MADD just sent out the following e-mail to their supporters. They want to give Grand Theft Auto (GTA) an adults only rating because it features the crime of drunk driving (apparently all the murder, car jacking and other crimes in it are just fine with MADD). “Drunk driving is not a game and not a joke” they say. Apparently only responsible adults should drink and drive. It isn’t appropriate for “youth”.

Oh wait, wasn’t MADD supposed to be opposed to drunk driving for *everyone*? So why then would the game’s rating matter? Why does MADD think it is somehow more acceptable for adults to drink and drive than youth?

Why also do they think limiting free speech is somehow an acceptable tactic in their anti-youth and anti-alcohol crusade?

MADD is encouraging their members to write the retailers below to pull GTA4 from shelves. You’d be surprized what a few pissed off complainers can accomplish. Don’t let MADD have the only say on this subject!

Write those same retailers and tell them that GTA is just a game and they shouldn’t stop selling it because a few mad mothers are upset over it. Write them and tell them to stand up for free speech.

MADD’s e-mail:

Each year nearly 13,500 people die in drunk driving crashes and
another half a million are injured in alcohol-related traffic crashes.
This is why MADD is extremely disappointed by the decision of the
manufacturers of the game Grand Theft Auto IV to include a game module
where players have to drive drunk.

Drunk driving is not a game and it is not a joke. Drunk driving is a
choice, a violent crime and it is also 100 percent preventable. MADD
is calling on the Entertainment Software Ratings Board to reclassify
Grand Theft Auto IV as an Adults Only game, a step up from the current
rating of Mature and for the manufacturer to consider a stop in
distribution if not out of responsibility to society then out of
respect for the millions of victims/survivors of drunk driving.

If you are concerned about the content of Grand Theft Auto IV, please
contact the retailers below and voice your opinion.

Amazon.com
206-266-1000
Online contact form
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html

Best Buy
612-291-1000
Online contact form
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=cat12104&type=page

Circuit City
804-527-4000
Online contact form
http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/genericContent.do?oid=209855&c=1

EB Games and GameStop
817-424-2000
help@gamestop.com

Wal-Mart
479-273-4000
Online contact form
http://www.walmart.com/cservice/cu_commentsonline.gsp?cu_heading=8

MADD Thinks Only Responsible Adults Should Drink & Drive

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080428/COL04/804280375

If you watch much television, you’ve probably heard of a product called Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

And if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.

The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte’s ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.

Even if, in hindsight, that decision seems a bit, um, idiotic.

Ratte is a tenured professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan, which means that, on a given day, he’s more likely to be excavating ancient burial sites in Turkey than watching “Dancing with the Stars” — or even the History Channel, for that matter.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn’t even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

Clearly it was an honest mistake, everyone involved seems to recognize it except the ones who removed the kid from his parents. Even if it wasn’t a mistake, the kid didn’t seem to have any ill effects from the alcohol, tests didn’t even show any in his blood, so there was no danger. This is absurd.

Happened at Comerica Park too.

Hahahah.

KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.

“You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,” Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.

“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.

“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

I came across a post on Apolyton from a Communist, Atheist, Slovakian who made a thread declaring himself to be Islamophobic and no longer ashamed of it. Points were raised about how Europe was gonna be a majority Muslim in 20 years, as is often said. Then the conversation turned to ask why the United States hasn’t had any issues with Islamic extremists. The reply was that we have lots of Christian extremists instead (which is a whole other level of BS but I didn’t address it). Someone rightly pointed out that the best equivalent to Europe’s Muslim “problem” is Blacks and other various races here.

I think that is a more accurate comparison. But things have changed a great deal in the last 40 years. Heck, we are likely to see a black president in the next year. So not only have we made tremendous progress over the last 40 years, the size of the “problem” we have here is larger than Europe.

Everyone talks all the time about how Muslims are “taking over” Europe. It is utter nonsense. Lets look at some numbers:

Muslims are 7% and 8% of the population in France, 5.8% in the Netherlands, 5% in Denmark, just over 4% in Switzerland and Austria, and almost 3 per cent in the United Kingdom.

If we use blacks, or even all non-whites, as our American equivalent the numbers are strikingly different.

In the United States blacks make up 12.2% of the population (much higher than any country in Europe). Plus Hispanics make up 14.8% of the population and Asians/Indians/Mixed/other are another 13.64%. So in total, non-whites are over 40% of our population.

