meehawl

On one wall is a “Star Trek” poster with investigators’ faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the [paedophile] offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie. Det. Constable Warren Bulmer slips on a Klingon sash and shield they confiscated in a recent raid. “It has something to do with a fantasy world where mutants and monsters have power and where the usual rules don’t apply,” Bulmer reflects. “But beyond that, I can’t really explain it.”

I called the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit and spoke to Det. Ian Lamond, who was familiar with the LA Times article. He claims they were misquoted, or if that figure was given it was done so jokingly … Detective Lamond does claim that a majority of those arrested show “at least a passing interest in Star Trek, if not a strong interest.” They’ve arrested well over one hundred people over the past four years and Det. Lamond claims they can gauge this interest in Star Trek by the arrestees’ “paraphenalia, books, videotapes and DVDs.” … Paraphrasing his answer, he said, while there was sometimes other science fiction and fantasy paraphenalia, Star Trek was the most consistent and when he referred to a majority of the arrestees being Star Trek fans, it was Star Trek specific.

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Slate has a story about an apparently racist “Nogger Black” bar (black on the outside!) being sold in Sweden by a Unliver subsidiary. Which reminded me of “Golly Bars“, AKA Golliwog Bars. These were a staple of growing up in Dublin that Unilever (through its subsidiary HB in Ireland) sold as a vaguely ice-cream-textured treat with an ugly blackface wrapper. What the fuck is up with Unliver anyway? In later years, HB/Unilever changed the “Golly Bar” and abstracted the blackface into a rather impressionist design to try to obfuscate the Golliwog’s nasty origins, finally changing completely to some lame polar bear or something. I think possibly my first awareness of racism, and of institutionalised racism, came when I was all of 5 or 6. I was sitting there wondering why some of my ice pops had pictures of dracula, or bunnies, or cows but for the life of me I couldn’t understand why this one had a picture of a person with dark skin who didn’t look very happy at all. I remember asking my parents and getting a vague answer that didn’t satisfy me. I decided to stick to the Dracula Pops, because there was a serious ice pop I could get my teeth into! Besides, HB’s version of “ice cream” bore more of a resemblance to flavoured cardboard than anything else. Just don’t get me started on Minstrels chocolates! And oh yeah, Unlever also does a brisk trade in “skin whitening” creams in many Asian countries where the paler you are, the posher you are, apparently.

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A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now … It now appears that, far from improving the quality of life for Iraqi youngsters, the US-led military assault on Iraq has inexplicably doubled the number of children under five suffering from malnutrition. Under Saddam, about 4% of children under five were going hungry, whereas by the end of last year almost 8% were suffering.

Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished … Jean Ziegler, a UN specialist on hunger who prepared the report, blamed the worsening situation in Iraq on the war led by coalition forces.

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850 KB/s in BitTorrent downloading speed from UKNova, NiteShadow, and BitComet. A new personal best.

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John Cornyn, a rather obnoxious US Senator, has suggested that it’s somehow understandable how *some* people might be driven to kill “activist” Judges who make unpopular decisions. Reminds me of how Stalin solidifed his control of the judiciary in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s…

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I’ve just discovered that Dispensationalism (the kooky and dangerously twisted strand of religious fundamentalism unnervingly popular in the United States) was invented by an Irish guy, in Dublin: one John Nelson Darby no less. We’re really sorry. Dispensationalism preaches the fairy-tale notion of “Rapture”, which is a bit like being abducted by aliens or elves, instead this time it’s God. The idea that they will escape a whole lot of shit coming down the pipeline apparently gives many fundamentalist christians licence to abdicate responsibility and let the environment and civil society go to hell because, well, it’s going to turn into hell anyway. Or something like that. Some of the weird “prophecies” within dispensationalism are also to blame for some of the less rational bone-headed foreign policy moves by successive US governments, especially with regards to the Middle East.

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