Germany seriously challenged America’s dominance in the Preserved Food You Can’t Imagine Ever Taking Off The Shelf Even In Your Most Desperate Moments category with their mighty Cheeseburger In A Can…

Well I’m here to tell you we Americans, the people who gave the world SPAM, Individually Wrapped Slices Of Fake Cheese, Fake Potato Chips In A Can (we call them Pringles on this side of the pond) and Cheese Puffs, the snack food you can put in your will, just couldn’t stand idly by and let some other country desecrate the joy of eating better then we can.  Well I’m happy to say that good old fashioned American Know-How has risen to the challenge with (drumroll…)…

Chicken In A Can!

Just the thing for that swine flu shelter you’re going to be building this weekend…

Top thAT Deutschen…

Jonathan Golob over at SLOG has some good bullet points about the emerging Swine Flu epidemic.  I’ll try to paraphrase:

Q: But thousands of people die every year from the flu.  Why is this one any different?

A: It’s killing younger healthier people is why.  This is not your normal seasonal flu that brings down older, or already very ill people.

Q: So we’re all going to die?

A: Not unless the Plague comes out from retirement too.  Even the horrible Spanish Flu of the early 1900s only killed 2 percent of the people it infected.  But considering how infectious flu is, 2 percent if this thing really takes off is still going to be a huge number of fatalities.  Just like it was back then.

Q: So why close the schools if we’re not all going to die?

A: (I love Jonathan’s answer here so I’m going to steal it verbatim) Because kids are second only to mosquitoes as vectors for disease transmission. 

It’s not just that we love the little dears, although we do, and want to keep them out of harms way.  It just seems to be hard to get it into their little heads that they shouldn’t wipe their little runny noses with their little fingers and then pick up a toy or open a door or share a cookie…

Q: What should we do?

A: Everything you usually do to avoid catching the flu, only more of it.  Wash hands often.  Especially after coming inside, and extra especially before touching your face and eyes.  Avoid confined enclosed spaces with other people, or keep at least three feet away.  Surgical masks won’t protect you from it.  Gloves won’t do any better if you forget and rub your eyes when you have them on.  Good hygiene is the best defense. 

It’s unlikely to happen, but keep enough food and stuff at home that you can sit it out for a few days should that ever become necessary.  This is good advice in any case.  Natural disasters, power grid failures, the unexpected localized calamity, can make being outdoors, driving anywhere or getting food a problem.  Just ask the folks in Tornado Ally, any earthquake zone, or anywhere an ice storm has massively brought down power lines.  You don’t have to go all urban survivalist…just be sensibly prepared. Like this little guy…

Right now we are advising all our clients to put everything
they’ve got into canned food and shotguns…

Don’t panic.  Just stay aware and informed.

Via Sullivan, relating a reader’s comment on John Derbyshire’s try at making a secular case for denying same-sex couples the right to marry…

Gay man says he was forced out of partner’s room at OHSU

The domestic partner of a man who appeared to be near death was reportedly ordered to leave the room when it was time to make some major decisions about the patient.

This all started with a hospital visit. The patient, who only wanted to go by his first name of Christopher, was having trouble breathing. So his partner, Patrick took him to OHSU.

As Christopher was laying close to death, Patrick was told he had to leave the room and couldn’t believe what the nurse was telling him.

"The nurse said, ‘Christopher is very ill. There are some life and death decisions that have to be made and now is not the time for friends to be in the room.’ I’m like, ‘we don’t have any friends in the room,’" recalled Patrick.

Under Oregon law, Patrick had the right to stay in the room because the pair had been legal domestic partners for nine months. Patrick found a lawyer who made a call to the hospital and after two and a half hours, he was allowed back inside. 

This commenter on Derbyshire’s post sums it up pretty well…

This is from a week ago. A woman in Florida, carrying documents, was kept out of the room while her partner of 18 years died. While their children stood by, no less. Why do people continually bury their heads in the sands about these things? “Oh, I can’t believe that people are so cruel!” It happens. We know it happens. We have documentation that it does. You know what stops it? The universally-understood bond of marriage.

