A Full Pardon

So Alan Turing was a mathematical genius who helped the British win World War II for The British with his codebreaking skills. However, after the war he was indicted under public indecency laws of the time because of his homosexuality. He was sentenced to have to take female hormones to blunt his sex drive and he killed himself a few years later.

The government of Britain officially apologized to Turing and pardoned him in 2013. Now, a new bill will be introduced by Prime Minister Theresa May to pardon another 49,000 men who were indicted under public indecency laws before they were repealed in 1967.

I always wonder if it’s worth it for a government to take time to redress something that’s long since over. On the other hand, in 2003 the United States Congress renamed french fries “freedom fries.”

Actually, one guy changed the congressional cafeteria menu, but it counts.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/alan-turing-law-government-pardon-rachel-barnes-historic-crimes-a7370621.html

They Don't Want Us to Exist

Kim Davis, a clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky is in jail right now for contempt of court. She refused to issue marriage licenses because she objected to the recognition of same-sex couples, despite a US Supreme Court decision that she should.

Less than a month ago, a Colorado court of appeals ruled against Jack Phillips for refusing to make a cake for a gay couple. Like Kim Davis, he cited his strong religious feeling as his reason for his discrimination against gays.

Putting aside for a moment three things:

1. If your religion demands that you sacrifice a child every full moon, you could not do that in America, because your religious beliefs do not allow you to break the law.

2. If you are of a pacifist faith, join the army, and then refuse to fight; you'd be in trouble not for your faith, but because if your job requires you to violate your faith, you should resign.

3. The United States does not give out permission slips from the Christian God and if you don't understand the difference between God and The US Government, you don't understand either very well. 

Folks Wanna Remove Historic Confederate Statues Now

Good.

A little background
On June 17th of this year, a domestic terrorist walked into an evening church service in Charleston, South Carolina. After an hour of listening to Americans discuss their devotion to God, he opened fire on the room. Nine people died.

He chose one victim to spare and tell others of his motivation (five others survived). The white, 21-year-old man explicitly stated that he was killing black Americans to start a race war. Photos later surfaced of him bearing the flags of apartheid states, citing quotes from the founder of The American Nazi Party, burning the American flag, and--of course--waving a Confederate flag.

It's that flag that's become this tragedy's Easy Way to Preventing the Next One (TM). We always find something to blame and kick weakly in the shins after a white guy kills a handful of folks, but for once the target is a reasonable one. Making the Confederate flag a less common sight won't change the pervasive racism and cultural cowardice that filled this shitbag with the idea that murdering people would make him vaguely fuckable to women.

And some of that has spread further, to a desire to take down statues of Confederate generals which we apparently have aplenty down here. As a Southerner and a veteran of the US armed forces, screw The Confederacy. Screw their flag. Screw their generals. Screw each and every article of Confederate iconography.

But not the horses they rode in on; I don't think Traveller was racist.

Evening News: Josh Duggar

TW: This article contains mention of sexual abuse against minors.

If you're reading this, you have probably never heard of Josh Duggar. He's the eldest of 19 kids, all of whom are the stars of TLC's reality series “19 and Counting.” In light of an InTouch article, Duggar admitted that when he was 14 and 15 he molested five girls, including his own sisters. His public admission included an apology and an admission of the harm he'd done. Time Magazine's timeline is essential.

So another celebrity openly and honestly admitted their mistake after it became public and undeniable. Who cares? Josh Duggar has made a career of proselytizing. The faith of the Duggar family has been central to their lives and for Josh, that's included an opposition to LGBT individuals. The man who as a teenager molested girls and publicly admitted the harm he has done has for years accused homosexuality of being inherently harmful to children.

And it's not limited to him. The friendly cop his dad eventually reported the abuse to? Serving time for child pornography. That cop's report? Destroyed days after these revelations. While running for state representative, his dad claimed that rape and incest should be punishable by death, but took over a year to report that his daughters were being molested by his son. Bill Gothard, friend to the Duggars and head of their homeschooling program? Accused of molestation and covering up child abuse.

