Category: In the News

Although the methodology for various purported cures for “the gay” varies, the result they promise is the same: that you’ll go from this…

…to this:

Here’s a video of a CNN report featuring a gay cure [2.3MB QuickTime] promoted by one Richard Cohen, M.A.. The fact that those two letters constantly appear after his name on his books should be your first warning. In my experience, people who insist on adding their degree letters after their names — especially if that degree is a master of arts — are more often than not low-watt bulbs who either know how to work the systems of academia or went to sub-par universities.

Your second warning should be that the exercises he demonstrates are so pathetic that even emo kids will find them laughable. Pictured below is some hug therapy, meant to promote some non-sexual father-son style love that Cohen says is missing from gay men’s lives:

“After the hug session, we’re going to start an emo band called “Falling Down Stairs”. Click the picture to see the video.

We don’t move into truly hilarious territory until Cohen demonstrates “bio-energetics” therapy. The name alone should set off your bullshit detector, as should the fakety-fake pseudo-scientific rationale behind it: “to release memory stored in the muscles”. Cohen demonstrates it by taking a tennis racket and smacking a pillow repeatedly, screaming: “Mom! Mom! MOOOOOOOM! Why! Did you! Do that! To me!”.

Although it’s probably been about two decades since he moved out, Mommy remains the root of all his problems. Click the picture to see the video.

I have no idea how Paula Zahn kept a straight face through the interview. If it were me, I’d have taken the racket and started smacking Cohen: “Richard! Richard! RICHAAAARD! You! Are! Too stupid! To! Live!”

[via On the Face] Here’s one of those instances where a blogger happened to be “right there”: Ahmet of Thinking Blog lives across the street from one of the houses that was raided in Saturday’s arrest of suspected terrorists and took pictures.

In a later blog entry titled The Terrorist Next Door, Ahmet — a Muslim himself — writes that the Muslim community is going to have to do some soul-searching:

In this atmosphere of the self perpetual cycles of unexamined and unchallenged dogma, coupled with the predominant passive-aggressive mentality in addition to an entitlement mindset that is in a constant state of self imposed victimhood it becomes easy to lure young minds into thinking they can become instant heros/revolutionaries. An instant illusion of purpose, belonging, and mission.

In addition, contemporary Islamic ideology is in dire need of reform, and those of us who are capable of speaking out have to speak out or, as I repeatedly said in this blog, the terrorists will speak for us. The common polarized interpretation of Islam serves no one no good. I can’t deny that there are injustices that Muslims are on the receiving end of and that the West has a big role in that; but two wrongs can never make a right.

There are legal, legitimate, and honorable ways to fight injustice; terrorism is by no means one of them. You can’t take revenge on someone who killed your brother by killing his! It’s plain insanity, and out of the entire population of Muslims around the world, those who live in the West should understand this best, but the state of withdrawal and disengagement in which these Muslims live in within the “Walls of the West” plays directly into this.

To summarize, Muslims in the West have an approach towards the society in which they live that alienates them and creates a sense of artificial antagonism. This usually produces an identity problem for young Muslims who naturally need a sense of belonging. It is in this self imposed atmosphere of cultural hostility, in the middle of the Us vs. Them, that terror recruitment thrives.

The question now is: Who’s responsibility is it to engage these Muslims?

[Thanks to “mantid” for finding the photo] Here’s a clever poster design from the PR department for the German branch of Unicef about child labour. The “S.O.S.” is very cleverly worked in:

The bottom of this poster reads “Children forced into work are calling for help”.

Wendy “Girl on the Right” Sullivan, whom I met a couple of months back and lives near me has started an organization called Canadian Angels.

In the U.S., there’s an organization called Soldiers’ Angels that sends letters and “care packages” to soldiers abroad; Canadian Angels is the Canadian analogue. There’s more in this National Post story.

(The Canadian Angels blog notes that the story ran in Saturday’s “Canada” edition of the Post, but not the “Toronto” edition. A piece did appear in today’s “Toronto” edition, which is what prompted me to post this in the first place.)

Regardless of where you stand politically, I remind you that soldiers go where they’re told and that theirs is a job that’s often dangerous and performed under the worst circumstances. (I’m going to admit bias and disclose that General Renato deVilla, former secretary of defense for the Philippines, is a relative.) I think it’s reasonable that there should be some kind of avenue for Canadians to send a little gratitude to our solders abroad.

Well done, Wendy! I salute you with a fliet mignon on a flaming sword.

Be sure to read computer security guru Bruce Schneier’s essay, The Eternal Value of Privacy. In it, he takes apart the old canard that goes “If you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” currently being peddled by some bureaucrats in this age of the PATRIOT Act.

The haert of the essay an idea best expressed by Cardinal Richelieu’s famous line: “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Schneier argues that the debate about surveillance isn’t about “security versus privacy”, but about “liberty versus control”.