The other major flaw with your argument is you never explain why extending marriage rights to gay couples will “mess” (with), “redefine” “overturn” or “overhaul” marriage. You simply assume your argument throughout.

When marriage changed from a property arrangement between a father a prospective husband, when women were changed from essentially chattel to equal partners, when marriage was changed from multiple wives to one – all of these did far more to change marriage then changing the gender of the two people involved in today’s civil marriage laws.

Last – "people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team?" I thought equating homosexuality with bestiality and incest was limited to the religiously motivated. Disgusting. As for polygamy – marriage used to be that way in many cultures. Perhaps you had better ask historians why we changed away from it rather than ask the gays why they should have to preemptively defend against something for which they’re not asking.

Emphasis mine.  A case against same-sex marriage is not made by making a case against something else.  That said, you have to believe as Orson Scott Card does, that the bond between a same-sex couple simply does not exist…or that ripping it asunder is no crime against their humanity.

Why do people continually bury their heads in the sand?  They’re not.  Not at this stage of it.  The one’s doing that now aren’t burying their heads in the sand, they’re looking the other way.

Via Dan Savage… I’ve been railing online since the early 1990s about how essentially immoral the anti-gay religious right is. How the scorched earth take no prisoners war they’ve been waging against gay people demands absolute renunciation of everything fine and decent a human being can possibly be, systematically strips away any human nobility they might have possessed, any aspiration to honor and justice and truth, any higher emotion then simple, relentless, pure as venom hate. The culture war leaches out of them anything decent they might ever have been, leaving behind a pathetic caricature of a human being, whose only purpose in life is hating someone a little more today then they did yesterday.

The Moral Majority. Family Values. Traditional Values. Christian. God Fearing. Bible Believing. I grew up in that milieu, and the people waving those flags today have utterly no relation to any of that. None. Morality, virtue, values, these are not things they aspire to, they are masks they hide behind. Time and again back in the Usenet days, I would find myself arguing with a bigot who told me with easy confidence that I didn’t want to get into an argument about morality, so thoroughly had they co-opted the meaning behind the words. Time and again I would beat them over their pathetic heads with their own cheapshit failures of moral character. I was raised in a Baptist household, and I know how fire and brimstone are done. Often I wished that I could see others doing the same, rather then conceding the moral argument to a bunch of gutter crawling louts. Listening to James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, William Bennett, Lou Sheldon, et. al., yap, yap, yapping about morality is like listening to Al Capon bellyaching about crime.

These are not moral people. They are thieves in the house of human virtue, leaching off the efforts of better men and women who have tried over the ages to lift humanity from the caves to the stars. They steal from those of us who love life, and love humanity, and love this good earth and want to leave it a little better for our having walked upon it, the tools we have uncovered over the centuries for testing right from wrong, true from false, good from evil, and turn them against us, to drag us down into their gutter, so that they will shine. They have preached for so long that they are the keepers of civilization’s essential virtues that many of us have come to believe it. They are vampires, feeding on them, never to be nourished by them.

If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that I lived long enough to see the moral crusade being brought right back to them. Here’s a video from YouTube user robtish that shows in neon lights how horribly warped the moral compass is over at the Traditional Values Coalition. What do you call a people who claim FBI statistics show only a small number of violent crimes were committed against homosexuals in 2007, while omitting, among other violent crimes, the category of murder from the tally? Moral? Virtuous? Christian?

This is what the culture war does to its soldiers. It strips them of everything within them that could have been fine and noble and decent. No higher virtue then hating the enemy is allowed to live within you. Not honor, not reason, not any sense of right and wrong is allowed. Hate does not share power with anything else a human heart might be capable of. You let it in, and it will consume you. There is the evidence…right there, laughing in your face.

