You know there is something horribly wrong with your life when you don’t even remember getting up at 7:41 am to your beeping alarm, and resetting it to wake you up 3 hours later. That means I missed a class, just barely made it to another… but did manage to get more than 4 hours of sleep last night. Yay. (And I fell asleep in the Carpe Diem [atheist, agnostic, non religious] club tonight. Oops. President was not impressed… was *really* not impressed when I retorted wtih "yeah well your heirarchial group is stupid.")

So, I’m just going to do a bit of a linky link round up then I’m going to bed, because I have reset my alarm to go off at 7:41 again for tomorrow, and I actually need to get up this time. I skip my 8:30 am class all the time.

E.O Wilson does an interview with Grist Magazine about his religious experiences and environmentalism and all that jazz. Speaking of interviews, tomorrow around this time I will be posting an interview that I did with Mr. Levy today. …Its taking me forever to edit it because we both say "um" so often, and we got in an argument at the end of it that I want to 1/2 use, but I can’t use all of it because we’re jerky to each other. Stupid Alon.

Amanda posts about Bush lovin’ all them fellow yankees to death, and links to a really really interesting post by Lindsay. Aww. Sometimes, I really don’t want to move to America.

Jessica, rightfully so, gets pissy about this article. I had my doubts about third wave feminism for a while… but I’m starting to see the good behind… most of it. It’s a tricky ‘wave’ but whatever. People need to stop trying to put labels on things and just lets us have goddamn abortions.

I think I really give off the impression that I read the same 3 or 4 blogs every day, when really… I never ever link to the one I read the most… but I will today. Kos did an interesting post on Doolittle today. And actually his midday open thread from today is probably the best one thats been posted in a while. One that was posted, not by Kos… but at daily kos, is a really good read - Do We Need An Atheists’ Right Movement? Good schtuff.

I think McBoing is my favorite poster at punkass. (I’m quite the fan of Marc aswell, it’s a toss up.) I liked this post from him today, (well actually this is the post…) Have I ever done my celebrity rant on here before? I don’t think so. I’ll get around to it eventually. It’s midly entertaining. Modonna (who says her adoption was legal, dammit!) is one of my favorites to attack… (well, post-awesome feminist stage).

It’s being blogged about everywhere, but I’ve decided that I like the post at Feministe the most about it. Yes, she was asked to remove her veil, yes that was stupid, yes religion is stupid. Grr.

Ahh, and there is SO MUCH NEWS. I’ll just post the one article… its actually the only one that I read all the way through. but trust me… there is SO MUCH NEWS!! Anyway - the Tigers are agreeing to talks, and I think thats nice. …I also think I’m overtired because I seem to think it’ll help the probelms in Sri Lanka.

And finally, I remember a time when I used to actually care about hockey. Now I don’t, however, I do have this horrible heart sinking feeling when I see Peter Forsbergs team lose 9-1 against Buffalo. Tragic… ‘k, maybe I still care a little. But I have less time and a lack of TV this year. (Forsberg apparently weighs 4 more lbs this year btw… I …hate that I know that. And he’s only gotten 2 goals this year. Seriously Peter. You used to be good.)

*Update* Tamil Tigers… d’oh.

Tomorrow night (Wednesday) from 5 - 6 (or 8 -9… if you’re in the eastern time zone, where most of my readers are) I am doing an interview with Jessica from Feministing. You can listen to it live here if you have winamp. If you don’t have winamp, I suggest you get it, because it’s far superior to all other music players. If you have any questions that would really embarass Jessica on air, feel free to e-mail them to me. Bwa ha.

Im at the station right now, and I’m the only one here. It’s lonely. Feel free to stop in and say hello. I’m all by myself until 3 pm!! Oh dear. I wonder if I can go take a nap in the on air booth…(there is a couch in there…) But more likely I’ll go peruse the 40 000 cds in the cd library. Err, I mean…do work…

*UPDATE!!!* it is being reschedualed. I will post when I have more info.

The Athiest Mama does a review on the movie Jesus Camp.

