Photos of Afghanistan Atrocities Horrify

We have been in Afghanistan far longer than the Russians were, and there is no end in sight. President Obama came into office in hopes of getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but 3 years in we're still there.

Sometimes it takes a true shock to convince people to change the status quo. A rogue team of soldiers that photographed the atrocities they committed may be the catalyst. Warning: Photos on the attached article are deeply disturbing. And there are many more that remain unpublished for now.

It is feared that these pictures - which show the aftermath of the murders at the hands of a rogue U.S. Stryker 'kill team' - could be even more damaging as the trials of the 12 accused men are currently under way in Seattle...

Army officials attempted to keep the photographs under wraps as part of the war crimes probe fearing it could inflame feelings at a time when anti-Americanism in Afghanistan is already running high.

In their statement, the U.S. army said the photographs depicted 'actions repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States Army.

Can we STOP joking about prison rape?

Among the most disturbing trends in American comedies is not the growing incidence of groin kicks (common in even chidren's movies today). It is the fact that jokes about prison rape are now so common as to be expected in any movie or television show about jails or prisons. Recent studies, however, show sexual abuse in prison is no laughing matter. And even more surprising, a huge number of them are perpetrated not prisoner-on-prisoner, but guard-on-prisoner.

How many people are really victimized every year? Recent BJS studies using a “snapshot” technique have found that, of those incarcerated on the days the surveys were administered, about 90,000 had been abused in the previous year, but as we have argued previously, those numbers were also misleadingly low. Finally, in January, the Justice Department published its first plausible estimates. In 2008, it now says, more than 216,600 people were sexually abused in prisons and jails and, in the case of at least 17,100 of them, in juvenile detention. Overall, that’s almost six hundred people a day—twenty-five an hour.

It is time to stop trivializing this horrible phenomenon, and recognize it as a very, very bad thing. Convicts give up many of their rights when they commit a crime and are convicted. But ensuring basic human rights is something we should always do, because otherwise we are all dehumanized.

39% of Pregnancies in NYC End in Abortion?!

I really, really, really hope this is a case of a statistic taken out of context and misunderstood. Because the idea that almost 40 out of every 100 fetuses in NYC are aborted is just monstrous. Whether you're Pro-Choice or Pro-Life, can we all agree that abortion should be a last resort and not commonplace?!

In 2009, there were 225,667 pregnancies in the City with 126,774 resulting in live births and 87,273 resulting in abortions. In addition to those abortion numbers, there were 11,620 spontaneous terminations.
Forty-six percent of all births in the Bronx result in abortions—the highest among the five boroughs, according to the report.
Blacks had the highest number of abortions with 40,798 with Hispanics having the second highest at 28,364, according to the report.

Happy Day-Before-Thanksgiving