Unlike the crazy predictions in Europe, it is far more likely and certain that in a few decades there will be a non-white majority. And the majority of us are ok with that.

Also, of that 60% white population we are still not nearly as homogeneous as individual European countries either. Italians, Germans, Brits, Russians, French and all the rest make up our white population. All sorts of different religions and demoninations too. That alone caused trouble in the past, but now we’ve totally gotten over it. Soon we’ll be entirely over the race thing too.

If France is having riots and predicting doom & gloom with 7 to 8% Muslim population, my advice is to get a fricken grip.

Or maybe all you elitist Eurocoms should stop and think for a moment about your conservative, bigoted, redneck, backwards cousins across the pond. Then perhaps you’ll realize that we have far more successfully, humanely, and comfortably stitched together a cosmopolitan and tolerant culture than Europe ever has or will. We certainly have had many problems along the way, but we’re stronger and better for it. Our nation didn’t come crashing down because of our diversity we became the world’s only super power.

So, in summary:

USA
Diversity
Muslims
Islamic radicals
Europe

First seen at Apolyton, this is a fairly perceptive bit of ad placement:

Last night Instapundit picked up my appearance on Fox News a week or two ago:

SEVEN STATES THINKING OF LOWERING THE DRINKING AGE: They should. And the Federal government should get out of the business of trying to regulate state drinking ages, a subject of no legitimate federal concern whatsoever. it’s also telling that MADD wouldn’t even appear on camera to argue the other side.

Apparently TownHall.com picked it up too (which is where Glenn found it). It is great that he noticed MADD’s conspicuous absense from the piece. Apparently this is their new strategy, ignoring us in hopes that we’ll just go away.

It is a marked departure from their strategy this last fall when they considered this new push to lower the drinking age such a threat they created a coalition specifically to fight us (us being NYRA and Choose Responsibility). They held a press conference and announced their intention to fight to keep the drinking age where it is. It was an amazing tactical blunder.

With all the money, resources, clout and manpower they have, they felt threatened enough by us to go on the offensive. Of course it backfired horribly for them and ended up putting the issue of lowering the voting age into the press even more, giving us lots of free press. The media were surprised too, they couldn’t believe MADD would feel so threatened by this push to lower the drinking age that they’d start up this whole coalition to oppose us.

So now they’ve rethought their strategy and have been refusing to appear on any programs to discuss lowering the drinking age. After giving us tremendous credibility by opposing us directly they hope that they’ll deflate us by ignoring us. Sorry folks, the genie is out of the bottle now, this movement is not going away.

Gandhi had a great quote about this phenomena:

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.

MADD is doing things out of order. First they ridiculed us, then they fought us, and now they are ignoring us. One way or another, we are gonna win.

The evidence countinues to mount that the drinking age has been a failure and the denial of equal rights to young adults is too glaring an inconsistency for many Americans. The movement continues to grow, more and more people are becoming convinced that this is the right direction to move into.

MADD is more scared than they’ve been in a very long time.

Even though MADD itself refuses to debate us (because they know they’ll loose) their founder continues to open her big mouth in opposition to us (and in opposition to our troops as well). Hopefully Glenn will take notice of this comment by Candy Lightner on the Mike & Juliet Show.

Stefan had an excellent response to her comment. Also, Marty Beckerman wrote up a good reaction to it on Radar.Maybe MADD does have the right strategy. If their people (or former people) are going to get on national television and stupidly insult all of America’s armed forces (past and present) then it is probably best that they don’t show up to debate us. The more people realize how low their opinion is of Americans, our troops, and our youth, the more people will realize MADD is out of touch and completely wrong on this issue.

In response to the article I quoted in my last entry, Jason had this to say about Obama:

What all the fainting, name chanting, yes-we-can-ing, cult of personality stuff does is boost an empty suit riding on a wave of “hope” and “change” no one with two brain cells can believe in, to the highest office in the land.

At risk of following you down the rabbit hole of thread jacking, Obama made a fairly honest and cogent defense of his “hope” and “change” platform at the last debate. Despite the attacks of his critics he does indeed have many specific policy objectives. Overall they aren’t terribly different than Clintons (with the exception that Obama isn’t going to force people to get health insurance or go on the government dole, which I very much like), but he is taking a different approach selling it.

