Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Random Quote Of The Day: FIFA President Tells Homosexuals “No Gay Sex At The 2022 World Cup”
SMH…this guy means “No Homo” literally:
Fifa president Sepp Blatter today provoked calls for his resignation after joking that gay football fans should “refrain” from sex during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal. Asked about concerns over the treatment of gay fans at the 2022 tournament, Blatter appeared to laugh the question off, saying: “I would say they should refrain from any sexual activities.”
Blatter and South Africa’s president, Jacob Zuma, sitting alongside him at a press conference to discuss the legacy of the 2010 World Cup, both laughed awkwardly, as did several journalists present. But the Fifa president’s response and that of the assembled audience provoked anger from John Amaechi, the former NBA basketball star who revealed he was gay in 2007. He accused Blatter of “epic ignorance”.
Meanwhile, campaign groups said he risked undermining work to combat homophobia in football and called on him to apologise immediately or stand down. Amaechi, born in the US but brought up in Stockport, has built up a career as a psychologist, campaigner and broadcaster since retiring in 2003. He said Blatter’s reaction was indicative of the wider attitude in football.
“It’s not just his reaction but the fact that an entire room of sports reporters thought this something worth laughing about,” Amaechi said. “He is football. This is football’s attitude. This man, who giggles like a six-year-old when asked a perfectly reasonable question. This is yet another case where the epic, archaic, neanderthal ignorance of someone who wields the power to summon kings, princes, presidents and prime ministers uses that power not to foster positive change but to further entrench bigotry.”
Blatter went on to say there would be “no discrimination against any human beings on this side or that side or left or right or whatever. So you can be assured that if people want to watch a match somewhere in Qatar in 2022 I am sure they will be admitted to such matches.” Qatar’s stance on homosexuality and women’s rights has been widely questioned since it won the right to host the 2022 tournament by promising to bridge east and west. According to Amnesty International, last year in Qatar at least 18 people, mostly foreigners, were sentenced to floggings of between 40 and 100 lashes for offences related to “illicit sexual relations” or alcohol consumption.
Lord Ouseley, chairman of the Kick It Out campaign, who today hosted a House of Lords reception to highlight its work in tackling racism and homophobia within football, said Blatter’s comments were outrageous.
“The whole thing is potentially calamitous,” he said. “We’ve got some real dinosaurs right at the top end of these world bodies. Blatter talks a lot but doesn’t deliver on these issues.”
Chris Basiurski, chairman of the Gay Football Supporters’ Network, said: “Many LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender] people live in countries where they would face execution or imprisonment if discovered. These people deserve our help, our respect and our support. They, like the rest of us, do not deserve to be laughed at. Mr Blatter should retract his remarks and apologise immediately. Otherwise, he should reconsider his position and resign.”
That seems unlikely given Blatter’s track record. It is far from the first time that the 74-year-old Fifa president, who intends to stand for another four-year term in 2011 despite the recent flurry of corruption allegations levelled at his organisation, has caused outrage with his views. In 2004 he suggested that, to raise the profile of their sport, female footballers should wear tighter shorts.
When asked about the reaction to his latest comments, Fifa simply pointed to his subsequent remarks. “You see in the Middle East the opening of this culture, it’s another culture because it’s another religion, but in football we have no boundaries. We open everything to everybody and I think there shall not be any discrimination against any human beings be it on this side or that side, be it left, right or whatever,” he said.
Blatter, who called England “bad losers” after Fifa awarded the 2018 tournament to Russia, added: “I think there is too much concern for a competition that will be done only in 12 years. But it gives me the opportunity to say that in Fifa, and this is in the statutes of Fifa, we don’t want racism, we don’t want any discrimination. What we want to do is open this game to everybody, and to open it to all cultures, and this is what we are doing in 2022.”
No high-profile gay footballers have come out publicly since former Norwich City forward Justin Fashanu, who killed himself in 1998. The Justin Campaign – a pressure group named after Fashanu that was founded to highlight homophobia in football – said Fifa and Blatter should be “utterly ashamed”. He said that in awarding the World Cup to Qatar and Russia, Fifa sent the message that the LBGT community simply didn’t exist in its eyes.
Lil Wayne: “Lyrically, I’m Better Than Everybody, I Don’t Ever Have To Promote Nothing, That’s The Beauty Of Being Lil Wayne”
It is safe to say that Lil Wayne may have bumped his head while in prison or may caught a case of “YOU MUST BE CRAZY” while in the hole for the last 30 days of his sentence. In a new interview with DJ Drama on Shade 45, Lil Wayne spoke on his new album “The Carter IV” and his new single “6-7” and speaks on how he thinks he’s better than everybody, lyrically
Facebook Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg Is The Man!!!
See kids: hitting those books, being a bit of a loner despite being confident and then deciding to get back at all the cool kids by creating a new way to make friends pays off. Very nicely.
For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year.
Almost seven years ago, in February 2004, when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard, he started a Web service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com, and it was billed as “an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges.” This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day.What was Mark like as a kid?
What just happened? In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale. We are now running our social lives through a for-profit network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over.
Facebook has merged with the social fabric of American life, and not just American but human life: nearly half of all Americans have a Facebook account, but 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. It’s a permanent fact of our global social reality. We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here.
The young Mark was “strong-willed and relentless,” according to his father Ed. “For some kids, their questions could be answered with a simple yes or no,” he says. “For Mark, if he asked for something, yes by itself would work, but no required much more. If you were going to say no to him, you had better be prepared with a strong argument backed by facts, experiences, logic, reasons. We envisioned him becoming a lawyer one day, with a near 100% success rate of convincing juries.”
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
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