I wrote here about how we found out how Peter Pan peter butter got poisoned: the company, months after the event, did a belated inspection that blamed a leaky roof. The FDA hadn’t been able to find that same leaky roof when it inspected fact two months earlier.
Neither the company nor the FDA, we know now, managed to notice what it took those evil "trial lawyers" conservative Republicans so love to hate to discover some three months after the fact: a dead rat, rat traps, and roaches, and more. Conditions worthy of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
"Attorney Randall Hood of Rock Hill and 15 other attorneys were inspecting a ConAgra foods plant in Slyvaester, Ga., in April when they found the dead rat, bird fathers inside the plant, roaches on raw peanuts and other things ‘consistent with salmonella contamination,’ according to a court document."
Ask your Aunt Millie to stop voting for Republicans. If she won’t, at least tell her to skip the Skippy.
Now go back and read that post I put up a few days ago, where David Broder waxes happily about the times he spent eating quail with Karl Rove.
[Update...] Fixed the link to the Broder post. Sorry…
This article has been removed due to the inaccuracies surrounding the research of Paul Cameron.
This statement from the web page of Exodus International was the result of intense work of the web page www.exgaywatch.com
The web masters of the site noticed that Exodus International was using Cameron’s work, so they made it known.
Exodus International removed the information and the head of the group, Alan Chambers, also said:
I appreciate EGW’s tremendous research skills. I saw your post on Exodus using Paul Cameron’s research and was embarrassed. We do not support the work of Paul Cameron nor desire to use flawed research. A member of my staff will remove these articles today and post a retraction. In the coming months we will be doing a survey of the content on our site to determine what if there are other articles or links that need to be removed.
Forgive me for being cynical, but I am not sold.
I can’t imagine why not. A. McEwen goes on in his post to list the various folks in the ex-gay/anti-gay movement who use, and keep on using, Cameron’s junk science, and who have helped its zombie lies (because they seemingly cannot be killed no matter how many times they are refuted) become part of the political discourse surrounding homosexuality and the rights of gay people. He ends the post with this:
In using Paul Cameron’s work, Exodus International helped to create a monster; a cottage industry of groups and spokespersons who used his studies to stroke the egos and prejudices of people against the gay and lesbian community and hinder the passage of pro-gay laws.
Exodus International owes the gay and lesbian community big time. And if it is serious about its repudiation, then Exodus International should take more of a key role in killing the monster it helped to create.
Meanwhile, over at Ex-Gay Watch, they’ve just posted several examples of NARTH’s use Cameron’s junk science. NARTH, some of you may recall, positions itself as a purely secular organization of mental health professionals in opposition to the APA on the issue of homosexuality. But they can’t claim the mantle of science for their work, and willingly and deliberately make use of the work of a fabulist like Cameron. When you see crap like this, you have to know they know full well that they are spreading lies…
For our first example, NARTH member Ross Olson sent a letter to the Pediatric Annals, a letter that was published on NARTH’s web site (I don’t know if that letter was ever published by Pediatric Annals). In that letter, Olson criticizes an article that described a thirteen-year-old transgender MTF. Because the original article described the teen’s sexual activities, Olson jumped to the conclusion that the teen was being sexually abused, and that allowed him to bring up the familiar charge that ties homosexuality to pedophilia. For support, he cited Cameron’s “research” as though it has been presented in a professional journal. Here’s the screen-shot of that paragraph:
This citation is one of the more amazing ones I’ve ever seen. The Journal of the Family Research Institute? It doesn’t exist, at least not as Olsen implies. The link actually goes to a quasi-monthly newsletter that Cameron published for several years called the Family Research Report (hence the “FRR” in the URL). It’s not a journal by any stretch of the term, let alone a peer-reviewed one. Maybe Dr. Olson aspires to be the Dr. Cameron of pediatrics.
But NARTH, claiming its opposition to homosexuality is not religious, but only based on the science, would find it far more difficult to walk away from Cameron then Exodus could. Exodus at least, can at least plausibly stand pat on its religious fundamentalism. NARTH insists it is only following the science. But ever since the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, NARTH has been nothing more then a refuge for reactionary anti-gay gasbags, who keep insisting that homosexuality must be harmful, because their bar stool prejudices keep telling them it must be. They can’t repudiate Cameron, because without his junk science, all they have left is their animus and contempt. At least Exodus has its religion.