Dan Savage over at SLOG reports thusly…

Married conservative Catholic—married arch-conservative Catholic—Mel Gibson hits the red carpet with his new girlfriend.

Gotta love them deeply held religious beliefs.

Many people are going to remember yesterday as the day Arlen Specter switched parties, and it became painfully clear to most Americans how fast the republican party was collapsing into a political black hole of insular nativism and bigotry. But I will remember it as the day I watched, slack-jawed, this article on Keith Olbermann’s Countdown…

I am 55 years old. I still remember the Nixon years as if they were yesterday. I remember Agnew spitting on four dead students at Kent State. I remember Ronald Reagan’s indifference to the growing AIDS epidemic. I remember him laughing at Bob Hope’s sick AIDS joke during the re-dedication of The Statue of Liberty…

I told one of my students that the most memorable Reagan AIDS moment for me was at the 1986 centenary rededication of the Statue of Liberty. The Reagans were there sitting next to French President Francois Mitterand and his wife, Danielle. Bob Hope was on stage entertaining the all-star audience. In the middle of a series of one-liners Hope quipped, “I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS but she doesn’t know if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” As the television camera panned the audience, the Mitterands looked appalled. The Reagans were laughing. By the end of 1989 and the Reagan years, 115,786 women and men had been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States, and more than 70,000 of them had died.

I will go to my grave remembering how the republicans cynically incited anti-gay hatred in one election after another in order to win votes. I have watched them grow meaner, smaller and cheaper year after year after year and I cannot begin to describe how sickening it feels to think I’d seen them finally hit bottom, only to realize that there is no bottom. Last night on Olbermann Chris Matthews was blunt in the wake of Specter’s defection, that the republicans had made two deals with the devil that they were paying for in spades now. First, they embraced Nixon’s racist “southern strategy” to peel southern states and white working class democrats away from the party. Second, they embraced the culture war of the religious right. Now, after the Bush economic and military debacles, what had been the republican’s only two marketable strengths, national security and the economy, have withered away, leaving decent people to finally, Finally see the Devil’s Deal…the stinking rotten core that has been animating the party ever since Goldwater lost. And they’re flinching away. In droves.

I am 55 years old. I’ve watched all this happen in my lifetime. And watching the Republican Noise Machine on Fox News trying to whip up the swine deadly flu outbreak into a brown-skinned people hatefest still managed to leave me completely dumbfounded. It really is the party of hate now.

Atrios on Arlen Specter switching parties:

I hope this works out better than I expect, but 60 nominal Ds doesn’t equal 60 votes.

Right.  And Specter isn’t the only D who, as Harry Reid said of Specter, is "with us except when we need him".  Whenever I hear republicans fear mongering about a democratic super majority it always puts me in mind of what Will Rogers said: "I am not a member of any organized party – I am a Democrat".  There could be just one republican left on Capital Hill, just one lonely republican in the House of Representatives, and there would be enough democrats willing to vote with him, that he could get his way on just about anything.

Democrats don’t like playing hardball.  Republicans think bipartisanship is when democrats give them what they want.  Until we get more democrats willing to fight for democratic principles (you know…that "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" stuff…), it won’t matter how many democrats there are in congress, the republicans will still control the agenda.

Digby:

In case you’re wondering what the head of the Republican Party thinks about the flu outbreak, here is his statement:

After the break, Rush attacked the UN for issuing a warning for a worldwide flu pandemic, claiming that it is "by design" to get people to respond to government orders. The media fall right in line with this stuff, Rush said, amplifying the nature of the crisis. Rush — in his capacity as public health expert — added that "the flu’s a common thing."

This makes perfect sense. If you are a conservative you can’t believe that something like an epidemic or a pandemic could even exist or you would have to grant that the necessity for public health — a government function. Indeed, you even have to grant that a pandemic requires that people are going to be forced to behave in ways that explicitly explicitly define their own personal survival with the common good.

