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wMonday, December 31, 2001 |
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posted by
Christopher Bird at 1:02 AM
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From The Guardian in London:
Now, for the first time, a systematic independent study has been carried out into civilian casualties in Afghanistan by Marc Herold, a US economics professor at the University of New Hampshire. Based on corroborated reports from aid agencies, the UN, eyewitnesses, TV stations, newspapers and news agencies around the world, Herold estimates that at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between October 7 and December 10. That is an average of 62 innocent deaths a day - and an even higher figure than the 3,234 now thought to have been killed in New York and Washington on September 11.
Of course, Herold's total is only an estimate. But what is impressive about his work is not only the meticulous cross-checking, but the conservative assumptions he applies to each reported incident. The figure does not include those who died later of bomb injuries; nor those killed in the past 10 days; nor those who have died from cold and hunger because of the interruption of aid supplies or because they were forced to become refugees by the bombardment. It does not include military deaths (estimated by some analysts, partly on the basis of previous experience of the effects of carpet-bombing, to be upwards of 10,000), or those prisoners who were slaughtered in Mazar-i-Sharif, Qala-i-Janghi, Kandahar airport and elsewhere.
posted by
Christopher Bird at 12:38 AM
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posted by
Christopher Bird at 12:04 AM
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Odd thing I like to do: see if "amateur" porn sites are for real.. (Real meaning in this case "yes, these are actually amateur pornographers rather than the usual fifteenth-storefront-for-massive-porn-empire.com.") So here's "www.modeltexans.com" (I'm not going to link to it. I have standards. If you want to see it, cut-and-paste it yourself, you lazy perverted bastards) and I'm going through it and running it through the usual "is this real" questions out of curiosity. (No snickering. All the good stuff, as usual, is pay-only, and I have better things to do than masturbate to thumbnail JPGs.)
Okay. Let's begin.
1.) Does the site feature an improbable collection of pretty "teens" who "just love to show off how they fuck and suck"? Well, yes, obviously. Otherwise I wouldn't be looking at it early in the morning. (Internet pornography is better than coffee, you know.)
2.) Do said "teens" look to be in their mid-twenties but with kiddie haircuts and maybe carrying lollipops or something? And here the answer's no, which is the first point of diversion. I mean, really, if I had a dollar for every popup porn site that had barely-dressed "girls" with giant lollipops in Sailor Moon outfits, I would be a rich, rich man and would have a servant to do this sort of thing for me.
3.) Does the site offer any proof of age for said "teens"? And this is interesting because this is the second point of diversion - the webmaster and head porn girl person actually scanned her ID card and put it up for all to see (although I'm not sure what the point of blurring her day of birth is when she's already let us all know she was born in January of 82). Now, obviously, it's dead easy to get fake ID. The question is whether or not a porn site would actually be so incredibly desperate for hits that they'd stoop so low as to fake it. (And the answer there is probably yes, given how bad things have gotten for the net-porn industry in general.)
I'm going to sit on the fence as to whether this one's another site that's just trying a new tactic to get the dirty old men to pay up - or not. There are arguments both for it being real (the site's porn girls all seem kind of skankily realistic, and for a porn site, I don't see a lot of the usual "cum-guzzling facials!" copy that you grow inured to after a month or so of the usual surfing) and for it being fake (for crissake, am I really supposed to believe that a bunch of high school girls in Texas have nothing better to do with their time than make porn for extra money? I mean, aren't Texans rich? If it was Missisippi, I could believe it more easily).
In any case, let me just say that the world, for better or worse, has come a long way since Jennicam was a major source or erotic thrills.
posted by
Christopher Bird at 8:09 AM
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posted by
Christopher Bird at 7:24 AM
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