Walking though my Baltimore neighborhood
high as a kite on Galliano and Bahia Gold cigar
walking, dancing, strolling
seeing
my cameras safely tucked away at home
only my eyes to see tonight
the images beckon
everywhere I look
everywhere
everywhere
Here. Here. And…Here!
Look! Look! See!
but it’s for my eyes only
tonight
you can be the guidebook
soul set free to fly
tonight
Alive
the little rowhouses
brick walls stare silently back indifferent
lights in the windows
stars above
the moon shines
shadows and light
the images, everywhere
everywhere
just for me
I see it all
constant craving
but just for my eyes only
tonight
just for me
just for my eyes
tonight
thank you, whatever you are
ominpotent indifferent creator
or nature itself
that brought me into the world this way
the way I am
with these eyes
thank you thank you thank you thank you!
for these eyes
for these visions
for this need
am I mad? No. Just…blessed.
The Rehoboth Beach one has been up almost five months now and my goal since starting to work in Apple’s Aperture software was to have a new one up every quarter or so. But what really motivated me was a conversation I had with my Friday happy hour pals in D.C.
Jon Larimore, a dear old friend and former sysop of the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS once upon a time, had weeks earlier paid me some of the best complements I’ve ever had on my photography and my photographic eye, when he viewed the Rehoboth Beach gallery. What made his complements especially delightful for me is that he once worked for the National Geographic Society, and all his working life there he was swimming in some of this world’s absolutely first rate photography. He knows good photography when he sees it. Well…last Friday some friends who’d been with us to Rehoboth Beach came to the roving happy hour and I finally had a chance to ask them about the Rehoboth gallery. One of them took me aside during the evening, asked some questions and made some observations that really convinced me he was getting what I do, at the level of someone who is really into photography. He saw it. And what was more, he really liked what I was up to. Not everyone who appreciates photography is going to like my photographic voice. They’re just not.
Well…Jon later told me that the guy works for the Smithsonian Institute, and he knows from good photography too. So I told them before the evening ended that I’d be putting up a new gallery soon. This is what I’ve been working on, between weekend household chores, here at Casa del Garrett yesterday and today.
This next one is from a book I tried to do back in the mid 70s. Back then the options for self publishing photography books were limited and you really needed money to pull it off, which I didn’t have much of. So I devised a scheme for hand binding a book of photos that consisted basically of pages of silver paper photos (we didn’t have PCs back then. let alone photo quality ink jet printers) dry mounted on archival board. I hand made every one, and I think I sold like about a dozen of them before giving up. Nowadays I could use any of dozens of Internet companies that let amateur photographers create their own photo books on a limited production basis. Even my photographer’s software, Apple’s Aperture, now has a built-in system to let you create and publish your own photo books.
But I was really proud of that first effort, vanishingly small as its print run was, and my basic style and the themes in my photography have not changed much over the years. I called that first book, Shadows and Light. If you saw the first gallery I put up here, the one of Philadelphia images, you saw my pure photographic voice there, as it’s matured over the years. You can see the distance from the twenty-something photographer who did Shadows and Light back in 1975 to the Philadelphia gallery in late 2004 in the sure footed way I do it now. I know what I’m doing. I still don’t have words for it, but I’ve learned that a graphic artist doesn’t need words to understand themselves. That’s why we’re graphic artists as opposed to writers or poets. We deal in imagery. And looking back on those early images, which is what I’ve been doing lately for my Big Scan project, I’m really pleased with how well most of them hold up. I sure can’t say the same for my early efforts and painting and cartooning. Those embarrass me. But the photography I did as a young man still holds up, at least to my eye. I know what I’m doing. I’ve been doing it for decades now. Mostly.
So the next gallery is going to be from the Shadows and Light sessions, circa 1973-75, when I can finish scanning enough of it in to make a decent gallery out of. Expect it sometime this coming week. It’s a younger me. But the voice is there, sure and certain. That really amazes me in retrospect. I went through a period of time when I just put my cameras away and didn’t touch them for years because I was sick of looking at what I was seeing in my photography. It was a bad time for me. But time passes, the universe expands and cools, and I picked my cameras back up again, around 1998, because sooner or later I just had to.
Installing a new lawnmower blade after the old one gets worn out and dinged will make cutting your grass easier, I’ve discovered. Also…common lawn grass has the ability to wear down steel.