Rush is right to be a little bit nervous about this, though. Public health crises tend to focus the public on the usefulness of things like science, international cooperation, government coordination. You know, the sort of thing that liberals think are necessary. Something like that simply doesn’t fit into the conservative worldview.

The magic hand of the free market is suppose to prevent pandemics.  Somehow.  Actually, they don’t give a rat’s ass about any of that.  In the rarefied gated communities and resorts of the fabulously well to do, communicable diseases don’t matter unless they somehow manage to get inside.  And once there, these are people who really do have access to that "best health care system in the world" thing that the rest of us here in the U.S. only rhetorically do.

Meanwhile, back in the republic of Texas…

Less than two weeks after raising the prospect of seceding from the union, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is calling on the federal government to come to his state’s aid in the midst of the swine flu outbreak.

Repeat after me: Goverment is the problem, not the solution… Goverment is the problem, not the solution… Goverment is the problem, not the solution…

Fred Clark writes about the persecution complex behind the NOM ads…

We’ve seen how this plays out on the national scene two, three times a month. Some pious dignitary remarks that homosexuality is just like pedophilia or bestiality — a statement regarded within the hegemony of the sect as wholly innocent and inoffensive. Someone outside the sect will reply, accurately, that this is an offensive lie, a vicious slander. That response will be perceived, within the sect, as "religious persecution." The response — any response other than "thank you, sir, may I have another?" — implicitly rejects the legitimacy of the hegemony and rebels against the privilege enjoyed by the sect. (A big part of that privilege, it turns out, is the expectation that one can say offensive things without others taking or expressing offense. This has become far more important as a hallmark of American evangelicalism than, say, Sabbath-keeping.)

I’d say this isn’t just a religious right phenomena.  You see culture warriors on the right holding the same two mutually contradictory positions that Fred points out in certain American evangelical circles.  On the one hand, we represent the Great American Heartland…the Common Folk…The Moral Majority…The Silent Majority…  And so on…  But on the other, we are oppressed.  Our values and our way of life are in danger of becoming extinct. 

Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been hearing a version of this self contradicting complaint for decades now.  On the one hand, gay people are a teeny-tiny minuscule minority, whose claims of oppression don’t even merit a laugh, let alone any serious thought.  On the other, we are a vast and powerful conspiracy that will soon extinguish any trace of American values.  On the one hand we are contemptible, weak, easily frightened swishing faggots.  On the other hand we are dangerous militants.  Huh?

The thought police are always out to get them.  Political Correctness is always taking away their right to express their deeply held beliefs.  Whenever someone is called out for their cheap bar stool prejudices, they complain that they are being silenced.  It isn’t that people find their knuckle dragging bigotries disgusting.  It’s that a vast liberal socialist communist homosexual conspiracy is out to get them.  When Mrs California endorsed cutting off the ring fingers of all the gay citizens of California, and promptly fell out of favor with the Mrs America judges, a great wail arose from the kook pews, clamoring that she was the victim of political correctness, and that people who opposed the gay agenda were being silenced.

Silenced.  Let me show you silenced…

Ex-Louisiana KKK chief arrested in Prague: police

PRAGUE (AFP) — A former US Ku Klux Klan chief was arrested Friday in a Prague restaurant while he was on a speaking tour here, Czech police said.

Former Grand Wizard of the Louisiana-founded Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, was arrested on suspicion of promoting movements seeking the suppression of human rights, police spokesman Jan Mikulovsky told local media.