They had a man come in with a red shirt that said “Life” and he handed out “Life” bracelets to all of the kids and then gave them all little plastic fetuses that were supposedly 7 weeks gestation. Then they had them all praying and crying hysterically. He told them that 1/3 of their friends couldn’t be there with them because they had been murdered.

How scary is that?

Tell me, in what sense it is right to tell a child that people in the world are murders because they were raped, or too young, or not ready. The events that are shown in Jesus Camp are child abuse. This makes me so happy that I wasn’t hired at Kenesserie - I know that I wasn’t a part of something like this. It is heart breaking to see so many children being SENT to evangelical camps to be trained just as children in Islam are. The women who leads the whole thing, Becky Fisher, said that her goal is to have children ready to lay down their lives for god.

She gets the children into this overwhelming emotional frenzy. The children are literally scared. They are scared that they are displeasing god, and they are scared into believing that they need to repent and have their sins washed away and to get rid of the demons that are dwelling within them. It is internalizing a fear of people who are different from them. They are NOT being taught values, and NOT being taught the religion… they are flat out being abused.

Perhaps if the children understood the religion, and if they understood the doctrine behind their manipulation it would be a different. But this is what abusers do. A man who beats his wife makes her scared to leave and makes her emotions so overwhelming that she wont leave. Sex abusers get children by invoking in them emotions which they don’t understand, but they think they’re alright because they don’t know better. They are manipulated and forever branded by these intense emotions - this is what the people at Jesus Camp do to the kids.

The last clip in this post is really really scary for a couple of reasons.

1. What if that women had a gun in her purse and wanted to shoot the little girl for preaching to her.
2. "Good job way to be obediant"… Encouraging a little girl to just listen and do what she is told is wrong on a million different levels. Say the girl she walked up to was a rapist, and told the little girl that god was saying to bring her a gift, but she had to come to the car to get it. …Okay, I know, bad example. But she’s been taught to be obediant, and she’s been taught that whatever god says is the right thing. So what is to stop her from going?

Today Women On Air (my radio show) had an interview with Samantha King, the author of the book Pink Ribbon Inc. The interview was only about 15 minutes long, but Samantha brought up a lot of really great points. And I personally recommend reading the book. Its a fast read, its informative and really interesting.

Basically, the book deals with all of this breast cancer stuff that we see going on today. The pins are everywhere, there are pink yogurt lids, commercials, runs…everything. Its not that these are bad things, raising awareness for breast cancer is really important, but not harmless.

A few of the things Samantha brings up in the book are where the focus of cancer fundraising goes to, and why, the people that are displayed in breast cancer ads, and the cost of those ads. The thing that really opened my eyes to my naive outlook on things was that the company that provides treatment for cancer patients, is one of the main contributors to funding in breast cancer research and advertising.

From that you can see a few problems that would arise. They push for more funding to go into treating the disease instead of preventing it, when obviously prevention would be a gazillion times better. Also, the advertisments that they’re putting out to spread the word about breast cancer is spending a giant chuck of fundraised money. So the charity groups are becoming big corporations, and it was really easy to tell how hard that was hitting Samantha.

Another thing that she brought up in the interview was who the advertisments focus on. There are never any overweight women, or stereotypically normal or ugly women. They’re all very idealistic, which I had never realized before because I was always looking more for the information when it comes to breast cancer ads. But I am brought back to my last women’s studies class where someone raised a picture of a girl topless, a very young, very attractive women with just her hands over her breasts, and at the very bottom in teeny tiny letters, it said "breast cancer is no joke". Should glamour and beauty really be used in raising awareness on such a horribly sad issue?

I found this post at blog her about the book. check it out. and read the book.

Disturbing factoid: This year in America, more than 211,000 women
will be diagnosed with breast cancer and 43,300 die. One woman in eight
either has or will develop breast cancer in her lifetime. In addition,
1,600 men will be diagnosed with breast cancer and 400 will die this
year. If detected early, the five-year survival rate exceeds 95%.
Mammograms are among the best early detection methods, yet 13 million
U.S. women 40 years of age or older have never had a mammogram.