That's right. You better keep it high and tight and don't use too much mousse.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the personal is political. No more so than in the issue of personal appearance. The imposition of headscarves is deeply resented by more liberal-minded women. Now the government is tightening up on men's hair as well. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance has published a guide to men's hairstyles. Short, neat hair is approved; ponytails are definitely not. The styles are to be showcased in a "modesty and veil" conference later this month. On the streets of Tehran, you often see young men with the most extravagant, outrageous, hairstyles.
Huge bouffant quiffs that must take hours of loving care.
They are clearly intended as an unspoken act of rebellion against a government that bans many of the pleasures young people enjoy, including public displays of affection or Western pop music.
And it isn't just the men. If a woman is dressed inappropriately, she can be addressed by any passing male and if she argues, she can be taken to the police station. The article continues here.
These are the same nutbags attempting to amass nuclear weapons.
I guess to his credit, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has actually argued that it is not the government's place to mandate dress codes. However, I think that is only to bolster his popularity.
A San Diego resident awoke to a shocking discovery: a naked stranger passed out on his downstairs sofa. San Diego police Lt. Jim Filley says the Pacific Beach homeowner called police after wandering downstairs Sunday morning and finding the snoring man. Filley says the naked man was drunk and thought he was in his own home in Mission Valley, some 20 miles away. The man, whose name wasn't released, had taken off his clothes outside the house and walked in through the unlocked front door.
Story reported here. You can tell this wasn't in Texas. In Texas there definitely would have been gunplay.
Remember the fuss Barack Obama generated when he first raised the prospect of creating a national healthcare system in the US? Remember how, as the healthcare bill was debated, American eyes looked towards Europe and recoiled in horror and disgust at the massive and overwhelming burden Britain faces with its National Health Service? At the prospect of having their standards of service reduced to such a level?
It may surprise you, then, to learn that the US Government now spends more on provision of healthcare than does Britain's. That's right, the idea that by contrast with the UK, America's healthcare system is largely reliant on private provision and payment is simply incorrect.
The costs of running various US health programmes ' Medicare and Medicaid most significantly ' is, at 7.4pc of gross domestic product, greater than the 7.2pc of GDP the UK Government spends on the NHS. By my reckoning, the US must just have overtaken Britain this year on this basis (the latest figures date from 2008), having risen worryingly fast in recent years.
So the obvious question is: is this disproportionate amount of healthcare spending justified? Is it backed up by results? Here, the evidence is even more disturbing, for based on two key measures of healthcare effectiveness ' infant mortality and life expectancy, the US actually has worse outcomes than Britain.
Quite how the US manages to spend more public money than Britain, to spend more than the same amount on top of that in private cash, and still to have worse healthcare outcomes than the UK is a question best left to others. But the evidence on this is quite stark.
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) wanted to fly 10 lawmakers down to the Gulf of Mexico to see the damage caused by BP's gigantic oil spill first hand. House Democrats said no.
Scalise's trip was rejected for a variety of bureaucratic and logistical reasons, but it has also opened a new vein of partisan squabbling over who should be allowed to arrange a trip to view the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The squabbling over who gets to travel to the Gulf on whose dime is the latest sign that congressional oversight of the oil spill oversight from Capitol Hill has been bogged down by partisanship. Congress has held upwards of 20 hearings on the disaster, often duplicative ones each week, as lawmakers struggle to grasp and fully realize the scope of BP's giant oil spill.
The national debt will reach 62 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of this year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Wednesday.
The budget office said the debt will reach its highest percentage of GDP since the end of World War II. The jump is driven by lower tax revenues and higher federal spending in the recent recession.
And while the national debt would stabilize at 67 percent of GDP over the next decade if current law were maintained, extending tax cuts enacted during the administration of President George W. Bush and keeping growth in appropriations in line with inflation would mean that the debt would reach almost 90 percent of GDP by 2020.
If something was built with federal dollars in the state of West Virginia in the last half century, there is a good chance that Byrd helped get the funding -- more than $3.3 billion over his career. And that is only what such watchdogs as the Citizens Against Government Waste can attribute to him. Recent years have seen disclosure requirements for pet projects that were unheard of when Byrd became a senator in 1959. For the current fiscal year, Byrd had more earmarks worth more money than any other lawmaker: 89 earmarks for more than $250 million.
Sen. Byrd Is Gone, but Pork Barrel Politics Likely to Persist in Some Form
When Byrd, then in poor health, relinquished his post as chairman of the Appropriations Committee in 2008, he handed the gavel over to Sen. Daniel Inouye, now the second-longest serving member of the Senate, who had $200 million worth of earmarks for the current fiscal year. The ranking Republican on the Appropriations Committee, Sen. Thad Cochran, had more than $100 million.
Republicans will use anti-Washington spending as their main weapon in the upcoming midterm elections. But for all the new disclosure online and voters' anger about the debt, and the death and retirement and political defeat of so many appropriators, many still remain on Capitol Hill and will continue to funnel money to their states and districts.
To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies ' all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.
Hence the Party's perpetuity: "for the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes . . . The prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity".
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