All caught up now. AKotW 4/1

Asshats of the Week:

Musa Ibrahim, spokesman of the Gaddafi administration.  Now of course, just that much makes him eligible for some standard-level asshat nominations every other day or so.  But really, he pulls in front of the pack by the specific ways in which he manages to represent what is looking more every day like one of the worst governments in history.  Case in point: when Iman al-Obeidi burst into a foreign press room to tell journalists that she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's soldiers, Ibrahim told the press (after she was dragged away by secret police and hotel staff) that al-Obeidi was drunk and mentally ill.  Now just to let the rage subside so I can continue typing................................. ok, it's not subsiding.  We the Blog have some personal and professional issues tied up with this question, so let's just keep it simple: discrediting a politically oppressed person's story of abuse by saying they are mentally ill is insidious and evil.  It is also the second-oldest trick in the book (right after "she's a woman, you know how they are").  As evil as it is, being intimidated is just what he wants, so let's just call Musa Ibrahim what he is: just some loathesome asshat who can't even keep his own story straight for two weeks.
Oh and since then?  He's announced that's she's being charged with defamation.

Deep breath.

Next up:

The Florida GOP, for chastising Rep. Scott Randolph (D) for using the word "uterus" on the statehouse floor (pictured is spokeswoman Katie Betta).  Now here's a case that really demonstrates the versatility of this category by going from the evil end of the spectrum to the stupid end.  This is easily the most idiotic thing I've heard all year.  Would only it were an April Fools' Day joke.  GOP officials expressed concerns that young statehouse pages were hearing the absolute smut that is the word "uterus."  Hey Florida GOP: your page program is for kids 12-14.  If those kids haven't heard the word "uterus" yet, and they're your example of Florida's best and brightest, you are doing Florida wrong.  Although to be fair, I'm not sure anyone has ever done Florida right.  In conclusion, uterus uterus uterus uterus uterus.  Vagina.

 And finally, mounting a comeback long after we kind of forgot about them (man, it's nice sometimes to not be the Gulf Coast, isn't it?), we've got the executives of Transocean, who gave their highest-paid executives bonuses for having a banner safety year after Transocean's cooperation with BP on the Deepwater Horizon drill resulted in a months-long oil gush into the Gulf of Mexico that many consider the worst ecological disaster in North American history as well as the loss of eleven lives, nine of which were Transocean employees.  Either every other site Transoceans works on is so safe and pure the employees ride unicorns, or those internal safety goals were mighty damn low. 

Asskickers of the Week:

Iman al-Obeidi.  Hey, guess how hard it is to publicly announce you were raped.  A few days ago.  In Libya.  To a bunch of foreigners.  Being chased by the secret police who are part of the same organization responsible for your rape.  And continuing to fight them and the complicit hotel staff for nearly an hour as they break cameras, threaten you with knives and try to physically muffle you.  And knowing that eventually they will succeed in dragging you away.  Let's give al-Obeidi the credit she deserves here: holy crap did she work hard to make sure people knew that Gaddafi wasn't who he said he was and that not all of Tripoli is happy with him.  There's been reports that she's been freed from the official authorities, but if she has, her family still doesn't know about it.  Honorable mention to the journalists who tried to protect her, but she had to have known they wouldn't be able to-- that's why she started telling her story as soon as she got in the door.She knew this was coming when she did what she did.  And she's astounding for it. 

Olga Kotelko, of Canada, is 91 years old and holds most of the track and field records for her age group for the fairly simple reason that 91-year-old women do not tend to compete in track and field.  However, although it's impressive to begin with that she's out there, she's beating the people closest to her in age by significant margins.  She doesn't skimp on events either, competing in running, jumping and throwing events.  This is just plain awesome, in both the modern and more accurate uses of the term. 

Seana McKenna and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.  McKenna is going to be the first cross-gendered lead in Richard III at the festival this summer.  Women have done Hamlet before, and of course there's lots of gender-bending all through Shakespeare, but Richard III is "the character actor's Hamlet" and hasn't been done before.  That being said, this isn't breaking any particular social barrier or anything: it's just a wicked awesome idea, it's got some good thoughtful reasoning behind it, it's a team of excellent artists... and let's face it, she looks pretty kickass as Richard.  Art!  It's pretty cool!

And finally we've got Hideaki Akaiwa, whose story of Asskickery is good enough to make it worth going to work on Monday even in the face of all those asshats.  When Akaiwa, of Ishinomaki, Japan, realized the tsunami was imminent, he put on scuba gear and dove into the tidal wave.

Let's just pause and let that sink in for a minute.

Somehow Akaiwa swam all the way to his home, where his wife was trapped inside the house and quickly running out of air.  They shared his scuba respirator until he got her to safety, then he went back into the water to find his mother in her house and rescue her.  Both women survived.  Akaiwa has continued to hit the water daily in hopes of finding more survivors.

Humankind: Some of us are jerks, most of us are mediocre, but a few of us are gorram superheroes.