His argument was that to make substantial policy change it is essential to inspire and motivate the public. To build grassroots support. Politics and leadership is more than pie charts and bar graphs.

Is he selling the American public short to play to their emotions and try to inspire them instead of appealing purely to logic? Perhaps. But I think he is completely correct about the American electorate. Those that want to read his detailed policy objectives can look them all up on his website. Will most Americans do so? No. It doesn’t matter what kind of speeches he gives, most voters, sadly, aren’t going to pay attention to the details. I can’t tell you how to fix this problem, but you can’t blame Obama for recognizing it and creating a political strategy that fits the reality of voters in this country.

It is a strategy that many credited to Bush in the last 8 years. Many analysts say that he was very light on details and policy specifics compared to Gore or Kerry, but he reached average voters at the gut level and inspired trust, hope, patriotism, what have you, and so they voted for him. At the same time he appealed to the emotions and being a “good ol’ boy” he derided his opponents as egg-heads too concerned with policy and numbers and out of touch with what “real Americans care about” (whatever that means).

So you can’t blame Obama for doing what Bush has done so successfully in the last two elections. Heck, even Reagan, I believe, spoke more in broad strokes than in policy details and was heralded for it.

So just because Obama doesn’t include the minutiae of his health care plan in his stump speech doesn’t mean those details don’t exist. It is our duty as educated voters (as opposed to the rest of them) to seek those details out.

On the issues I have a fair amount of disagreement with him (as I do with most all candidates of any party), but I don’t fault him for his approach.

Interesting article critical of women. Basically makes the case that women are crazy and inferior to men (and written by a woman to boot). I find it interesting not because of the central argument of the article, but some of the evidence she provides and what implications it has for youth rights.

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

She prefers to focus on the fact that women get into more accidents, but I think the more important gender imbalance is the riskier driving habits of men and the fact they are far more likely to be in a fatal auto accident than women. This is exactly the claim made against teen drivers. Why don’t we ban men from driving? Or require restrictions on their licenses? Maybe men should have a limit on how many people they have in the car while driving. Or we should limit what hours they are permitted to drive.

The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men’s and women’s brains not only look different, but men’s brains are bigger than women’s (even adjusting for men’s generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid.

So men’s brains are more advanced than women’s. Men have a higher capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning. Why then are women allowed to vote? Or do many other tasks in society? Arguments about youth’s deficient brains have spurred the passage of many anti-youth laws. Why don’t we as a society care about those same brain inequities between men and women?

Clearly the arguments for anti-youth rights laws are hollow. They are after-the-fact justifications for people’s anti-youth bias. If their arguments are to be believed then we must turn the clock back 200 years and deny rights to a whole host of other groups in society.

The real answer though is that none of this matters. Women were not granted rights because their brains were determined to be sufficiently advanced enough to warrant suffrage. Curfews on blacks were not repealed because they proved they could handle the responsibility of being out after dark without committing crimes.

These laws changed because we are all human and fundamentally equal before the law. No one “deserves rights” we have them innately. They are common to us all and are inalienable. To deny rights to youth is as unjust as denying them to women.

Link:

Hampstead TV executive Cat Le-Huy is facing four years in a Dubai jail after hashish weighing less than a grain of sugar was found in his bag.

Friends and family have been told this week by the Dubai authorities that the Garnett Road businessman faces being imprisoned after a microscopic trace of the drug was found in dirt in his bag.

Mr Le-Huy, head of technology at Endemol, makers of big Brother, has been held for three weeks without charge after flying into the United Arab Emirates on January 26.

At first customs authorities said he was being held for carrying suspicious jet leg pills, but they now allege finding 0.03grammes of hashish - an amount so small it can’t be seen by the naked eye.

A fighting fund has been set up to cover Mr Le-Huy’s legal fees with £25,000 already flooding in from friends, family and supporters.

“I am sure if I went to Shepherds Bush where he worked and picked up some soil I would find traces of drugs and it’s such a small amount it could even be off someone he brushed past,” said friend Radha Sterling.

We have asked for independent testing of the dirt and to know what equipment they are using but they have refused. Personally I don’t think there are any drugs whatsoever.”

Dubai authorities have successfully applied to hold 31-year-old Mr Le-Huy him until the end of March - when he faces being charged and served a UAE mandatory drug sentence of four years behind bars.