inkbluesky

Finnish Minister admits sending 200 dirty texts to erotic dancer from taxpayer-funded phone

Ilkka Kanerva, 60, confirmed today that he has sent text messages to Johanna Tukiainen, a member of the erotic dance group Dolls, and to her sister.

Kanerva is taking the stance that this is much ado about not much. Leave it to the existentially inclined Fins to see it all as part of a tiny act in the big picture, “Messages have been sent, but not in the sense of any deep drama of human relationships“, Kanerva said. How are the sisters holding up,

She said that she initially saved the messages as evidence, but that she is now thinking about possibly publishing them. All she would say about the content of the messages was that they contain “personal material”.

“Men are men,” she is quoted as saying. “I think that Kanerva has good taste in women in other respects as well.”

Using taxpayer provided technology for personal gratification is understandably not appreciated by taxpayers, but the general attitude that this was inappropriate behavior, but not the we’re all sliding into moral oblivion attitude displayed by the Finnish public has certain maturity about it.

train station murals - portugal 

Terrorism or cries of the big T have become the new wolf cry. By current definitions everyone from the colonial Minutemen to a sentimentalist that ties themselves to a 300 year old oak tree is now a terrorist. Nothing like robbing a good descriptive word of all meaning. The line between what constitutes good and bad becomes increasingly cloudy when those that claim the exclusive right to issue such definitions decide that perhaps the world’s single largest abuser of human rights be removed from a State Department list of human rights violators, U.S. drops China from list of 10 worst rights violators

The announcement that the U.S. State Department no longer considers China one of the world’s worst human rights violators has earned the ire of human rights groups.

In its annual report on more than 190 countries, the State Department did say Tuesday that China’s “overall human rights record remained poor” in 2007. China, the report said, tightened media and Internet curbs and increased controls on religious freedom in Tibet and the western Xinjiang region. The report said that China’s abuses also included “extrajudicial killings, torture and coerced confessions of prisoners, and the use of forced labor.”

Maybe China just has a better lobbyist then Iraq.