I have an electric lawnmower. It would hardly do for most suburban lawns but it feels a tad extravagant for the one in the back of my little brick rowhouse. But two years of trying to cut grass with a basic pushmower sold me on a power one. Now I just run the mower back and forth over my little patch of grass a few times and I’m done, all but the trimming which I do with my electric weed whacker. Spring is here in Baltimore now, and the grass in my back yard has already needed mowing once. But when I got the mower out this year, it seemed unduly sluggish. I could hear the motor bogging down on grass it shouldn’t have had to work at cutting. So I stopped, unplugged, and took a look at the blade and was just amazed…I had no idea grass can make steel dull like that in just four years. Well…I dinged the blade once also, when I pushed the mower too close to the sewer tap that sticks out of the ground in my back yard near the alley, just far enough that a couple weeks worth of grass growth hides it almost completely from view. I should plant flowers around it or something. But I swear just cutting the frigging grass for four summers made the rest of the blade about as dull as the edge of a quarter.
So I went looking around for a new one and none of the local hardware stores carried that particular blade, including the store I bought the mower from. I guess I’m supposed to buy a whole new lawnmower when the blade wears out. I ended up googling the part number and finding new blades on, of all places, Amazon.Com. Somehow buying lawnmower parts where I buy my books doesn’t quite compute.
High school senior Allen Lee sat down with his creative writing class on Monday and penned an essay that so disturbed his teacher, school administrators and police that he was charged with disorderly conduct.
"I understand what happened recently at Virginia Tech," said the teen’s father, Albert Lee, referring to last week’s massacre of 32 students by gunman Seung-Hui Cho. "I understand the situation."
But he added: "I don’t see how somebody can get charged by writing in their homework. The teacher asked them to express themselves, and he followed instructions."
Allen Lee, an 18-year-old straight-A student at Cary-Grove High School, was arrested Tuesday near his home and charged with disorderly conduct for an essay police described as violently disturbing but not directed toward any specific person or location.
The youth’s father said his son was not suspended or expelled but was forced to attend classes elsewhere for now.
Today, Cary-Grove students rallied behind the arrested teen by organizing a petition drive to let him back in their school. They posted on walls quotes from the English teacher in which she had encouraged students to express their emotions through writing.
"I’m not going to lie. I signed the petition," said senior James Gitzinger. "But I can understand where the administration is coming from. I think I would react the same way if I was a teacher."
Cary Police Chief Ron Delelio said the charge was appropriate even though the essay was not published or posted for public viewing.
Disorderly conduct, which carries a penalty of 30 days in jail and a $1,500 fine, is filed for pranks such as pulling a fire alarm or dialing 911. But it can also apply when someone’s writings can disturb an individual, Delelio said.
"The teacher was alarmed and disturbed by the content," he said.
But a civil rights advocate said the teacher’s reaction to an essay shouldn’t make it a crime.
"One of the elements is that some sort of disorder or disruption is created," said Ed Yohnka, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. "When something is done in private—when a paper is handed in to a teacher—there isn’t a disruption."
(emphasis mine) I hear they’re going to pass a new law against Disturbing The Peace Of The People In Charge. They say the penalties will be severe.
If you really want to blame someone for trying to destroy the United States, point the finger at… Satan?
The devil, Lucifer… whatever you want to call it, one Utah Republican says it is he who is trying to bring the USA down.
And Satan’s apparent weapon of choice: Allowing illegal immigrants to cross the border.
According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah County District 65 Chairman Don Larsen has submitted a formal resolution to oppose the devil’s plan to destroy the country — to be discussed this weekend at the Utah County Republican Convention.
“In order for Satan to establish his ‘New World Order’ and destroy the freedom of all people as predicted in the scriptures, he must first destroy the U.S.,” Larsen’s resolution states. “[It is] insidious for its stealth and innocuousness.”
Larsen’s proposal to defeat Satan? Close the borders to illegal immigrants to “prevent the destruction of the U.S. by stealth invasion.”
