Charlie the Unicorn.

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Amusement, Guest Author, Ming the Merciless, T3h Intarweb

“We’re goin’ to Candy Mountain!”

Bootilicious Obama

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, LOL Gheys, Ming the Merciless, Politics

See, even John McCain wants Obama in ‘08.

Because we haven’t talked about abortion in a while.

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, Ming the Merciless, Op/Ed, Politics, Rants, Religion

In response to a statment that “unborn children” have a right to life:

“But no one has the right to live off another human being against their will either, which is why we don’t have legislation forcing the donation of blood, marrow, and other other organs. One thing recognized in the civilized nations of the world is an individual’s–man or woman (at least in theory)–basic right to physical sovereignty. This is also why we outlaw slavery.

You may find abortion morally reprehensible, unconscionable, and even an offense worthy of eternal damnation, but if the argument is that a fetus qualifies as a person with all the attendant rights and protections thereof, it must also be subject to the same responsibilities and limitations. And one of those limitations is that it may not force the involuntary physical or biological servitude of another, regardless of the cost to the fetus. Just as you cannot force someone else to donate bone marrow to you even if you would die without it.

The choice to allow another person to use your body as a life support system, and to face all the attendant physical dangers that places you in, should always reside with you, and you alone. It’s a decision that you should be able to make for yourself, taking into account your beliefs, your circumstances, and what is physically, mentally, and emotionally the best choice for you without a course of action being forced on you by the state, a religion (and not necessarily your own, at that), or another person.

And approaching it intelligently, that also entails a responsible society that will provide for the needs of a child (including food, shelter, clothing, and education) when the parent or parents are unable to do so, and without removing the child from the parent–the pat suggestion that someone birth children in order to relenquish them for adoption if they are unable to provide for them turns my stomach, especially considering all the unwanted, unloved children already in existence that are suffering in orphanages and foster care systems. Unfortunately the ability to provide for a child often weighs heavily in the decision to have an abortion. I personally find that a terrible affront to the concept of choice.”

(Quoted with permission of the author)

God Julukkah!

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Blogging, Ming the Merciless

and Happy Holidays, Ms. K.

Here’s your Julukkah present.

It’s only the first version, so if there’s anything you would like a little different, let me know. Also, I’ll make you a non-holiday banner.

<3

Pink for October

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, Ming the Merciless

Yes, The World According to Kang has gone pink.

It’s for the month of October, to raise awareness about breast cancer.

Don’t worry, we’ll return to a surly, disillusioned color scheme in November.

China Moves Up In the World: Gets Lake Monster

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, Ming the Merciless

In a controversial decision, the deteriorating post-imperial United Kingdom decided to raise some quick cash, which they desperately need after clinging to the coattails of the colonial lunatic and landing smack in the middle of the Iraq fiasco. Rather than continue following in the footsteps of everyone’s favorite former colony in the Americas (no, not Canada!) where they simply sell their country outright, instead those wily British have offloaded that national treasure, the Loch Ness Monster, to the Chinese.

The Chinese have provided this video of “The Lake Monster Formerly Known as Nessie” enjoying his new habitat of Lake Kanasi.

No word yet on whether they will chop him up and sell his bits as fertility supplements and aphrodisiacs. Keep an eye on your spam-box for updates.

Some things to think about.

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, Ming the Merciless

Iraq. Haditha. Blackwater. George W. Bush. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo Bay. Rendition. George W. Bush. Torture. Downing Street Memo. Scooter Libby. George W. Bush. Karl Rove. Domestic surveillance. Halliburton. George W. Bush. Dick Cheney. The Patriot Act. Civil liberties. George W. Bush.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others–as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and officeholders–serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience

Lancome Response

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, Ming the Merciless, Tentacle Wagging

Here’s the official Lancome response, folks. According to them, they don’t test finished products on animals. That gives them a lot of wiggle room, so it’s probably safe to say that within the production chain somewhere components of Lancome products are tested on animals. Realistically, if they weren’t, Lancome would have been boasting about it.

From: Consumer Affairs, Lancome (Internet)
To: Ming the Merciless
Date: Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 7:07 PM
Subject: Ref # 42XXXXX

August 17, 2007

The safety of our consumers is our highest priority at Lancôme, a division of L’Oréal USA, Inc., and we can assure you that our products go through extensive testing to provide the best and safest possible products for our consumers.

L’Oréal is committed to the elimination of animal testing. In 1989, L’Oréal ended all animal testing on its finished products. However, various national and international regulations still require additional testing to guarantee the safety of new ingredients. L’Oréal meets all governmental safety requirements in the 130 countries in which our products are sold.

For more information about L’Oréal’s commitment to the elimination of animal testing, please refer to L’Oréal’s Sustainable Development Report, which is posted on our company’s global website www.loreal.com.

If you are unable to click on the link, copy and paste it into the Address line of your browser. Then click Go or hit Enter on your keyboard.

We appreciate your interest in Lancôme and we hope this information is helpful.

Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXXXX
Consumer Affairs Advisor
Ref # 42XXXXX

Cruelty free?

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, Kang & Ming, Ming the Merciless, Resources, Tentacle Wagging

Let me preface this by saying neither Ms. K nor I are fanatical, Birkenstock-wearing, VW-driving, unwashed PETA*-flogging hippies. I was a member of my college’s student environmental action group for a while but I kind of lost interest about three meetings in, when they started planning protests that involved people dressing up like fish and infiltrating paper manufacturing plants. (I’m a little unclear to this day whether the plan was to perform the infiltration while disguised as fish.)