Regardless of how low in the human cesspool Duke is, that charge sent a little chill down my spine.  It was pure reflex, most likely born of having spent my entire life swaddled in American culture.  But there it was.  David Duke is lower then spit in a urinal in my book, but I am much less afraid of anything David Duke might say, then I am of the charge he was arrested under.  …suspicion of promoting movements seeking the suppression of human rights…   What the hell does that mean?  Suspicion of promoting movements…?  Seeking the suppression…?  What is the fucking criminal act here?  It could be anything.  Today that might mean talking about suppressing the rights of black people.  Tomorrow it might mean arguing against it, thereby suppressing the right of white people to keep black people in their place.  It could be anything.  Totalitarian states love that kind of thing.  It’s the kind of law that can be whatever they want it to be, whenever they want it to be that.  And you don’t have to actually Do Anything to break that law.  Just talk about doing something.  Maybe with one person.  Maybe with a whole roomful of people.  It doesn’t matter.  You open your trap, say the wrong thing, and you’re toast.  And you can never be sure what the wrong thing to say is.  It’s whatever the state wants it to be.  Probably just right then, in order to arrest you and make it all seem legal.  Giving police the power to arrest someone for speaking their mind just greases the skids for fascism. 

Mrs Proposition 8 California and her fans aren’t being silenced.  Critics of same sex marriage aren’t being silenced.  Their freedom to dispense horseshit about morality, religion, family values and same sex marriage does not trump other people’s freedom to call their cheapshit prejudices for what they are, and regard them with disgust.  If you can’t tell the difference between loosing a crown or loosing a tax break and going to jail then go get yourself arrested in some foreign land for opening your trap at the wrong time in the wrong place and find out.

You are not being silenced.  So shut the fuck up.

[Edited a tad...]

Scientific American finds the usual void of actual data behind the claim of successful ex-gay therapy…

Back in 1979, on Meet The Press and countless other TV appearances, Masters and Johnson touted their book, Homosexuality in Perspective—a 14-year study of more than 300 homosexual men and women…The results seemed impressive: Of the 67 male and female patients with "homosexual dissatisfaction," only 14 failed in the initial two-week "conversion" or "reversion" treatment…During five years of follow-up, their success rate for both groups was better than 70 percent.

Not bad.  However…there was just one wee problem…

Prior to the book’s publication, doubts arose about the validity of their case studies. Most staffers never met any of the conversion cases during the study period of 1968 through 1977, according to research I’ve done for my new book Masters of Sex.  Clinic staffer Lynn Strenkofsky, who organized patient schedules during this period, says she never dealt with any conversion cases. Marshall and Peggy Shearer, perhaps the clinic’s most experienced therapy team in the early 1970s, says they never treated homosexuals and heard virtually nothing about conversion therapy.

When the clinic’s top associate, Robert Kolodny, asked to see the files and to hear the tape-recordings of these "storybook" cases, Masters refused to show them to him…

Kolodny began to suspect Masters had, at best created "composite" cases out of many individual ones at best, or at worst had committed outright fraud.  Virginia Johnson apparently had similar misgivings about Master’s conversion successes, but never spoke publicly about them.  She later regretted that the book had gone to the publisher in the form it had, saying, "That was a bad book."  She feared that "Bill was being creative in those days" in compiling the conversion case studies.

Masters insisted right up to his death in 2001 that his work had been based on "…10 years of work with five years of follow-up—and it works."  But he never showed anyone the actual data, and few who worked with him can saw any of the patients, let alone the work with them actually taking place.  Given how reliably such therapy fails to work for everyone else, it isn’t hard to figure why Masters never showed anyone the data.  He had the same reason Exodus, Love In Action, and a host of other conversion therapy quacks have.  The data doesn’t exist.  The human consciousness isn’t a blackboard anyone can scribble their will on.  It doesn’t work that way.  You can’t talk someone out of being homosexual any more then you can talk them out of being left handed, or having blue eyes.

Via Dispatches From The Culture Wars…

From Pat Robertson, speaking about the DHS report on right wing extremists:

"It shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question. But it’s that kind of thing, somebody who doesn’t think that we should have abortion on demand, is labeled a terrorist! It’s outrageous."

Peter LaBarbera, responding to criticism from Glenn Sacks…

 Are you a homosexual, Glenn?

And then there’s good old Scott Lively wandering around the globe telling people that genocide is caused by homosexuals When I was a kid, it was the Communists who were secretly behind every hidden plot the lunatic right was babbling on about.  Now it’s Teh Gays.