A single article pulled on the thread named Josh Duggar, and with his actions made public, an ugly sweater is coming unraveled. These men protected by faith reveal the hypocrisy of holy rollers whose religious fandom and numbers give them the temerity to encircle and mercilessly call out the openly deviant few, but leaves them blind to the monsters behind them, and begging for mercy when they stumble.

The Battle for The Hugos

Every year since 1953, the World Science Fiction Society has given out The Hugo Awards for notable works in science fiction. Categories like Best Novel, Best Graphic Story, and Best Dramatic Presentation have been given to Star Trek, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and even The Avengers.

Nominations and winners are voted on by members of the society, who either pay to attend the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) or who buy a membership. A few thousands folks and a handful of rules assign some of the preeminent awards in science fiction to works and writers. 

Like most election systems, The Hugo Awards are not, nor have they ever been, marks of absolute quality. They designate the works which are able to garner the votes of the most WSFS members. They're marks of what's most popular that year among a handful of science fiction fans. Granted, you'd be hard-pressed to argue against the quality of those winners.

Hell, you pick one.

Back in 2011, a writer by the name of Brad Torgerson lost the Hugo for Best Novelette to Charlie Jane Anders, noted female and LGBT+ proponent. The following year, Torgerson teamed up with fellow Hugoless writer Larry Correia to address a problem Torgerson's website characterizes as

"...the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters."

Linkstorm: Lightning Round!

So a boy known as "Kunkun" has been ostracized by his rural, Chinese community. China is a big, diverse country and it's really mind-boggling to try to take all of it in. Anyway, the Chinese government did that thing that communist governments should do and stepped in to take care of the kid.

Hopefully, it'll end up like the story of Quian Hongyan, also known as "The Basketball Girl." After losing her legs in a car accident, her impoverished family couldn't afford to buy her prosthetics. Instead, they used basketballs to act as a contact patch for her lower torso. In 2005, her story was covered by the press and she was contacted by a Beijing clinic dedicated to helping disabled, low-income individuals.

It's nine years later, she's a minor celebrity and intends to represent China as a paralympic swimmer. She hopes the publicity she's gotten will help change attitudes in China towards the disabled.

Charlie Hebdo

The really big headline is the attack on the satirical French publication, Charlie Hebdo. Two gunmen, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, stormed the offices, killing ten staff and two police officers on January 7th. Over the next two days, their cell was uprooted and five more French citizens were killed before the Kouachi brothers and another terrorist, Amedy Coulibaly, were trapped in two separate locations in northern France.

Deep Space Nine: Always Relevant

"Once my troops are in place, I think you'll find it very difficult to get them to leave" indeed, Gul Dukat.

News News: Crime and Punishment

Most mornings, I sit down with my cup of coffee and open up a long list of news sites. The news doesn't always affect my daily life or educate me about the world, but it does reliably fuel a daily two minutes of cathartic hate. In an ongoing effort to entertain inform my readers, I thought I'd highlight some of this week's past stories.

Also, the images are designed for display on the blog. If you're reading on an RSS feed, you can set your background color to #222222 and/or your radio frequency to 104.15 to view it properly. 

In The Hauge, former Liberian President and alleged Lord of War, Charles Taylor was finally found guilty by an international court on 11 counts of aiding war crimes, including charges of rape, torture, using child soldiers, and murder. 

In 1989, he began a rebellion in Liberia, taking control of most of the country within an year, and supporting a rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone within the next. His services to the Sierra Leone rebels by supplying them with fighters and trafficking Sierra Leone diamonds. The court found his aid was rendered with knowledge of their war crimes, despite his claims that he tried to lead the rebels to a peace deal.

When shitbags like Slobodan Milosevic and Kenneth Lay dodge an open trial because even their hearts don't want to be near them any longer than necessary. When there's no trial that would expose their crimes and publicly label them as the criminals, then others see that there are no consequences for men of power who let their greed and ambition hurt others. Even Muammar Gaddafi and Osama Bin Laden got off easy with bullets to the face. The only development close to this one was the trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein, but I guess here in the States, we don't often equate hangings with justice.

Still though, awful lot of assholes going down these past ten years.