Instead, we’re the target market companies like L’Oreal and Revlon are aiming for. Thirty-something, middle class professional women. And we both make an effort to buy ecologically friendly, animal friendly products. As I write this, I’m finishing my cup of fair trade, ecologically friendly coffee. Made using a recycled paper coffee filter. (And this weekend, I’m going to pick up one of the reusable ones, if they finally have the right size.) Apparently they aren’t listening to their markets because we do still care about animal testing, too.

This morning I had an email from Ms. K, who is planning on reinventing her look and was trying to find information on whether Lancome cosmetics are cruelty free.

The sad answer to that appears to be, “No.” Apparently Lancome’s parent company L’Oreal at one point claimed they were done animal testing (back in the late ’90’s/early ’00’s) when caring about animals was hip and trendy but so far have refused to provide adequate follow-up information to cruelty-free organizations and may still require ingredient suppliers to provide animal test data. So no, L’Oreal/Lancome products cannot be safely assumed to be cruelty-free.

In an effort to clarify the cruelty-free status of Lancome, I’ve gone directly to the source and sent the following communication via their web site:

Dear Lancome;

I have recently been trying to verify your policy on animal testing but am unable to locate this information on your web site. Cruelty-free organizations list your parent company L’Oreal as either testing on animals or requiring unnecessary animal testing data from ingredient suppliers. Can you please clarify the following questions:

Does your company test its products on animals?
Does your company require its ingredient suppliers to provide animal testing data?

As a consumer, this information is important to my purchasing decisions since I strongly believe animal testing for cosmetics to be both unnecessary and highly unethical.

Sincerely,
Ming Merciless

I’ll keep you posted on what they have to say.

L’Oreal does also now own The Body Shop, and according to cruelty-free organizations, those products still do not employ animal testing or ingredients tested on animals. I’m personally ambivalent about using “cruelty-free” products from a company whose parent company has tried to masquerade as cruelty-free without actually making any changes. Perhaps if they see a demand for their cruelty-free brands it will convince them that it is important to consumers, though.

It’s not like going cruelty-free is going to cost a company market share. Nobody has ever stood in the cosmetics aisle looking at mascara saying, “Goddamn, don’t they have anything here that’s blinded some bunnies?”

For those of you that want to see where your products of choice fall (or find alternatives for the ones that fail), here are some useful links:

The Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics
Caring Consumer: A Guide to Kind Living

As a footnote:
Lancome and L’Oreal are also not listed as signers of the Compact for Safe Cosmetics, where companies promise to eliminate carcinogenic, mutagenic, and toxic chemicals from their products. For those of us in Europe, the EU Cosmetics Directive means that companies have to do this anyway for products sold here. Not so for the rest of you, I’m afraid.

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics Signers

*More on this later.

How I Mine for Housekeeping

Posted by Ming the Merciless as Guest Author, Ming the Merciless

or Sexist Stereotypes in My Daily Life

I’m a sexist.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Debian Social Contract and we are having some of the Boyfriend’s friends over for a pancake dinner. He suggested it last night around seven. I said it was okay with me. He’s going to make carrot-polenta European-style pancakes and I’ll make some blueberry-saffron American-style pancakes and possibly some mashed potato pancakes.

My first thought was “Oh my god, I have to clean.”

Not “We have to clean,” but “I have to clean.”

Because housekeeping is still, in my American psyche, the province of women. No one has ever judged a heterosexual man based on his housekeeping. Catty, cutting remarks are not made about the stacks of dishes on their sideboards. But women, ah women…

Maybe it was how I was raised, ostensibly a product of the Northeastern Protestant middle-class. “She’s a terrible housekeeper,” would be said in a lowered voice with raised eyebrows, and applied as equally to women who allowed junk to accumulate on hallway bureaus and left television sets undusted while last night’s dinner dishes waited in the sink as to women who allowed junk to accumulate on every flat surface and then on the surfaces formed by the junk, served dinner on paper plates because there were no clean dishes, and who had forgotten for months to purchase more bags for the vacuum cleaner.

Never a reflection on their husbands. “He’s a terrible housekeeper,” was never uttered.

Maybe it’s different in different parts of the country or different stratas of American society, but I doubt it with the overwhelming prevalence of advertising showing tidy looking women thanking the toilet genie for a new and improved, extra-strength, lilac-scented product; admiring their reflection in gleaming floors, or smiling as they dust the blades of a ceiling fan with a specially designed apparatus containing components developed by NASA. I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Clean, with his knowing wink and solitary earring is homosexual. In my head he lisps “Girlfriend, we have got to do something about under that refrigerator! It’s shameful!” He and the Brawny paper towel lumberjack are almost certainly one of those on-again-off-again couples.

I don’t know who does the cleaning in a particular home, whether it’s the man or the woman, or whether they split it equally, but in the back of my mind the credit for a tidy, well-kept house goes to the female half. The blame for a poorly kept one, even if the mess is obviously male in origin, also goes to her. (I suppose if I ever had occasion to make judgments on lesbian housekeeping I could assign credit and blame equally.)

I never thought about it until I left America.

Sweden, with it’s emphasis on equality in both public and private life, made me stop and reflect on the anachronism in my attitude– while I scrubbed the toilet because I would be mortified if our guests think I’m a bad housekeeper.