Kitty Says Moo

From the Times of London:

AN overseas holiday used to be thought of as a reward for a year’s hard work. Now Brussels has declared that tourism is a human right and pensioners, youths and those too poor to afford it should have their travel subsidised by the taxpayer.

Under the scheme, British pensioners could be given cut-price trips to Spain, while Greek teenagers could be taken around disused mills in Manchester to experience the cultural diversity of Europe.

The idea for the subsidised tours is the brainchild of Antonio Tajani, the European Union commissioner for enterprise and industry, who was appointed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister.

The scheme, which could cost hundreds of millions of pounds a year, is intended to promote a sense of pride in European culture, bridge the north-south divide in the continent and prop up resorts in their off-season.

This of course follows the EU’s discovery of Greece’s right to be subsidized the rest of the EU.

Jonathan Springston, a senior reporter for the Atlanta Progressive News, was fired from the online news service because, according to an email from the site’s editor to Creative Loafing magazine, Springston

“held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

Objective reality is so old-school.

You think the Euro-Nannies are bad? The Australian Government, looking out for citizens, is now regulating breast size in porn:

The Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as ‘abhorrent.’”

The Board has also started to ban depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. This is in response to a campaign led by Kids Free 2 B Kids and promoted by Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett in Senate Estimates late last year. Mainstream companies such as Larry Flint’s Hustler produce some of the publications that have been banned. These companies are regulated by the FBI to ensure that only adult performers are featured in their publications. “We are starting to see depictions of women in their late 20s being banned because they have an A cup size”, she said. “It may be an unintended consequence of the Senator’s actions but they are largely responsible for the sharp increase in breast size in Australian adult magazines of late”.

This just in:

Mia Farrow has ended her hunger strike to show solidarity with the people of the war-hit Darfur region of Sudan, because of “health concerns”.

In a statement posted on her website the 64-year-old said: “I have been instructed by my doctor to stop my fast immediately due to health concerns.”

Of course, the point of a hunger strike is precisely that it does put the striker’s health at risk. The most devoted hunger strikers have died in the process, a move certain to bring embarrassment and change when directed against a humane opponent. And oh yes- people have to know you’re actually on a hunger strike.

I’m sure that upon learning of Ms. Farrow’s brief hunger strike Sudan President Omar al-Bashir was moved to say, “Mia who?”

I was listening to Terry Gross interview actor Gabriel Byrne, who appears in a drama about a psychotherapist entitled “In Therapy” when I was struck by something Gross said that struck me as, well, even dumber than usual. She was gushing over Byrne’s portrayal of a therapist, and uttered words to the effect that she would like to go into therapy herself, as it just looked so neat. It immediately occurred to me that this was sort of like watching ER, and saying you’d like to have an emergency tracheotomy or a heart transplant done on yourself as it looked so fascinating.

But then, the sort of therapy that Byrne mimes on his show and that Gross idealizes has always been more of a luxury of the moneyed classes than actual treatment for a disability. It’s just a wonderful, endless voyage of self discovery, and unlike traditional voyages of discovery, you don’t actually have to do anything other than sit in a chair and talk about yourself.

As I thought about that,I couldn’t help but be reminded of a witty quote from P.J. O’Rourke: “Earnestness is stupidity gone to college.”

Around 25 years ago the Chinese government started putting strict limits on how many children a couple could have. Couples- particularly in poorer regions- reacted by doing more sex determination tests and aborting females, since they wouldn’t be able to contribute as much financially to the family as would male children. And so, as you might expect, China now has a shortage of women, with perhaps 30 million more men than women of marriageable age. This in turn has led to increased social instability and an great rise in the kidnapping of women to be wives- more than 42,000 kidnapped women and young girls have been freed by Chinese police, and they’re probably only scratching the surface.

You would think that the rest of the world would have learned from this example. But then,. you probably didn’t account for all those utopian thinkers now being employed by Western governments, as the Times notes:

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming. He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

A report by the commission, to be published next month, will say that governments must reduce population growth through better family planning.

Yet another academic who didn’t read Brave New World. Or perhaps he did, in which case I expect a lot worse coming down the pike soon.

Not, that’s not an insult from a tribe of nomadic Central Asian shepherds, or a song from the late night Cable TV edition of Sesame Street. It’s a genuine medical fact, courtesy of WebMD, and is #3 in a charming article entitled 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Your Penis. #1 is of course “Your Penis Does Have a Mind of Its Own”. As if we didn’t know that already.

Your tax dollars at work (from Ars Technica):

(The) Camera Phone Predator Alert Act (H.R. 414), introduced into Congress this month by Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. The bill’s text says that Congress has found that “children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.”

What’s King’s solution? One year after the passage of the Alert Act, all mobiles with cameras made in the United States must emit a “tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone.” And the legislation would forbid manufacturers to program an option that would allow consumers to disable the noise.

If King’s proposal was actually enacted into law and signed by the President, it would be enforced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose staff would have to figure out what kind of “tone or other sound” to force manufacturers to hotwire into their devices. The CPSC would also have to determine the aforementioned “reasonable radius.”

This isn’t a unique idea. There’s also been some discussion of requiring electric cars to produce a sound like an internal combustion engine in order to alert pedestrians- particularly blind pedestrians. The camera idea is, however, distinguished by being especially stupid.

Somehow I missed this great story from Discovery:

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world’s oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany.

A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects.

I was hoping there’d be something in the story about the 7th Century BC being the period when takeout food was invented in China, but no such luck. “Egg rolls… oh, yeah. Two of those. No, a dozen. And a bag of those dumplings…”

My favorite quote from the article:

Scientists are unsure if the marijuana was grown for more spiritual or medical purposes, but it’s evident that the man was buried with a lot of it.

Listening to Elizabeth Alexander read her poetry at the inauguration, I couldn’t held but think that the new President has yet to learn a lesson that I learned many years ago: Don’t hire someone just because you went to school with them. Not that much modern poetry is all that good, or even all that tolerable. Most seems to be really boring prose, broken up into irregular line lengths, with the odd colorful word thrown in for effect:

I went
to the bathroom
this morning
after
a night of drinking
and it was there
that I
polychromatically
decorated
the bowl

If you think writing this kind of bad poetry is easy, you should try it. I find I have to keep stopping myself from writing rhyming stanzas or being too clear. Granted, it flows easily from the pens of some- like our new President, whose undergraduate poetic stylings were featured in the New York Times:

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

The Times article notes that the poem above was featured in the Spring 1981 issue of “Feast,” a 51-page student literary journal that described itself as “a semi-annual journal of short poetry and fiction collected from the Occidental College community.” The Times article then adds that “The journal is no longer published”, to which I would add “to no one’s surprise.” Luckily for the rest of us, the President decided his core competencies lay in other directions.