Still catching up: AKotW week of 3/25

Asshats of the Week: 

Oh, there's so many.  But singled out for asshattery this week is Laurent Gbagbo of the Ivory Coast.  Now, this isn't to say the whole situation is his fault-- he probably shares in it with his opponent.  But Gbagbo was defeated in a presidential election and still refuses to leave the presidency.  (As bad as the U.S. seems sometimes, this kind of thing still feels unlikely, which is nice.)  So as a result the nation has descended into civil war, between Gbagbo's supporters and the supporters of his opponent, Alassane Ouattara.  Civil war that involves shooting women protesting for International Women's Day and on another occasion firing with extreme prejudice on pregnant protesters.  Ouattara may be just as much of an asshat personally, but there's one thing that someone could do to make this situation better, and the one thing is getting the heck out of the presidency, and the someone is Gbagbo.  Of course, it's already yielded up to a million refugees, so damage done. 

With military intervention comes the muddling of intentions, so it's difficult to be too excited about anyone in Libya right now.  However, we can still agree on the asshats of the Libyan Secret Police, who are widely known to have killed civilians and now are bringing those bodies out and claiming they were killed in coalition attacks, and who are maintaining a level of paranoia and fear in the capitol of Tripoli, to the extent that children are grilled by the police about what news stations their parents watch.  And while the blog does not want to condone the use of gender as an insult, we admire gall, and the Barbara Frietchie-esque woman described at the link above-- wow.

Asskicker of the Week:

Kate Bornstein: "for personally picking up my life, rattling it a bit, and reminding me that I have a damn voice still and I would be much happier if I went back to using it."  If there's a more succinct way to state the ideal of the Asskicker, I don't know what it would be.  Kate Bornstein is a "gender outlaw," author, playwright, theorist, and performance artist whose summation of her recent work Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws is "Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living, just don't be mean."  Yes.  


Historical Asskicker:

Maybe this will become a thing?  Who knows.  But we were reminded this week of Oscar Romero, as President Obama visited his grave on the anniversary of Romero's death during his trip to El Salvador.  Oscar Romero was a conservative bishop in the Catholic church whose appointment in El Salvador gravely disappointed the Marxist priests there, who feared their liberation theology mission to the poor was in danger, while pleasing the oppressive government.  Then, his progressive Jesuit friend Rutilio Grande, who was working creating self-reliance groups among the campesinos, was assassinated.  Romero stated later: "When I looked at Rutilio lying there dead I thought, 'If they have killed him for doing what he did, then I too have to walk the same path.'"
Romero became a vocal advocate of social justice, speaking out against institutional poverty, assassinations, torture, the Salvadorean government, and the U.S. government for giving military aid to El Salvador, reinforcing their power.  He did end up following Rutilio's path: in the middle of presenting mass on March 24, 1980, he was shot and killed by gunmen trained and organized by the School of the Americas and likely funded by the United States.  He is now one of the 20th century martyrs recognized in stone above the front doors of Westminster Abbey in London. 

Whoops! Let's play catch-up.

Soooo I missed a couple week's updates.  Apologies! 

So let's go back, way back, to the time of March 18. 

Asshat of the Week (March 18):

There were actually so many asshats this week that our nominees skewed to the asskickers in compensation.  But that's not to say one didn't shine through!

Boy, how did this take so long?  Sarah Palin makes her first appearance on the blog after denouncing the National Endowment for the Arts.  In the interest of not working ourselves up to a frothy rage in which all we can do is stutter half-obscenities and break whatever we're holding at the time like that one guy on Passions, that's all we're going to say about that.

Asskicker of the Week (March 18):

The Miami Hockey team, which won its first CCHA tournament championship and brought the Mason Cup to Oxford.  And the last CCHA tournament championship, maybe, since the Big Ten has broken off now and we're losing half the teams in the conference.  And OK, maybe a picture of Miele or the whole Brotherhood would be more appropriate, but c'mon.  Rico looks pretty badass there.

The SuperMoon.  The moon came its closest to the Earth in its elliptical orbit, and due to some orbit timing, this was the closest it has been in 18 years. 

(Now, here's where this gets a little tricky, and hence the delay.)  The coalition of nations working from the UN Security Council enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya, with special mention to President Obama for setting the "no boots on the ground" rule immediately with regard to U.S. troops.  Now, these sorts of military excursions in the Middle East often feel a lot better at the beginning than they do at the end.  But certainly it should go on record that the pressure building up through the past few weeks was incredible, and Gaddafi shows no signs of letting up on killing his own people even now.  So now, a few weeks later, there's more skepticism about this... but something had to be done.  And even though there are always negative repercussions to military action, this at least went through the UN.  

 The engineers who worked in high radiation levels to reconnect power cables to the overheating Fukushima reactor.  The human and economic toll from the earthquake is stunning, and the threat of nuclear disaster (while miniscule in comparison to the damage wreaked by the tsunami) certainly was doing no favors to the morale of the country or the world by awakening all sorts of nuclear ghosts.  We still don't know what the result of the increased radiation will mean for the people working at Fukushima-- probably an increased risk of cancer.  But they've been problem-solving away despite the breathtaking violence done to their country, and in the process preventing further catastrophe.  Engineers.  They're awesome.

 Jane McGonigal, who after recovering from traumatic brain injury using game mechanisms is using video games to make the world a better place.  On the premise that to reach a better world, you have to imagine a better world, Jane makes and fosters the creation of alternate reality games: some to imagine the world the day after we run out of oil, others to make helping other people in real life part of a game mechanic, some to encourage exercise, others to encourage healing, all to foster "the whole range of human emotion."  She recently delivered the keynote at PAX.  Kick on, all!