Somebody wake me back up when the voters start electing grownups again…
We normally think of "High Broderism" as the worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. But in reality this is just the cover Broder uses for his real agenda, the defense of what he perceives to be "the establishment" at all costs. The establishment is the permanent ruling class of Washington, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. Democracy’s messy, in Broder’s world, and passionate voters are problematic. It is up to the Wise Old Men of Washington to implement the agenda, and the job of the voters to bless them for it. When the establishment fails, the most important issue is not their failure, but that the voters might begin to lose faith in and deference for their betters. Thus, people must always be allowed to save face, no matter what their transgressions, as long as they’re a part of his permanent floating tea party.
While this basic attitude isn’t unique to Broder, his apparent lack of interest in the actual details of policy makes him a more absurd figure than some. For him it’s not about results, but about the right people being in the right places. It is terribly elitist in all the wrong ways. Arguments can be made for certain types of elitism – you do want a brain surgeon conducting brain surgery – but Broder’s elites are simply aristocrats. It’s their town.
Pissing On The Grave Of Edward R. Murrow…(continued)
In case you were wondering why the quality of journalism coming out of Washington is so Piss poor, David Broder explains here…
Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove. In the days when he was operating from Austin, we had many long and rewarding conversations. I have eaten quail at his table and admired the splendid Hill Country landscape from the porch of the historic cabin Karl and his wife Darby found miles away and had carted to its present site on their land.
It isn’t simply that they’re mindlessly parroting the talking points of whoever occupies the White House, as even a faint recollection of the unmitigated hostility Bill Clinton got from them recalls. No. They’re see themselves as part of that republican ruling elite now. There’s David Broder, the man they call the "dean" of Washington journalism, happily recalling his times eating quail…Quail, mind you…with Karl Rove in his historic cabin. And no…I strongly doubt they went out hunting quail beforehand. Not with Cheney anyway.
Sorta puts Broder’s crack about how the Clinton’s came in and "trashed the place" into perspective doesn’t it? Read that Sally Quinn column…it’s one big long inside the beltway bellyache about Clinton and Monica…and ask yourself where the puffed up moral outrage is over…oh say, Guantanamo Bay, the shredding of the Geneva Convention, torture, the destruction of New Orleans, the use of the Department of Justice as a weapon against political opponents and against dissent, being lied into a war that’s killed thousands of young Americans who had their whole lives ahead of them, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of the people we allegedly went to war to liberate. Don’t see it? Well there’s a reason for that. The Washington news establishment all regarded the Clinton team as nothing more then poor southern white trash in Their Town and that’s why they hated them. That’s all that mattered to them then, and it’s all that matters to them now.
I found this on another gay guy’s blog I read from time to time and gave it a try. At first glance it looked like a more visually interesting then usual online quiz, but behind it is yet another new social networking site, Imagini. It’s marked “beta” on their home page logo so I assume it’s still a work in progress. Ever since MySpace became this huge cultural phenomina a gaggle of other self described “social networking sites” have popped up vying for a piece of the pie, or to be the next big thing. But this one lets you describe yourself in a very eye catching way…
Alas, I can’t figure out how to format its damn embedding code in a way that let’s me put it in the center of the page like I can a YouTube player.
You start out by answering a series of questions about yourself, Visually. This appealed instantly to the graphic art geek in me. The personality profile it generated for me seemed to have me pretty well pegged in a few ways, and not in a few others, but over all it resonated with me and most of these little quiz things don’t.
I’m on MySpace. I’ve been referred to Friendster. I’ve added profiles to blogger and Live Journal so I could leave comments on friends’ blogs there. But as I’m perfectly capable of making my own web space (this one) I’m unlikely to ever be more then a passer-by on any social networking site, no matter how many features it offers. I think that’s what most folks on those sites are. I have my own domain. It’s like my little house on the net here. I can make it whatever I want. Everyone should have their own home out here. But of course not everyone has the skill set or the time to build their own, which is where sites like blogger and Live Journal can help. What’s nice about MySpace, what made it grow as hugely as it did in my opinion, is that it was structured in a way that Does encourage you socialize with the others more then other like sites did. I need that too. The encouragement that is.
So I’m pretty much a regular on MySpace too. I don’t have enough time in a day to be a regular in too many social sites. But Imagini Looks interesting. Alas, it rates me a zero percent match for the gay guy whose blog I found this on (shy little dickens wouldn’t even put a name to his Imagini profile…he’s signed in as “Anonymous”). Ah well. I actually kinda figured after reading his blogger blog for a couple years now that we aren’t exactly compatible types. I just read him ‘cuz he’s so damn cute.
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