Via Feministing…this incredibly sexist ad is… gross.

I think my favorite thing is that Jessica saved it as ‘flirtmyass’ hahaha, summed up in one file name.
To brother andy: this is the kind of ad I was talking about - why does THIS need to be the type of ad that is being put out there? "Make your girl friend drink this and she’ll be on her knees all night! woo!"

It’s incredibly maddening, and heartbreakingly sad.

Kyrgyzstan’s government is allowing domestic violence and the abduction
of women for forced marriage to continue with impunity, Human Rights
Watch said today in its first report
on human rights violations in this Central Asian country. "Police in
Kyrgyzstan have an obligation to ensure that perpetrators of domestic
violence and bride-kidnapping are brought to justice," said Holly
Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "But
more often than not, they simply don’t treat these as serious crimes."

Based on in-depth, firsthand interviews with victims of violence, the
report tells the stories of women who have been kicked, strangled,
beaten, stabbed and sexually assaulted by their husbands. The report
also tracks what happens when women seek help from the authorities.
Instead of attaining safety and access to justice, they are encouraged
to reconcile with their abusers.

Reconcile with their abusers! Reconcile! For fucks sakes.

The report also describes how women and girls are being kidnapped — sometimes by men they do not know — for forced marriages.

Arnold did good.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law several bills relating
to women’s health that were brought forth by Bay Area legislators, according
to a statement released today.

One bill, authored by Assemblywoman Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa,
seeks to keep the personal information of patients and employees of
reproductive clinics off the Internet in certain circumstances.

Wee! And more…

Other bills relating to women’s health signed by Gov. Schwarzenegger
included a law to protect a women’s right to timely access of
prescription drugs, regardless of a pharmacist’s ethical concern; a law
to mandate health care coverage for the HPV test; and a law to raise
standards for hospitals that collect breast milk from mothers for their
own children, CBS reports.

Go Arnold! The main thing here that I like "regardless of a pharmacist’s ethical concern". Damn straight.

Flash advertising is used to summon our emotions, in a 15
second commercial you’re told what you want by making it appeal to you very
basic wants in life. Advertising tells us how to think in addition to what we
want and why we want it. How? Easy. A diamond is advertised as ‘forever’. Who
wants a marriage or a love that lasts any shorter than forever? No one. Through
ploys like this advertising has given us what we want. Or at least what we
think we want.

When you ask someone what they crave out of life, it’s not
uncommon to get a response like “family” “love” etc. rather than “a really
great diamond”. So how is it that we go from love and family to diamonds and
beer? Ads show us ‘the good life’, they play up on what we desire. Beer ads demonstrated
the fantasy of a man and connect with the eroticism that is looming within.
Food ads show us good health and family times. Investment ads portray lovely
long happy lives ending in Hawaii.

They’re grasping on our inner desires and rechanneling these feelings from the
target audiences. Ads are how people are dreaming, they’re taking up our
emotions and selling them right back to us. Instead of focusing on that love,
that family and that happiness we’re focusing on an illusionary vision of what
we need to have in order to have the perfect and accepted love, family and
happiness.

In a way I’ve always seen advertising as exceedingly
comparable to religion. It sets up a false goal in order to control as many
people as possible. Through false themes and stories it invokes psychological,
social and physical ideals in people’s minds that they feel like they have to
follow. It is the ‘object’ world, or the ‘distant’ world interacting and
influencing the human world at the most basic and fundamental level. These
magical feats of enchantment and transformation bring instant ‘happiness’ and ‘gratification’.
It’s a passport to the surreal, and easy out to saying you’re happy and content
with life.

Just like with Christianity, you can say you’re living your
life to its fullest if you are living that life in regards to Jesus Christ, it
is the same with advertising. A lot of people would say that they’re living
their life to the fullest and greatest potential when they are the most happy –
but this happiness is streamed from false resources, just as Jesus is.

