
Joe & Buddha–
What is this? A case of primate facie?
**********
I ask you: Is there any hope for our world?
Joe,
Now you’re talkin’! 😀
chimpIRANzee?
Nah, North Korea is going on the Disarmament Commission. It’s graciously volunteered to handle the disposal of any nuclear weapons itself, that’s so nice of Kim!
To women everywhere:
Well wow…..is this some strange manifestation of misplaced hopefullness?
Elaine,
I kinda have to side with Joe on this one. Let me tell you a story I’ve heard about primates from a primatologist.
What happens if you give a chimpanzee a screwdriver?
He’ll use it to kill another chimpanzee.
What happens if you give a gorilla a screwdriver?
Nothing. He’d likely run away from it in fear.
What happens if you give a orangutan a screwdriver?
He’ll use it like a screwdriver.
The story ends with the question, “Now guess which primate humans are most like?” The answer: chimps.
The country of “Irangutan”: an insult to primates everywhere.
I want to know who put the hallucinogens in my coffee this morning. Surely I’m not reading this correctly.
What a joke!
Say what?
New name for this country: Irangutan.