Pages

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

Tiny (URL) Tips (2009)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

 Who would have thought a wee little packet of fake blood could threaten to unravel an entire culture. But so great is the threat of the “Artificial Virginity Hymen” — a kit that helps women fake their virginity — that prominent Egyptian conservatives are calling for an all-out ban. Not only that, they are also demanding the exile of anyone who traffics it.

  
“What creationists believe about human origins we get from the Bible,” said David Menton an acclaimed anatomist and also a creationist. “The creation of the world takes place on page one of the Bible. If you throw out the first page of the Bible you might as well throw out the whole thing. If you can’t live with the first page then pitch out the remaining thousand pages.”

  
The gap between wealthiest 10 percent and the rest of America is worse than at any time on record. Two thirds of all income gains from 2002-7 went to the top 1 percent. The Walton family alone is worth more than the bottom 100 million Americans combined. Wal-Mart is a major player in the “dead peasants insurance” game; it’s alleged that dead peasant insurance payouts are used for executive bonuses:
[Dead Link.]

  
Amnesty International has highlighted a case of a man facing execution in Texas. The human rights group has revealed a Texas man faces execution after jurors at his trial consulted the Bible when deliberating his fate:
[Dead Link.]


  Israel is making preparations to carry out military attacks in Iran after December, a French magazine reported overnight Wednesday:
[Dead Link.]

  
That Haiti needs the attention cannot be overstated. Unemployment hovers at around 70 percent, experts
say, and over half of the population lives in extreme poverty. Violence broke out in June as students demanded an increase in the minimum wage to $5 from $1.75 — which were daily rates, not hourly ones. Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh, make it so appealing:

  
When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism. About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about Capitalism turned out to be the truth.”
[Dead Link.]

  
We are fast approaching the time of the next great battle over evolution. The Neo-creationists will be corporations, and they will argue that they could not possibly be descended from human beings…The rape case of Jamie Leigh Jones was just a logical step forward in the long-standing Republican effort to lock Americans out of the nation’s courthouses, an effort undertaken on behalf of corporate supremacy. A woman is gang-raped by her fellow employees at government contractor KBR. The company says her contract prohibits her from seeking justice in court.
[Dead Link.]

No comments:

Post a Comment