But for some reason no one ever stops to look at the imagery
in advertising and at the horrible effects it’s having on extremely important
aspects of life. The most obvious one is gender identity. Ads show men and
women, and as time progresses they are showing men and women in more explicit
and erotic ways. They don’t show how each person thinks in the ad, the man or
the woman is not an individual they are the standard for their gender and they
are portrayed and presented as how we think they think.  And don’t even get me started on how
incredibly disgusting and wrong some of the sexuality can be in advertising and
the complete objectification of women…. I’ll be going on for days.

Another issue with advertising and its flashy emotion
invoking ways can be phrased into one question: In 1988, would George Bush have
won the election with out ad campaigns? Politics are directly affected by advertising;
we see that a lot now, a ton of money has to go into political party campaigns
just to cover advertising costs. But what do the ads really say about them?
They just appeal to emotions that are already in us through one or two really ‘radically
based’ political stances. You don’t get the full picture – you get a false
representation of what is supposedly going to make you happy and solve all your
country’s problems.

Our younger generations are being hurt so badly by these ads
too. No longer are kids seeing toys that help them to experience life, be
curious and inventive, instead they are seeing toys in which they can play out
a fantasy world that they see on TV or in movies. For example, when I was a
little girl I played with toilet paper rolls. Yes, toilet paper rolls. I don’t know
where I got the idea, but I would collect all the toilet paper rolls in the
house, and I would draw faces on them, make houses out of them and I would
really use my imagination to play. But now, you can just go out and buy a Lilo
and Stitch doll and play out the entire movie. There is no more imagination in
play time, no time to grow and develop the child’s own mind. When I worked at a
day care there were 2 year olds on the computer for over ½ an hour. …I couldn’t
believe it.

What I think is the worst kind of advertising today is that
crap that gets thrown into music videos. Nelly wrote an entire song that was an
advertisement; I’m of course talking about his song “Air Force Ones”… a song
about shoes that became insanely popular after the release of his song. This
just ruins music. I think it is a Missy Elliot video, (I think…) where you
watch part of the video through a Nokia phone. When I think back to New Kids on
the Block, or Vanilla Ice there was nothing they were selling, they didn’t want
you to go out and dress like them or get ‘grills’. It was about their music.
(Alright stop. Collaborate and listen, Ice is back with my brand new invention.
Something grabs a hold of me tightly flow like a harpoon daily and nightly…….yes,
I know the entire rap by memory, and will continue it after the fold… mwa ha
ha. You should hear me rap it!)

It’s one of those things that so many of us know are
horrible for our society. The earth literally can not stand to have these
consumer driven populations anymore – but there is no stopping it. The false
reality, advertising acting as god, is too satisfying for people, so we live
with one more idiocy of the world that is just going to help us in our
inevitable self destruction.

Read the rest of this entry »

I collect elephants, I’d take pictures of some of the ones that made it across the country but… I just turned my light off and got into bed and I’m not getting back out. But anyway I have a little stone box with two elephants carved into to the top of it.

The box is made out of soapstone, a metamorphic rock. I think it’s one of my favorite rocks. It’s most predominante elements are magnesium and iron so you’d think it would be really hard, but it’s not at all. On the hardness scale (which goes from 1 - 10, 1 generally being classified or compared to talc and 10 being compared to a diamond or gold.) I believe it is around a 3. When you touch it… even non polished soapstone even feels really really soft, like soap! Sort of like talc, only talc has a greasy feel almost.
It can also abosorb a lot of heat, so it is used around fireplaces a lot and if you go to a pot shop they’ll likely have soapstone pipes.

Actually talc and soapstone commonly form together. In the Mid-Atlantic region there were/are talc-rich soapstone deposits which in some areas got up to be about 90% talc forming in really thin layers. And the petrofabrics of the soapstone were really similar to srrounding schist which would suggest the soapstone formed prior to the Taconic metamorphic event of the area. In the particular area that I’m talking about the Mg of the rock was around 50-80% where the Fe was…20-50% (although it might be 25 - 50, or 20 - 55 %…I don’t remember)

Ah, what the hell, I was going to do a post on cute elephants and it went all geology on me. Pfft, whatever, moral of the post - elephants are awesome and are probably plotting to take over the world.